The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

I’m starting to get sick and tired of silly patents being granted to patent trolls (firms who have no intention of ever making any products, they just file for patents and then sue for damages / licensing fees the companies who did make real products).  The whole patent system that the United States has today is a total joke.  Half of the patents seem to have obvious prior art and yet the patent examiners at the patent office seem clueless to find it!  This is probably because they are overworked, underpaid and under extreme pressure to catch up on the massive backlog of patents they have to go through.

Still, that is not excuse for why Congress or somebody can’t overhaul the patent system.  I’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t be able to patent something unless you have a WORKING product in hand to show to the examiner.  Perhaps my method precludes the poor inventor from being able to capitalize on his ideas, but I just don’t see how you can make some of these ridiculous claims when you have no capability to produce anything close to that yourself, in the hopes that  someday someone else will produce it and you can charge them licensing fees.  By that idea I can just come up with something silly like an invention for an “Anti-Gravitic Car whose method of transportation involves negating gravity to provide lift”.  Now, if my silly patent were granted, if in 50 years somebody invented such a thing I could charge them loads of money to use my patented idea!  I thought back in the day when icons like Bell and Gray were being granted patents, they actually did some research, produced some working prototypes and then when to the patent examiner’s office to get a patent.  When did we stray so far from that?

By the way, what set me off was this story over at Techdirt.

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