[Merkuri]

One thing that I think they have a hard time evaluating in the patent office is the "nonobvious" part of the patent. Did you know that Amazon.com has a patent on "one click shopping" where you can click on one button to buy an item? Every other website has to have at least two clicks for you to actually buy something. Is buying something with one click really that obscure an idea?

I recall reading somewhere that somebody holds the patents on hyperlinks. The idea that you click on some text and it brings you somewhere else. How is that not an obvious method of navigation in a document?

I can't recall it off the top of my head, but I recall seeing a patent filed by the company I worked for, and I had to keep myself from showing visible signs of disgust, thinking "why do you feel like that's an original enough idea that it deserves a patent?" We also got caught by a patent from another company. They basically patented taking one type of information and exposing it as another type. We wanted to do the same thing, since our software thrives on the second type of information, but we had to do it in an obscure, roundabout way so that it wasn't truly that kind of information - not directly. All because somebody else wrote to the patent office about how to take data in format A and change it into format B.

It seems that nowadays companies try to patent everything so they can claim they thought of it first and sue other people who try to use it, and the patent office is so overcome by requests like these that they can only spend something like two minutes (maybe less) on each patent, so they're pretty much forced to say, "yeah, sure, approved" to each one or risk falling so far behind that it'll take decades to get any patents approved.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the current patent system.