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BBC: Technology industry hits out at `patent trolls'
Submitted by J.W. Bizzaro; posted on Friday, June 04, 2004
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Maggie Shiels addresses one of our favorite topics:
``Mad cap patents ranging from protecting a method of painting by dipping a baby's bottom into paint or a system for keeping track of people queuing for the bathroom may soon be a thing of the past if the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has its way.
``Such patents, while humorous, clearly show both how broken the American patent system and how lax standards are hurting innovation when it comes to business, the Commission says.
```The intellectual property system was designed to create incentives for people to innovate by giving them, for want of a better word, a monopoly on their ideas for a certain period of time,' FTC commissioner Mozelle Thompson told BBC News Online.
```But we have seen instances where companies use that monopoly in an anti-competitive way, sometimes to prevent other products from getting to market, to prevent people from sharing ideas and to prevent the kind of innovation that the patent system is really trying to spur on.'''
Full story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3722509.stm
Reference by Slashdot.
It's great to see some of the biggest corporate patenters be in the working group tasked to fix the problem. Just for fun, try a search at http://uspto.gov on the following patent numbers, and see what Microsoft has been up to:
6,748,582
6,727,830
6,632,248
6,594,674
5,974,454
5,819,372
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