"A patent is an artificial government-imposed monopoly on implementing a certain method or technique."

--Richard Stallman

Patent TrollTracker has attempted to show the magnitude of problems at the USPTO. The system has gone askew based on the observation that the number of utility patent claims issued by USPTO per year has quintupled in 30 years.

Note that the number of claims issued per year has almost quintupled in those 30 years, from under 700,000 claims per year to over 3 million for the last several years. That's amazing. And people wonder why the PTO is passing rules attempting to limit continuations and the number of claims per application.

Novell, by the way, appears to be filing at a regular pace too. Here is one from yesterday's news report:

Protection of data accessible by a mobile device. Peter Boucher, Jonathan Wood, both of Orem; Michael Wright, Sandy; Gabe Nault, Draper; Merrill Smith, Riverton; Sterling K. Jacobson, Saratoga Springs; Robert Mims, West Valley City. Assigned to Novell Inc., Provo. Filed Feb. 28, 2003, claiming priority to multiple prior patent applications. Patent No. 7,308,703.

If you wish to know what's involved in obtaining a patent, see this example from yesterday.

Yong Guan had scribbled 12 arrows across his office whiteboard, each black line going from one little box he had drawn to another little box. He had written five long formulas up there, too.

And that was bad news for cyber criminals.

This is likely to result in software (algorithm), which corresponds to graph theory, i.e. mathematics. Are we truly at a stage where people can own and charge for the use of applied mathematics? What would Newton say? ⬆

Related articles:

• When Patents Threaten Science



• EFF Challenges Bogus Patent on Internet Subdomains