Broken Patent System? Google, Apple Disagree

Posted by kdawson on Thursday August 2, 2007 @03:10AM from the with-a-straight-face dept.

Whiney Mac Fanboy writes "The AlwaysOn Stanford Summit featured the panel discussion 'The Patent Crisis: Crossroads for the Business of Technology.' Speakers included patent lawyers from Google, IBM, and Apple. According to The Register, Google's and Apple's patent jocks had diametrically opposing views. Google's head of patents believes the system is in crisis: 'The Patent Office is overburdened,' she said. 'The volume of patents going in is huge. And the quality of patents coming out — it could be better.' But Apple's chief patent counsel said the US patent system was 'not broken' and 'not in crisis,' calling it 'the best in the world.'"

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If it isn't done much yet, maybe there is a reason by dingleberrie · 2007-08-02 03:18 · Score: 5, Insightful

Our judges and juries attempt to settle items that they can relate to and understand the importance of, such as loosing life, property, or liberty.

Is the judicial system really qualified to test for items such as obviousness in a technical field in order to dismissing a patent. For every witness that says it is obvious, I'm sure the opposing side will say it's not. Perhaps we should have a select group of technical judges just for this purpose.