Examples of poor patents help us illustrate the fact that we are living in sad state. The Inquirer has been keeping track of some obvious patents recently and yesterday was no exception.

Sony's big idea is that if you wrap your hard drive in a fluid filled bag it will protect it if the outer case suffers a shock.

Maybe there is some generalisation here, but still, is this truly patentable? A company cannot just protect and possess something which even a child or a teenager can think of. Of what quality are all these patents that they are piling up?

A discussion over at Slashdot has an idea proposed for the elimination of spurious patents.

Now suppose that every time we have an idea that we think is 'obvious' but that hasn't been done before, or something we think would be interesting but don't have the money to create — that we blogged about that idea, tagging it as 'prior art' via Technorati. This would give people an RSS feed of prior art.

Saving the best for last...

Patent troll on the loose or just unnecessary harassment?

OPTi Initiates Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Eight Companies

[...]

The lawsuit against these companies is a continuing part of Opti's strategy for pursuing its patent infringement claims relating to its Compact ISA-Bus technology says Opti.