Patently Absurd

On the surface, I understand the idea of a patent. Brilliant or lucky, an inventor documents a wonderful new gadget and controls how that whatamajig is produced and sold. Half of the Great American Dream is the notion that any kooky character with enough brains and penmanship can create the seeds of a million-dollar industry. What I see in the news these days, though, isn’t that image of patenting.

Big companies make big targets. Success breeds opportunity for those left off the money train. Whether a claim is legitimate or not, I’m learning that the new and wondrous idea is the equivalent of a Chris Farley interview without implementation, marketing and adoption. (“Remember that time I thought of using computers to shop for movies? That was cool.”) I don’t envy or begrudge the courts tasked with sorting out such things. My gripe is that the quality of the patent seems to be in decline. Take this one, from a 1999 patent by Performance Pricing:

Systems and methods for transacting business over a global communications … Wayne W. Lin

Essentially, Performance Pricing seems to be staking a claim to the invention of e-commerce and market economy, suing everyone from Google to Microsoft who is involved with online advertising. Ironically, the patent is available on Google.

Actually, a closer look at the patent describes something more like Let’s Make a Deal. From the abstract:

Sellers offer the product/service within a specified price range, and buyers accept the offer, in exchange for the opportunity to close the transaction at the lowest price offered by achieving a high score during the collateral activity.

So, it sounds like if I agree to buy a discarded Apple iPhone on eBay for $300, I can wind up paying $100 if I get the high score on Asteroids. That would make shopping a bit more interesting, but it still wouldn’t be a patentable idea, in my opinion. It seems more and more that patents and intellectual property serve only as the bargaining chips of corporations, not protections for the kooky inventors.

The patent process is likely changing, which is a good thing. It’s not like Google doesn’t already have enough legal problems to sort out, my favorite being the guy who wants $5 billion as damages from the company’s alleged decision to adopt a codified version of his social security number as their name.