Meantime, a comment like mine usually attracts flame. I am surprised it did not.

Finally, the thing that moved me to comment was this:

Re: “I will charge you 50% more than anyone tries to charge me. Sen me an invoice at your peri” (sic)

Now that is ‘clever’. Seriously, I encourage people to follow that ‘outside the box’ line of thought. There almost certainly is a way to bind those jerks up in their own red tape until they cry ‘uncle’.

Next thing you know, they’ll be claiming that they, and not Al Gore, invented the internet. ::eyeroll::

I encourage everyone else to follow suit.

(I patented patent trolling in 2004.)

http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?PriorArtInvalidPatentsAndMailFraud

*I* invented that type of thing in the 1970s and put a production system in to use with it in around 1988.

That thing is *SO OBVIOUS* that none of the possibly thousand or even tens of thousands of people who came up with it even thought to pursue a patent. It is so trivial, I am hard-pressed to come up with an example. It is like patenting ‘contrast’ between letters and their backgrounds. It is dumber than dumb. It passes no sniff test at all. A patent is not valid on something that any reasonably competent professional would come up with in the course of the ordinary practice of their skill. I am a smart guy, but I ain’t all that smart and even if I was, that is hardly the cleverest thing I ever did. It is WAY, WAY not ‘inventive’.

Even if it was inventive, myself, my coworkers and companies involved like IBM all did more than just come up with the idea. We made it manifest in a very large working pilot and ultimately a production system. If they did not do enough due diligence to see if they actually had ‘invented’ anything, then that is their problem.

Contrary to what most think, I oppose even addressing them on the grounds above, most of the time. Even if the patent was somehow found to be technically valid, it is wrongful to allow it to stand. Allowing such a patent to be used defeats the original purpose of the patent system in the first place.

I wrote the following polemic, in response to other IP ‘trolling’, wherein I state my belief we should simply revoke patent and copyright grants entirely. They no longer serve the purpose for which they were intended, and are now simply a net negative drag on the affairs of ordinary men and women.

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/BobTrower

I urge people to stand a long way back from these debates and ask for a moment why we are even having the discussion. It is outrageous that parasites like these are allowed to waste the time of people actually producing things of value. I will now go back to the daily ‘invention’ of trivial things like the subject of that patent while I actually create things that *are* inventive.

Yet the primary claim of the patent is restrictive in some aspects. For example, it requires “the visual content comprises a plurality of mini-images in the form of a conveyor belt slide show.” So it may be possible that some of the firms being invoices really are not even infringing the patent if there images are arranged in different manner.

I can’t speak for foreign patent offices. However, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office needs to create an environment where patent examiners can do their job of a more complete examination rather than how quickly they can approve applications. They need an environment where they feel that they can stay. The turn-over of examiners in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is a serious problem. Arguably, this problem needs to be fixed, sufficient access to prior art needs to be established for examiners, and all active software patents should ideally be re-examined.

When did W3C define the image link? I thought it was before 2003….

Humans never cease to amaze me.