Former Intel CEO Andy Grove Wants Struggling Industries To Stop Slacking

lousyd writes "Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel and current instructor at Stanford Business School, has a message for industry. He believes that health care and energy, especially, could learn a lesson from computing's innovative and relatively government-free history. He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was. On the issue of computer patents, he insists that firms must use their patents or lose them: 'You can't just sit on your a** and give everyone the finger.'"

Comments

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[Planesdragon]

A great example of this was Wizards of the Coast's "patent" on card game mechanics [uspto.gov], to wit "The method of claim 3, wherein said step of designating one or more of the cards comprises rotating the one or more cards on the playing surface from an original orientation to a second orientation", which under a proper analysis done by any COMPETENT and non-overworked patent attorney should have been invalidated by prior art by the collected works of one Edmund Hoyle [wikipedia.org] over two hundred years ago.

Please provide example of a card game before Magic -- ANY game -- where rotating a card has meaning in play. I know of games where laying cards atop each other matters, and where flipping cards over matters, but none where rotation does.

If not, STFU, it's a valid patent.