More patent news...
I'm starting to think I should be registering patents at TheRegister.
"The Register - Patenting the hand that feeds IT"
Maybe we all should become patent trolls because it apparently works enough to make headlines.
The US Patent and Trademark Office has torn up parts of a video-streaming technology patent used against Adobe and Level 3 Communications in a patent-infringement legal scrap. The office's Patent Trial and Appeal Board has invalidated chunks of patent 5,995,091, which describes a "system and method for streaming multimedia …
But not as implemented and policed in USA.
The Patent Office is useless.
DCMA, Millennium Copyright act, DRM, the So called ITC really US Import Embargo Commission
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_International_Trade_Commission.
RIAA
1. Get a US patent for this:
"A means by which Ideas may be registered and protected in commerce by law." (You know they'll just rubber stamp approve it.)
2. Sell patent to Patent Troll Company with big pockets and little sense. (That'd be almost any of them.) IE: PROFIT!!
3. Get popcorn and beer to consume while watching them take US Patent office to court for patent infringement.
4. Watch as US patent reform actually becomes a reality. (I wish!)
I think someone actually tried to get a patent in the US on the "business" process of getting a patent and using it to sue someone else. As far as I recall it was initially granted, but the Patent Office subsequently revoked it when the patent owner threatened to sue the Patent Office.
Software patents, again.
Most of them could be summarised as follows:
"A method of doing things with a computer that other parties have been doing for years, either with computers or with pen&paper, expressed in the vaguest language and whose biggest achievements are usually destroying innovation and making lawyers rich."
...but it has two decades of worthless approved trash to sift through, and it's going to be a long time before this headache is behind us. Fortunately they're expiring at a steady rate now. (Most likely an impetus for last year's lawsuit.)