[FYI] Owning the Future

["Axel H Horns" <horns@ipjur.com>]

http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/jul01/shulman.asp

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Owning the Future: Patent Pollution By Seth Shulman   

July/August 2001   


It is not a perfect world. Tankers spill oil. Innocent people land in 
jail. Bad calls cost the home team a championship. And as almost 
anyone in the intellectual-property game will tell you, the U.S. 
Patent and Trademark Office continues to grant patents that are, 
well, patently invalid. I'm talking about patents for things that 
have either already been invented or are so straightforward and 
apparent they don't meet the patent's law requirements for being 
novel and nonobvious.   

[...]  

What makes these startups really interesting is that they are 
attracting support across a broad spectrum of intellectual-property 
players—from patent system boosters to open-source programmers. In 
the polarized IP field, that is no small feat.  

[...]  

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