Amazon Patents Getting Numbers Off a Check

theodp writes "After two rejections, Amazon was granted a patent Tuesday for the Extraction of bank routing number from information entered by a user, which covers the process of obtaining a routing and checking account number from information entered by a user from the face of a check. The patent application was filed in the week preceding Amazon's Call for Patent Reform."

Comments

Do it first

[KilobyteKnight]

It certainly sounds ridiculous on the face of it. But, in this current system, it'd be foolish for a company to not try and patent everything they can, even if they have no intention of enforcing it, before the competition does.

Then if you've accidentally infringed on someone else's silly patent, you can trade rights instead of having to cough up money.

IMNSHO, software patents should be eliminated entirely, and copyrights should only cover published works (i.e. source - you know, like books for which copyrights were origionally intended). What's left is trade secrets.