Losing the War on Patents

theodp writes: "Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly's once-hyped BountyQuest.com takes a beating in a Salon article today that takes note of Amazon's recent decision to license one of the few patents BountyQuest claimed to have found winning prior art for, a patent held by the InTouch Group, who had sued Amazon for infringing on the patent prior to Bezos' reported $1+ million BountyQuest investment. In the article, professional patent buster Greg Aharonian provocatively remarks that "BountyQuest was always a joke...Bezos and O'Reilly were never seriously interested in patent quality...Bezos just used O'Reilly to help Amazon...That Amazon ended up licensing the InTouch patent just shows how stupid the whole thing is.""

Comments

Re:If It's broke don't fix it!

[Vagrant]

Part of the problem is that there are too many patents being granted for questionable "inventions". Patents are only supposed to be granted if the invention is "non-obvious".

Obviousness (is that a word?) is something that can be argued for almost anything. Given enough time, resources, and research, many things can be deemed as obvious.

Its all plain stupid

[haplo21112]

The PTO really needs to stop granting patents on common sense ideas...
The whole on click thing, common sense, its patent that should never have been granted.

Downloading music samples, makes sense to deliver samples of songs to users, it would seem as connections got faster, that this would begin to happen more and more. Common sense...

Don't even get me started on the BT thing...again it makes sense that users would need to get from point A to Point B on a computer its a dumb patent.