Graham;
The recent announcement from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office about
overhauling their scrutiny of applications for online business patents
seems to imply a tacit acknowledgement that their is a problem with the
review process with respect to discovery or prior art or determination of
novelty in a claimed invention.
The Internet solves the problem.
Online business patents are, at large, ineffective and harmless.
We can have servers outside of US and there is no legislation (even
under US laws. note that the servers can serve yet another countries)
to make the servers illegal.
Clients in US may still be a target of a patent, if claims of the
patents do not cover servers and cover the clients only.
However, virtually no one can control downloading of software from
the servers to the clients at home.
As the Internet is not a collection of private IP networks connected
by NAT boxes, ISP has no knowledge nor responsibility on what their
customers are doing.
It's like copyright, so called, piracy, against which Holywood is
fighting seemingly in vain.
But, in this case, there is no problem of copyright violation.
The only effect of the patents is that they drive servers outside
of US and makes the Internet a lot more globally connected. :-)
Masataka Ohta
PS
I don't protect this message by patents or by copyright. :-)