PATENTLY HILARIOUS USPTO GRANTS PAGE TURN PATENT

NYT Bits Blog (@nytimesbits) tweeted that Apple Now Owns the Page Turn http://t.co/frCLYmvV - testing the mobile Blogger app

Vaudeville as Law: Page Turning Now a Patent of Apple? The Broken U.S. Patent Sytem and a Clueless USPTO Continue Unchecked While Congress and the Courts Slumber

Vaudeville as "law"? Few things are eroding respect for the law as much as the absurdities one encounters daily in intellectual property law.

Nick Bolton at the New York Times Bits Blog headlines that Apple Now Owns the Page Turn, writing:

"If you want to know just how broken the patent system is, just look at patent D670,713, filed by Apple and approved this week by the United States Patent Office."

Apple was granted 38 patents last week, one more ludicrous than the next.
One is for turning pages. Really. Here it is.


The above USPTO patent image is linked from the New York Times.

Essentially, that is nothing more than an animation of a page being turned.
Since when is THAT an invention? There are countless ways to turn a page, but picking one and animating it does not make it a patentable discovery.

It is a software program that animates a page turn.
There is NOTHING novel there deserving patent protection.

In fact, the Apple monopolist continues
to take and wrongly patent
completely obvious technologies
from earlier gaming and cinema eras,
where, for example,
animated page turning and
animated flipping has been used for decades.

The granting of patents for "turning pages"
could be called "vaudeville masquerading as the law of the land".

Read the details about the "page turn" patent of Apple at the NYTimes.com.

For laughs, read
Slash and especially the comments thereto
CNET and especially the comments thereto
and countless others postings about this absurdity.

Things that are not novel, can not be patented. That is the law.
Just try telling that to the USPTO and their army of the clueless.

A new Congress may just have been elected,
and an incumbent President re-elected,
but the odds that they
clean up the broken patent system
are next to non-existent.

Try patenting this as an "invention": an EFFECTIVE Congress.
Now THAT would be a novel invention.

Too many in government in Washington D.C.
appear to be there to play "big shot" and "be important"
and too few are there to do anything sensible.

The only hope is that the Supreme Court of the United States in its decisionmaking insert some sense into a patent and intellectual property system that has gone wild and is running loose virtually uncontrolled.

The ultimate solution for the broken patent system is to have special boards of review of USPTO-granted patents, such boards to be made up of persons of ordinary skill in each and every respective technical field ("Phositas"), who by a unanimous vote must find that a patent claimed is novel, not anticipated by prior art in the field, and is not obvious to someone skilled in the art in that discipline. That would eliminate at least 95% of all claimed patents and bring sanity back into a completely broken patent system.