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The humor on "obvious" (pmm) is appreciated. The explicit exclusion of perpetual motion machine hints at the hopelessness of the government patent office's business model: it's impossible to find the talent with such a wide and deep knowledge base to fulfill the requirement of an idealized patent examiner.
I agree that having a patent is worth no more than an excuse to take someone to court. I'd add that, it often gives just enough ropes for the small firms to hang themselves. While I'm not familiar with the details of the whistle maker, it would not surprise me at all if the company killed itself fighting that law suit.
Even a company as big as Apple nearly killed itself fighting the "look-and-feel" lawsuit against what many thought was a copycat in the late 80's and early 90's. When Apple lost the case, many pundits lamented the eminent demise company. Yet, it was precisely the end of that litigious saga that ushered in the return of Steve Jobs in the mid-to-late 90's. Instead of wasting resources and executive attention span on pointless intellectual property lawsuits, Jobs practically relaunched the company on a trajectory of continuous innovation. There have been numerous copycats since the 1996 iMac, trying to copy everything from unitized desktop PC (iMac) to white plastic music player (iMac) to white plastic cellphone (iPhone), yet Apple retained the lion's share of profit in each of those market segments before the segment is commodidized, then Apple left the various copycats to fight over the table scraps while itself moved onto a new field of its own creation, raking in more profits in the process. The result is more and more feature-rich devices becoming accessible to the masses. That's quite a contrast to the patent-stifled pharmaceutical industry where costs to consumers have gone through the roof while investing is like playing lottery.
posted by 96.233.42...
, Thu, 6 Jan 2011 23:03:23
, Fri, 7 Jan 2011 15:31:58, Fri, 7 Jan 2011 16:23:21, Sun, 9 Jan 2011 03:24:46
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