Conscientious objectors to the Patent Wars, prepare to be outraged: In a just-released interview for PBS' Inventors YouTube series, the recipient of the first-ever software patent in 1968 characterizes Amazon's infamous one-click patent as one "that should have never been issued" and "obviously not an invention." He also questions the logic behind Apple's pinch-to-zoom patent (recently invalidated), deeming its patenting "questionable."
PBS is running a biweekly YouTube series called "Inventors," which profiles a new inventor (or invention) every other week. This time around, the subject is Martin Goetz, the so-called "Father of Third-Party Software," who is perhaps most famous as the winner of the first ever software patent in 1968.
You can hear his story below, which includes the reason why he applied for that curious (at the time) patent back in the late 1960s. It's an otherwise benign profile of one of the foundational figures in modern software; but then, this is the man who unintentionally launched today's Samsung-Apple-Microsoft-Google-EveryCompany patent wars.
Shouldn't we give this innovator's opinion some special attention?