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Fluffeh writes:
"In June, President Barack Obama called for action against patent trolls. Today the White House held a short conference updating what has happened in the arena of patent policy since then and announced new initiatives going forward — including one to 'crowdsource' the review of patents.
Currently, getting a patent is a one-on-one proceeding between the applicant and the examiner. Two pilot programs that allowed the public to submit prior art were only applied to a tiny number of patents, and in the first program, all the patents were voluntarily submitted by the applicants. Applying such scrutiny to a few hundred patents, out of the hundreds of thousands issued each year, isn't any kind of long-term solution.
Unless the crowd-sourcing initiatives were to put major new burdens on applicants — which would be resisted — the fundamentals of patent examination aren't going to change. Patent examiners get an average of eighteen hours to review a patent. Most importantly, examiners effectively can't say 'no' to applicants. They can reject a particular application, but there's no limit to the number of amendments and re-drafts an applicant can submit."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday February 22 2014, @11:51PM
Did WhatsApp actually have any patentable features?
After all, the capabilities it touts have been available in multi-platform multi-network applications since Jabber gateways, and there are 20 of them in the app store on Google or Itunes right now.
Software should probably NOT be patentable at all. (And I say this as a guy who makes his living writing software). Copyrighted, sure, but If I want to write a better WhatsApp, its just a a bunch algorithms.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.