A Patent Strain on Innovation

Computerworld - Some things are patently ridiculous. One is the U.S. patent system, an institution in desperate need of reform.
The reason for patents is to encourage innovation. We give inventors exclusive rights to their creations for a limited period, after which the inventions enter the public domain.
In the real world, patents are also about politics, mismanagement and slippery behavior. The results may be damaging to our economic and cultural health. Patents are supposed to be issued for actual inventions -- for new methods and machines that are, crucially, not obvious. Too many patents are being awarded for "inventions" that aren't new or are blatantly obvious.
The technology business is rife with bad patents. A couple of years ago, BT Group claimed to own a patent on hyperlinking, a concept that long predated the company's application. This bizarre notion was, thankfully, shot down in a U.S. courtroom, but not before SBC Communications spent a lot of money defending its right to use the technology.
Microsoft lost a trial in which a small Illinois company, Eolas Technologies, claimed to own fundamental technology for browser plug-ins. The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) is re-examining that case, which many in the Web community believe is an example of a patent that should never have been issued in the first place.
Then there are the "business method" patents -- essentially, online translations of analog activities. The most infamous is Amazon.com's "one-click" shopping patent, but there are lots of other egregious examples.
There's plenty of blame to go around on this. But the chief culprits are the PTO, which by nearly every credible account doesn't sufficiently analyze the applications it gets, and Congress, which allows this to persist.
To be fair to the PTO, it is laboring under handicaps. For example, Congress doesn't let the agency use all the money it generates in fees to improve the patent process. But the PTO's attitude has been compared, accurately, to that of a polluter. The agency, which considers patent applicants -- not the public -- to be its main constituency, hands out patents willy-nilly and lets the courts sort out the mess that results.
IT has a serious stake in this. The intellectual property dust-up over Linux seems likely to be the tip of a nasty iceberg, with patent holders (especially Microsoft, I suspect) potentially using threats about alleged infringement to scare people away from open-source software. And companies developing their products are increasingly filing for patents on everything that moves, mostly for defensive reasons. Wouldn't you