who we all know invented "search".
You have to love the absurdity of the U.S. patent system - CHAOS.
Thomas Claburn at InformationWeek, February 23, 2010, reports that Xerox [has filed a] Patent Suit Against Google [and] Yahoo claiming triple damages - of course - and claiming that various elements of Google and Yahoo search violate Xerox patents on methods and apparatus for integrating information and knowledge.
But what else can we rightly expect, given the state of the current patent law?
As Claburn notes at the end of his article in connection with this suit:
"The most recent proposed legislation, the Patent Reform Act of 2009, has been sitting in committee in the Senate for almost a year."And we ask of the U.S. Supreme Court - will their upcoming now long-festering decision in Bilski put an END to the PATENT MADNESS?
We doubt it.
Take a look at this Federal Circuit decision from February 25, 2010 (yesterday) in which many brilliant human legal minds - perhaps we exaggerate - are involved in supremely important cogitation on the crucial patent invention (?) of "static" prices not found (?) in prior art - that's what the jury determined folks - surely experts on the matter, we presume, but fear not, for the dynamic "re-centering" of "price levels", such as could not be disabled by the user, was declared as a significant "non-static" element of the exculpated non-infringing competition, who were thus dynamically "in motion". That's what the courts found, more or less, broadly described, tongue-in-cheek.
What sane man would believe that the USPTO ever issued a patent for essentially that?
Static prices in any inventive context as an "invention"....?
Not in our world, but perhaps we do not live in the same world as the USPTO?
You see, we view the world like this. Prices can be either static or dynamic in ANY context and any invention or method can USE that non-inventive phenomenon to their advantage or disadvantage, but they can not INVENT that phenomenon in the context of any method. Prices are not a transformed element and can not be used as a material basis for obtaining a patent. Why do legislators and courts not understand the difference?