"In the electronics industry, patents are of no value whatsoever in spurring research and development."
- Vice President of Intel Corporation, Business Week, 11 May 1981
A software patent is a set of rights given to the creator of software that disallows anyone else to make, use, sell, or trade software without permission from the patent holder. According to United States patent law, you can't patent a mathematical formula or an abstract idea, but you can patent a "practical application of a computer-related invention" (Tyser). How, then, does Google have a patent for a variation of the abstract idea of a linked list? (See http://www.google.com/patents/US7028023.) Perhaps software patent laws in the United States are not as well-defined as they seem to be. We should either define the laws more strictly or abolish software patents entirely.
And someone has a patent for "computer-based methods for determining the head of a linked list". Their royalties must be off the charts.
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