USA Today Gets Sarcastic Over Patent Hoarding

from the getting-punchy dept

You know that silly patent hoarding attempts have reached the big time when a newspaper like USA Today comes out with an incredibly sarcastic piece mocking all those little patent hoarding shops who claim they came up with obvious ideas (that have tons of prior art) and are suing just about everyone they can think of. "On Nov. 3, Kaplan/ConnecTel sued Cisco Systems, which apparently has robbed Kaplan of millions of dollars in income from four of his patents that describe how a router would use computer chips to determine the best way to route information. In other words, his patents cover pretty much the way the whole Internet works.... Obviously, no one had thought of this before he did in 1996, even though Cisco had been founded 12 years earlier to make routers and Bob Metcalfe had invented Ethernet computer networking 23 years before. That's why Kaplan has the patents! The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office never screws up stuff like that."

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