| PJ... Come on.
Are you seriously suggesting that the administrative branch
of the the US government has the power to just suddenly decide it can ignore
established case law around patents? That they can "obey the law" as you would
wish it to be, rather than as the Courts have said (through interpretation of
Congress' broad language) it actually is?
That's getting into "birther"
territory in terms of legal logic. It does not become Groklaw. It actually
sounds more like the Onion.
Yes. Like most law, patent law is
squishy. The courts have not come to a uniform decision regarding all aspects of
it. But the fundamental outline that embodiments encoded in software are
allowable seems pretty firmly established. And attacking the USPTO over
something that it has no control over is absurd. If you want to get mad about
this, get mad at the Supreme Court and Congress.
It's also a missed
opportunity. Much of the problem with the modern patent system actually IS
administrative in nature. I would start with the most obvious one, which is that
Patent Examiners receive two "actions" for allowing a patent, while
receiving only one "action" for rejecting one - and examiners annual performance
reviews are largely based on the total number of administrative actions they've
taken in the year. Essentially, it's half the work to just be a rubber stamp
for any crap patent than it is to reject things based on prior art, so it
becomes far too easy for examiners to say "I'm behind, and if there's a problem,
well, the courts will just fix it".
But that won't get changed if people
waste the USPTO's time ranting about things they have no control
over.
ps. Not everyone who disagrees with you must be evil or
ignorant. Some times you may even find a few who know things you don't.
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