US Dir. of Citizen Participation Patents the News

theodp writes "Ex-Googler and now White House Director of Citizen Participation Katie Stanton is charged with promoting open public dialogues. Last Thursday, Stanton and Google snagged a patent on displaying financial news. Google explains that Stanton's invention — Interactive Financial Charting and Related News Correlation — will 'facilitate and encourage the user's use and understanding of financial information,' which does jibe nicely with Stanton's appointment to Obama's New Media Team. Too bad it'll be encumbered by a Google patent until 2027."

Comments

Re:Misleading title

[radtea]

Thanks--we all know that every /. patent story is full of lies, and I appreciate you taking the time to figure out which specific lies were in this one.

Rob Malda et al believe deeply in the fundamental soundness of the US patent system, to the extent that it wouldn't surprise me that they held substantial portfolios of non-trivial software patents themselves. You can tell this is the case because every single patent-related story on /. is substantially false: either the summary is full of lies about what has actually been patented, or a patent application is presented as a patent grant. The level of ignorance expressed by the /. editors may actually be beyond the limit of "never assume venality where stupidity will do", although admittedly that is a tough boundary to cross.

In any case, if they had any fundamental beef with the US patent system they would be posting stories of genuine abuse, not fabricated and misleading summaries and headlines that are clearly the work of people who think the only way to make the US patent system look bad is to lie about it.