Does the Patent Office respect the software community?

The US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) is now issuing about 20,000 new software patents every year-a tenfold increase in the last six years. Considering these inexplicable numbers, the IEEE, the ACM, and similar organizations should ask the PTO on what basis it thinks there are 20,000 novel and not obvious software inventions each year. The Japanese and European patent offices are demonstrating the same problems, but there are a few well-known reasons why the PTO issues so many patents: the indifference to prior art, the flood of patent applications, and the patent examiners´ assembly-line working conditions