[ale] Segue from MS threatening the community

[David Tomaschik]

In many cases, the patent office pretty much grants any patent that
comes with the right paperwork and fees, under the assumption that IF it
ever comes to a legal issue then the courts will deal with determining
if the patent is valid.  Just look at the number of patents that have
been invalidated by the courts on the case of prior art or obviousness.
 The patent 'examiners' seem to be little more than paper-pushers who
don't know the difference between paper and reality.

What's more is that, IMO, being able to patent something without a
workable demonstration is evil.  In fact, all those Intellectual
Property companies that make money off of nothing but licensing should
be shut down.  If you want to make money from an idea, fine, but then
you should produce the idea.  Knowledge is not a product.

David

JK wrote:
> Rev. Johnny Healey wrote:
> 
>> Virtually anything can be patented in the US, including the user interface.
>> One-Click is a good example of this; you don't need to see the source code
>> to know that the patent has been violated.
> 
> IATotallyNAL, but I suspect that, while this may appear to be the
> current state of affairs, it doesn't reflect legal reality.  For
> example, it's my belief based on, basically, me reading Groklaw
> a lot, that reverse engineering has always been explicitly
> *permitted* under US patent law.  IOW, if you can figure out how
> to do what a patented product does, more power to you, as long
> as you don't actually *copy* the patented product.
> 
> I suspect that something like One-Click, which takes the average
> web-aware developer about 75 milliseconds to "reverse engineer",
> should qualify as "obvious" even under the current US patent regime,
> and therefore shouldn't have been granted at all. The strategy of
> choice seems to be, "file patents (pat. pending) for everything (pat.
> pending) in sight (pat. pending), and count (pat. pending) on the
> patent office review process (pat. pending) to drop (pat pending)
> the ball (pat. pending) sufficiently often that you get a few
> granted."
> 
> I think there are a few ideas in software that legitimately
> deserve(d) patent protection (for a brief period!).  The notion
> of function calls implemented by a stack, for example, is
> brilliant, fundamental, and not totally obvious if you don't
> already know about it.  However, most software behavior, if
> you describe it to an experienced developer, she'll be able
> to think of two or three implementations for that behavior
> in ten minutes or so. Such things ought not to be patentable,
> IMO.
> 
> -- JK
>