[KLUG Advocacy] Re: Microsoft: WE Invented the Internet!

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> can not be granted for a technology already in common use.  And there 
> might be some form of  "squatters rights" that says if you don't defend 

I know this applies to copyrights,  I don't know if the same is true for
patents.

> a consortium, developed.  It seems to me that the patent office should 
> be either beefed up (they're probably overworked) 
> so that they can do their homework, 

Bingo!  So hows that letter to you congressman coming?  What there needs
to be is a PENALTY for filing for demonstrably bogus patents;  then the
lawyers can turn it into a profit center thus creating a check-n-balance
system.

Of course, in a system them spends $343 billion* on the military
establishment and then $31 billion** on K-12 education it is hard to
believe that infrastructure like the patent office is a terribly high
priority (even less so the fate of small business)

[* 2004 U.S. Budget office, not including the cost of the invasion of
Afghanistan or the fiasco that is Iraq.]
[** 2004 U.S. Buget office ]

And lets not even talk about the scant ~$2 billion to reduce the
dependency on foriegn energy sources;  a single Stealth bomber costs
more than that.

> or disbanded so they don't grant patents they shouldn't.

Ha!,  thats so unlikely it is downright funny.