An octet of tech companies have filed [3] an amicus brief asking the courts to reject lawsuits concerning vague patent concepts. Facebook, Google, Zynga, Red Hat, Intuit, Dell, Homeaway, and Rackspace are all saying that abstract claims--for example, the Steve Jobs patent [4], rejected by the U.S. patent office on Friday [5], which attempted to claim ownership of any multi-touch interface--are a waste of money and suffocate innovation.

The short-term aim of the brief is to upend a recent decision by the courts to uphold [6] the Alice Corp's patent claim on computer-implemented financial intermediation over the CLS Bank (translation: the bank creates a "shadow" site, usually in data storage, on which credits and debits can be made. When the transaction is completed--i.e., the person sending the money is found to have enough funds in his account--on the shadow site, then the demand is made to the real site belonging to the financial institution).

The argument put forward by Google, Facebook, and the rest, says this: "It is easy to think of abstract ideas about what a computer or website should do, but the difficult, valuable, and often groundbreaking part of online innovation comes next: designing, analyzing, building, and deploying the interface, software and hardware to implement that idea in a way that is useful in daily life. Simply put, ideas are much easier to come by than working implementations."

[Image from an earlier attempt [7] to patent the interactive web, defeated by Google, Amazon, and Yahoo]