microsoft has just been granted a patent for paged scrolling in documents. this is not a joke, this is U.S. patent 7,415,666. there probably is no point in dwelling on the obvious stupidity of such a patent, but it simply makes you wonder who (if anybody) is running the P.R. at the USPTO. bogus patents such as this are not isolated incidents, there is a steady stream of patents that obviously make no sense.
when patents such as this are granted, there are many asking for a reform of the patent law. however, the important thing here is that this kind of patent is not something that is the fault of the current patent law, it is the fault of how patents are granted, and the fact that there obviously is not any expert involved in granting them. however, there definitely is a challenge to deal with the deluge of patent applications that big corporations produce, and that is something that should be addressed by a patent reform.
but it shouldn't be too hard to find patent examiners who will realize that they have used paged scrolling in a variety of applications for quite a while now. and it also shouldn't be too hard to put some process in place that would avoid the steady stream of embarrassing bogus patents. is somebody keeping track of the really bad ones? if there is a site that collects memorable patents like this one, i'd be interested to hear about it! there is the EFF patent busting project which should have generated a fair number of good candidates for such a collection, but the page looks dysfunctional and does not even say which year they are talking about...
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