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...

[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().