'What Idiot Wrote The Patent That Might Invalidate Software Patents? Oh, Wait, That Was Me' | Techdirt:

We recently wrote about a surprising Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruling that might open the door to invalidating a lot of software patents. We received an an interesting comment on the post a few days later from John Pettitt:

So I was thinking - great they invalidated software patents, lets see what crappy patent written by an idiot they picked to do it - then I realized the idiot in question was me :-)

Not sure how I feel about this.

John - inventor of the patent in question.

Pettitt is now running an interesting operation called Free Range Content, which helps companies syndicate content easily. However, a while back, he was the named inventor on patent 6,029,154, describing a "Method and system for detecting fraud in a credit card transaction over the internet." We reached out to Pettitt to ask him a few questions about his views on the patent system and he kindly agreed.