Who sez the US Patent and Trademark Office is a mess?

Many readers may be too young to remember when Amazon.com took out a patent on the notion of one-click checkout. It was that long ago. Granted, such a concept is, of course, entirely non-obvious, took billions of dollars and millions of man-years in research and development, and you can’t blame them for thinking nobody had ever done anything similar before. I mean, clicks? On webpages? That’s innovation for you!

Now El Reg reports that due to the efforts of a New Zealander, most of the patent’s major claims have been struck down.

Don’t get me wrong. I like patents. In principle. But unlike our own patent office in South Africa, which is merely a registrar, the US PTO is actually supposed to investigate patent claims. That it so often fails in this mission is possibly one of the biggest problems with the patent system as it stands. It taints the entire principle of patents, making the defensible look ludicrously indefensible at times. Such as when it takes ten years and one month for the US PTO to laugh Jeff Bezos’s absurd claim out of their office.

(Hat tip: youngBLOOD.)

Think people who over-borrow and now claim to be in a debt trap they can’t afford to get out of should be cut some slack? That fat-cat banks and “irresponsible” lenders should buck up and take a hit to prevent bankruptcies, repossessions or foreclosures? That’s exactly what Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick thinks.

According to the Boston Globe, he “plans to introduce an ambitious program … to assist Massachusetts communities in preventing foreclosures by pressing lenders to accept losses on their mortgages so that homeowners are able to sell their properties and pay off smaller loan balances.”

Making himself an unlikely but unambiguous contender for next year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto not only spots the elementary logic failure, but follows it ad absurdum:

Of course! It’s that simple! People can’t afford to pay their mortgages, so government just steps in and presses the lenders to accept losses, and voilà! Problem solved.

This could work for other problems too. Health-care costs too high? Just have the government press doctors, hospitals and insurance companies to operate at a loss. Three-dollar-a-gallon gasoline putting a crimp in your budget? We’re from the government, and we’re here to help! Just press the oil companies to sell gas for 50 cents a gallon (plus tax, of course). Food too expensive? The government can press stores to give the stuff away.

The only problem with this is that it is expensive for the companies involved, and it wouldn’t do anyone any good if they all went out of business. The government should do something! What about labor costs? Perhaps the government can press employees to work free. All this would require is the repeal of the 13th Amendment [abolishing slavery].

Hey, come to think of it, Patrick’s program is an ambitious one!

Quod erat demonstrandum.