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I was part of a team that developed a distributed realtime database. That is to say, a record could exist on a dozen servers, and these servers could be handling transactions from hundreds of thousands or millions of simultaneous users. This was back in the day of high latency due to modems, so we worked out how to deal with the fact that by the time a client might get some information it might be out of date. We did this to allow for massively multiplayer online games... this was not a bogus patent because we really did advance the state of the art, and for a couple years there only about a dozen people in the world were capable of producing this kind of software. However, on slashdot, people claimed that this patent was a patent on "the idea of online games!!!!!!". Later there was a big discussion claiming we'd patented IRC and oh, how bogus that was, because IRC was around for YEARS before we filed our patent! Nothing in the IRC protocol, or any of the online games at the time (or most of them sense) solved the problems we were solving in our patent. The thing is, the anti-patent people never read the patent. The Amazon "one click patent "is not a patent on putting a "Buy now" button on a website. Our patent didn't cover IRC, etc. I haven't done a survey of patents, and so I can't say what percentage of them are bogus, and what aren't. I can believe a bogus patent could exist, and there is a remedy for that-- present prior art and the patent gets thrown out. This is a pretty functional solution, and anyone pressing their case better be prepared because the possibility of prior art always exists. So, I doubt there are many bogus patents, at least, not many that ever make it to court. I do think there are a lot of patents that are presented as "bogus" that aren't. My other patent has a headline that makes it sound totally bogus... but it isn't. I just can imagine what people will say about it-- because they never bother to read the patent. They already believe patents are bogus and whenever they see yet another claim that a patent is bogus they are ready to believe it. |