Lawmakers Debate Patent Immunity For Banks

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Now that a small Texas company has a patent on scanning and archiving checks — something every bank does — that has survived a USPTO challenge, lawmakers feel they have to do something about it. Rather than reform patent law, they seem to think it wiser to protect the banks from having to pay billions in royalties by using eminent domain to buy the patent for an estimated $1 billion in taxpayer money, immunizing the banks. The bill is sponsored by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)."

Comments

Heh...

[TheSpengo]

Our legal system reminds me of when you write a huge undocumented, uncommented program in C and have other people do additions and debugging.

Re:Heh...

[JustShootMe]

You're describing what happens when salespeople and politicians try to do a geek's job.

Re:Heh...

[dgatwood]

You're kidding, right? No, our legal code is almost entirely like an entire operating system written in undocumented Perl.

• There are no hints as to what any part of it is supposed to do and it is written in a language that to most people looks like line noise.
• Every significant patch is applied by adding an additional Perl module that overrides an existing method in an existing module, replacing all of the code in that method with a complete new copy of the method that is almost identical to the old one but adds or removes a backslash in a single regular expression.
• The entire core logic was written in a crunch session by a bunch of geeks locked in a room together and forced to design it by committee.
• The application was a rewrite of another application that never really worked well in the first place.
• Every function name is chosen explicitly to provoke an emotional response in the developer, e.g. thisFunctionSucks() or callMeNow().

Bank Patent #2

[fireman sam]

Charge people for depositing their money.

Re:Or, instead of feeding the patent troll

[Anonymous Coward]

A billion dollars. Talk about misuse of taxpayer funds.

Wow, better to spend on a patent than avoid an unnecessary war!

I think Dr. Evil got it right this time

[JoeCommodore]

"I'll patent a technology employing 'computers' to 'scan' checks, thereby holding the whole banking industry hostage... for ONE MILLION DOLLARS!"

Number 2, "uh, one Billion, sir."

"Thanks, Number Two.... ahem... for ONE BILLION DOLLARS!"

Re:Or, instead of feeding the patent troll

[superswede]

...or maybe it's time to reform the US bank system - checks belongs to the 20th century!

Start by providing real electronic transfers and bill payments. For example, to transfer money electronically between accounts in two different US banks (e.g. BofA, WellsFargo, ...) costs something like 20-40 USD and the receiving bank may charge an additional 10 USD. As a comparison, most transfer within the EU is free across banks and countries! It is even cheaper to send money from EU to the US, than within the US.

The cheapest solution in the US is to send the money via a check. <sarcasm>We've got this beautiful service where we can do "online" payment, which in practice means that a physical check is printed somewhere in the US, mailed to the recipient who then drop it of at her/his bank to cash it. The bank then probably send the check off to another location where it is *scanned* so it can be archived and verified later. That is what I call an efficient bank system.</sarcasm>

So, maybe DataTreasury is doing us a favor - we might get an improved bank system without checks.

Re:other option...

[Xolotl]

Probably cheaper, too.

Re:Well, now...

[Alex Belits]

Al Capone exploited retarded laws and enriched himself through fear-mongering. Patent trolls on the other hand... oh shit. Alcatraz seems to be closed for good, but I think, US Government has a perfectly good replacement in Guantanamo, currently being umm... misused.