Deeplinks Blog posts about Stupid Patent of the Month
Back when you were a kid, you may (depending on your age) have checked books out of your library using a circulation card. The cards, like the one pictured to the right, would allow the librarian to keep track of the books, who had them, and when they were expected back at the library.
(This month’s Stupid Patent is awarded to Xerox, who on January 19, 2016 was awarded a patent on essentially the library circulation card, but done electronically.
For the first time ever, this month’s Stupid Patent of the Month is being awarded to a design patent. Microsoft recently sued Corel for, among other things, infringing its patent on a slider, D554,140, claiming that Corel Home Office has infringed Microsoft’s design.
The design patent, as detailed by Microsoft in its complaint, is titled “User Interface for a Portion of a Display Screen” and entitles Microsoft to own this:
More specifically, Microsoft claims to own this design of a slider.
Plenty of businesses rely on third-party payers: parents often pay for college; insurance companies pay most health care bills. Reaching out to potential third-party payers is hardly a new or revolutionary business practice. But someone should tell the Patent Office. Earlier this year, it issued US Patent No. 9,026,468 to Securus Technologies, a company that provides telephone services to prisoners. The patent covers a method of “proactively establishing a third-party payment account.” In other words, Securus patented the idea of finding someone to pay a bill.
We’ve long been concerned about “patent trolls”—companies that don’t produce anything themselves but buy patents, then make their money by threatening and even suing companies that are producing products. But today we’re going to discuss a different kind of trolling: running fishing lures through the water. That’s because this October’s Stupid Patent of the Month, US Patent No. 7,113,449, involves putting data about trolling—the fishing kind—on a computer.
Imagine if the inventor of the Segway claimed to own “any thing that moves in response to human commands.” Or if the inventor of the telegraph applied for a patent covering any use of electric current for communication. Absurdly overbroad claims like these would not be allowed, right? Unfortunately, the Patent Office does not do a good job of policing overly broad claims. August's Stupid Patent of the Month, U.S. Patent No. 8,788,090, is a stark example of how these claims promote patent trolling.
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