If Nintendo can patent game mechanics despite prior art, anything’s possible.

Zak 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'm sure a number of things are terribly wrong with the patent system. Amazon's one-click patent is another that comes to mind. Patents are for how, and the how there is "store the default payment and shipping info in a database".

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BizarroLand 3 days ago | parent [-]

I'm sure that some of these patents happen by slipping the examiner a few bands in the application paperwork. Afterwards it's on other people to defend themselves to the tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if they lose you can get an entire company and all of its IP, property, and money.

$5k under the table is a small price to pay for such potential payoff, not to mention the value of the chilling effect on competition.

It's unethical, seedy, shitty, banal, and pestilent, the kind of thing that only the most hellbound and soulless of sleazebags would ever even think of to do, but it's profitable.

	▲	giancarlostoro 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		How many patents do you have? Or are you just making assumptions and defaming people who could very well do an honest day's work? I assume the people at the US Patent Office go through thousands of patents, I would imagine it can get pretty exhausting reading each and every patent, especially after you ran through hundreds of unpatentable documents. You literally have to look up prior patents, and make sure its not already a thing, and figure out, is this really the same or not? Funnily enough, one of my former bosses has one or two patents on something really simple that he came up with. It's a really clever piece of tech that the military uses, stupid simple to implement too.
	▲	metabagel 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I rather think that issuing patents was incentivized in various ways, leading to more bad patents being issued.

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IAmBroom 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There's prior art (centuries old!) on Mickey Mouse's head.