When Good Patents Go Bad

will writes "The Washington Post has a good review of patents in the information age. The insanity of the US patent system has been chronicled on this site numerous times in the past (for example, an FTC report on patent policy, some patents for obvious applications such as Microsoft patenting local weather, and Amazon patenting inside book searching). The Washington Post article does a good job of overviewing IP issues today, why the current US patent systems fails in the information age, and gives an example of patent extortion. Excuse me while I patent my DNA."

Comments

What makes a bad patent?

[mgcsinc]

One aspect seems central to many of the patents which are generally accepted to be absurd or insane: they are patents on processes for selling goods or services rather than on the goods and services themselves or their means of production. There doesn't seem to be enough awareness of this discrepancy between these types of patents and ones which we consider to be reasonable. Online retailers such as Amazon, for example, may claim that they have two customer bases, book-buyers and advertisers, and that the website itself is a product for the advertisers, but in truth their real customers would seem to be the former....

Re:All I can say is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or are there actually some decent altruistic people out there who want to make the world a better place?

Yes, there are.