If those mega corporations ever manage to win in the struggle to impose a software patent regime in Europe there’ll be hell to pay… Anyways in what is one of the more memorable screw ups (has to be a screw up in some way) the US Patent Office has seen fit to award Balthaser (an internet design company) a patent which covers “methods, systems and processes for the design and creation of rich-media applications via the Internet.”

And in one sentence Web 2.0 (or at least the rich-media bit) has been effectively patented.

Either the US Patent system is playing a joke well ahead of April 1st or they’re seriously telling the world that in the US you can pretty much patent any software idea regardless of how general or broad, and start charging everyone else license fees.

Most of us know software patents are little more than an excuse for big companies (in Europe at least small to medium enterprises loathe the very thought of a patent system!) to squish the smaller guys out for 20 years. Second Europe opens up a host of pre-patented ideas from the US will charge through the EU Patent Office on trolleys pushed by an army of those weasly characters we call patent lawyers. Anything to get them in before the natives win out.

Maybe in another few years the publishing houses will get a Literature Patent Office set up. That’d be fun. “ION patents a system of text representing a future or mythology based plot”. Ha, now try writing Fantasy or Science Fiction you lowly authors!

Well looks like the cat is among the pigeons, maybe some prior art find will dump these chaps by the roadside. Then again it’ll only be a matter of time before another idiot claim is made…

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  1. Should source code be copyrightable?