Lawyers Ordered to Play RPS to Settle Dispute

Rent-to-Pwn writes "After the lawyers involved couldn't settle even the most basic disputes without court intervention, a federal judge ordered the two lawyers to play one (1) game of rock, paper, scissors to settle the dispute. Being a federal case, in theory, it could become precedent for similar, unimportant decisions. Of course, there's no mention of what the two lawyers are supposed to do in case of a tie ..."

Comments

Re:Games are patentable

[Kadin2048]

To be fair, that patent was eventually shot down, or so I heard. Basically the USPTO invalidated all of its claims, and then the holder just declined to pay the fees and it expired.

Still, whatever examiner passed it ought to be punished in some sort of humiliating way.

I have heard from a friend who is starting work as a patent examiner that they have totally revamped their recruitment and training programs. Now, instead of going through nominal 'welcome aboard' training and being shoved out onto the floor and told to start processing patents, there's like 8 or 9 months of training, following which you're basically an apprentice to somebody more senior (where they have to approve/rubberstamp your work) for a while.

There still seems to be some obvious issues, like the number of patents you process per day/week influences your promotions, so that there's an indirect reward for pushing more paper, but they do seem to be making some progress.

Still, I wouldn't mind seeing them drag out a Dunce cap for patents like that.