Several nits with the article.

> On the flip side, the argument that without software patents modern tech-based companies can't thrive seems weaker every day. A 2015 article calculated that 30 percent of billion-dollar startups have zero patents.

This is an odd take on the original data source: https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2015/11/03/the-naked-truth-30-of-.... If you look at the table mid-way down the page, only one category of companies has relatively low patent-ownership share compared to valuation share: "consumer Internet." Of course, these companies don't need patents to protect their IP. They don't deliver a product to consumers that their competitors can disassemble and copy. Their IP is hidden in their servers behind a web services API. Uber's logistics algorithms, for example, are important trade secrets, but there is no need to patent them because they can't be reverse-engineered from the Uber app.

As shown in the chart, several kinds of companies deliver software products to consumers, or disclose technology through standardization, and have a relatively greater need for patent protection. Waymo, for example, has tons of patents: https://patents.justia.com/assignee/waymo-llc. So does CMU, which pioneered early work in self-driving cars.

> In a 2016 ruling called Enfish, the Federal Circuit ruling took a single sentence from the Supreme Court's 2014 ruling and used it as the legal foundation for approving more software patents.

This reads Alice backwards. Alice was about why patents on business methods are ineligible, even though they are implemented in software. I.e. patents on using software to automate methods of doing business that were already in use. That is why when Ars covered the decision in Alice, its headline was "Supreme Court smashes 'do it on a computer' patents in 9-0 opinion," not "Supreme Court smashes software patents in general." Alice assumes that real technological inventions that happen to be implemented in software are patentable.

The "single sentence" in Alice Ars that refers to is actually two sentences:

> The method claims do not, for example, purport to improve the functioning of the computer itself.

> In other words, the claims in Diehr were patent eligible because they improved an existing technological process, not because they were implemented on a computer.

Ars makes it sound like the Federal Circuit (and now PTO) took a narrow exception in Alice, articulated in a single sentence, and used it to swallow the rule. But in Alice, the Supreme Court viewed business-method patents as the exception to the general rule that useful inventions are patentable (even if they are implemented in software). These sentences simply explain why the patent in that case falls into the exception.

To put it in concrete terms, compare the patent in Alice (on the business practice of intermediated settlement), to something like an algorithm for power management in a laptop that improves battery life. Alice says that the former is not patent eligible, in part by distinguishing it from the latter. But it's not really talking about the latter category of eligible inventions, or making any statements on how broadly or narrowly that category should be defined.