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IBM Breaks Patent Record, Wants Reform
An anonymous reader writes "IBM set the record for most patents granted in a year for 2006. At the same time, IBM points out that small companies earn more patents per capita than larger enterprises and pushes for reform to address shortcomings in the process of patenting business methods:
'The prevalence of patent applications that are of low quality or poorly written have led to backlogs of historic proportions, and the granting of patents protecting ideas that are not new, are overly broad, or obvious.' And the company has been committing itself to a new patent policy: 'Key tenets of the policy are that patent quality is the responsibility of the applicant; that patent applications should be open to public examination and that patent ownership should be transparent; and that business methods without technical content should not be patentable.'"
It is possible to revoke patents. It happens regularly, along with re-examinations prompted by either patent holder or a third party.t s/1300_1308_01.htm#sect1308.01
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documen
The whole system is fairly transparent and the new proposed peer review system would be a great opportunity for you to provide all this prior art that you claim exsists so the the examiners can have access to it. They get a limited amount of time to try to find something and if they can't find anything there are limits as to the legal definition of obviousness that can be applied to reject an application.