[PLUG] THIS AMERICAN LIFE: The Patent Show

[Rich Shepard]

On Tue, 26 Jul 2011, Michael R wrote:

> Summary: Venture capitalists have heavily invested in patent ownership
> companies that extort payment for patents they control. Scary because the
> USPO has issued thousands of patents for software ideas. As in "online
> backup" is covered by over 3,000 patents, of which at least three have
> identical titles. (So much for "non-obvious and unique")

   Which is why some folks have tried to push patents back to things and not
ideas. So far they've been unsuccessful. Wait until someone patents the
whodunit genre of crime fiction and then tries to collect payments from
every other author.

   It never made sense to me why the USPTO ever allowed 'business processes'
and 'software' to be patented. Why not patent the use of the '+' sign and
the process of addition to get the sum of two numbers? Egregiousness taken
to the obscene extreme.

   Greed trumps ethics.

Rich