IBM Wants Patent On Finding Areas Lacking Patents

theodp writes "It sounds like a goof — especially coming from a company that pledged to raise the bar on patent quality — but the USPTO last week disclosed that IBM is seeking a patent for Methodologies and Analytics Tools for Identifying White Space Opportunities in a Given Industry, which Big Blue explains allows one 'to maximize the value of its IP by investigating and identifying areas of relevant patent 'white space' in an industry, where white space is a term generally used to designate one or more technical fields in which little or no IP may exist,' and filling those voids with the creation of additional IP."

Comments

Too meta for me...

[Loibisch]

My head explodes at the sheer number of possible meta-jokes hidden here...

Re:Too meta for me...

[bcat24]

Incidentally, they also own the land.

Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me

Re:Ingenious

[Drakkenmensch]

Basically what IBM wants is a patent that makes applying for a patent a patent infringement unless you pay them first.

Clarke's variant.

[DrYak]

Reality has become a joke when a joke becomes reality.

Or to misquote Arthur C Clarke's 3rd Law :
Any sufficiently advanced joke is indistinguishable from reality.

(Or Maybe shall we say : Any sufficiently advanced reality is indistinguishable from a joke.)

Re:Ingenious

[Zarf]

Wont this start an infinite cascade of similar statements?

And that's how we'll break the patent system. They'll get so caught up in recursive patents that they'll chew up all available resources in the US government eventually causing an out of memory error. The whole government will crash because there will be no space left for log files. The result will force a reboot of the US government.