[bastard_op]

The patent offices are likely just used to seeing a steady stream of crap from Apple that is so wacky they just accept it as part of their charm whether from a dead man or not. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple has partners (or their own) planted in the same building to coincidentally wine and dine the patent office execs regularly like lobbyists. There is obviously a well paid set of folks that just file random crap patents from Apple constantly in a hope something, anything hits, and since it's Apple they simply cannot and will not be ignored.

I really can't say I blame them either, look at the lines of patent trolls lined up in West Texas every year to sue them. State of the nation...

I do have to wonder if someone went back to criticize the fact a dead man is the most inventive corpse since 2Pac and Biggie if the patents could be invalidated as superfluous. Yeah right, it's Apple.

[mschuster91]

The patent system has to be reformed completely in any case. If you're an innovative company, no matter the size, you have to file as many claims as possible so that you have counter patents to throw at your opponent, which makes the problem with patents worse for everyone because of the low-quality noise. If you're a small company, you have to be really diligent in your patent search because the risk of getting sued by legitimate patent holders or patent trolls is very high, made worse by the fact that the US system allows trivial software patents. If you're any kind of inventor, you have to either file a patent and risk that China will just outright steal your invention, or you do not file a patent in the hope it will take the competition long enough to reverse engineer and bring to market.

[pfannkuchen]

> file a patent and risk that China will just outright steal your invention

As in they notice that the patent was filed and copy it before you launch? Isn’t the system noisy enough that this would be really hard for them to do well?

[mschuster91]

> Isn’t the system noisy enough that this would be really hard for them to do well?

China has more than enough people to throw at a problem that's very easy to parallelize, and a culture that doesn't give a fuck about Western ideas of intellectual property ("gongkai" [1]).

And yet, our politicians seem to be happy to deliver our IP, our jobs, everything to a nation that's at least hostile towards us, on a silver platter.

(Note that I actually prefer the way of gongkai, but unfortunately it'd destroy our economic models so I see no way of reform in that direction ever happening -.-)

[1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297