Sounds MAD! Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by one of two opposing sides would effectively result in the destruction of both the attacker and the defender.

Software patent does not have a universally accepted definition. One definition suggested by the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure is that a software patent is a "patent on any performance of a computer realized by means of a computer program".

There is intense debate over the extent to which software patents should be granted, if at all. Criticisms of software patents include:

* Whether software is patentable; and
* Whether the inventive step and non-obviousness requirement is too easily satisified for software.