The Dead Day of the Patent Office
filed on Monday, April 03, 2006 at 11:01:50 AM CST

It's absolutely amazing the way patents work here in the United States.  You can patent just about anything so long as the idea is original, and that you can present proof that the idea is plausible.  Not functional, mind you.  Simply plausible.  You do this by describing the basic procedure, drawing, if needed, general apparatus or diagraming layouts.  Then you submit it, and, if it's not already patented, or similar to another patent, voila... you have a patent.

Thus, Eolas Technologies has a patent, United States Patent 5,838,906 (read it if you don't believe me about just describing something), that basically describes a web-browser plug-in.  To my knowledge, they have sued only Microsoft, which makes one wonder why Netscape, AOL Time Warner, and various other web-browser companies have not been sued.

But here's the big question... why is someone able to patent and then sue someone over a rather obvious implementation of something.  And how is it that we allow this, as a nation, to occur.

A system allowing a user of a browser program on a computer connected to an open distributed hypermedia system to access and execute an embedded program object.  The program object is embedded into a hypermedia document much like data objects.  The user may select the program object from the screen.  Once selected the program object executes on the user's (client) computer or may execute on a remote server or aditional remote computers in a distributed processing arrrangement...

I mean, for god's sake, just that part there could be applied openly and broadly to things such as a form coming from an ASP or CGI application.  I mean, really, there are so many things wrong with this patent, not the least of which is that a jury upheld it.

The day of the Patent Office is long passed.  I mean, take Blackberry... someone patents an idea.  Not a functional idea, just a possibly functional idea.  A company doesn't know this patent exists, creates, completely independently of that patent or knowledge thereof, and then whammo, the patent holder says, "But, you've violated our patent."  Blackberry then pays millions upon millions of dollars to someone who had an idea, but hadn't put a single hour of work into it, and certainly didn't bother to adapt it.

It's one thing to say that if you approach a company with an idea, that idea should be yours, and unless compensated for it or you license it to them or whatever (you know, a contractual obligation), you should have no fear of losing that idea.  But if you sit on your idea and never find anyone to use it, you shouldn't be able to just register it, wait for someone else to come up with a similar idea, and then say, "Why, you've stolen my idea.  Pay me.  Now."

It's just sad.

Subnote:  Not sure how things turned out with Apple, but they were sued as well... so far though, no notes on anyone else.