So the light bulb, your Edison example, is a great example of a famous invention, the product of human creativity in the sciences and the useful arts, and something that the government then rewards a limited exclusive right to for a limited period of time in exchange for disclosing how that thing is made, how it works, so that humanity can benefit from it for all of time, and other human beings can then build on it and create future great advances.

Thomas Edison’s patenting of the incandescent light bulb is indeed a “great example”; a great example of how the U.S. PTO mistakenly granted a patent 1879 — to the great cost of the courts, and with undue restriction of competition and stagnation of progress — only to later invalidate that very patent less than four years later in 1883.

Yes, the patent office’s chief administrator’s “great example” of how the patent system is purported to work is instead yet another shining example of how it utterly fails to actually do so. Such a display of ignorance in the very field for which Mr Kappos is presented as an authority is shameful, to say the least.