Examples of Outrageous Patents and Judgments Examples of (at least apparently) ridiculous patents and patent applications abound (more at PatentLawPractice): * Amazon's "one-click" patent, asserted against rival Barnes & Noble * Cendant's assertion that Amazon violated Cendant's patent monopoly on recommending books to customers (since settled) * The attempt of Dustin Stamper, Bush's Top Economist, to secure a patent regarding an application for a System And Method For Multi-State Tax Analysis, which claims "a method, comprising: creating one or more alternate entity structures based on a base entity structure, the base entity structure comprising one or more entities; determining a tax liability for each alternate entity structure and the base entity structure; and generating a result based on comparing each of the determined tax liabilities" * Apple's patent application for digital Karaoke * the suit against Facebook by the holder of a patent for a "system for creating a community for users with common interests to interact in" * the "absurdly broad patent [issued to Blackboard] for common uses of technology if that technology is employed in the context of education" (see also Patent Office Rejects Blackboard E-Learning Patent One Month After It Wins Lawsuit, Techdirt (Mar. 31, 2008) * Compton's (now Encyclopedia Britannica's) patent that "broadly cover[s] any multimedia database allowing users to simultaneously search for text, graphics, and sounds basic features found in virtually every multimedia product on the market" * Carfax's patent on a "method for perusing selected vehicles having a clean title history" * Acacia's patent for putting a unique transaction number on a receipt[26] * Pat. No. 6,368,227, covering swinging sideways on a swing

via: http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2009/07/23/fair-use-evaluator-and-exceptions-for-instructors-etool-released/

the flexibility that fair use offers versus the certainty offered by more specific exceptions for research and teaching found in the copyright laws of most other countries

Includes summary data: how much research, how many patents, new products, etc.

OPENNESS For all innovation efforts, there are quite important issues concerning openness, and the hazards of enclosures of science and the hoarding of knowledge. A number of academics writers, patent professionals and R&D experts have called attention to the potential risks that innovation inducement prizes might lead to less sharing of knowledge, as people position themselves to win prizes. But this risk should be seen in a broader context. It is also often pointed out that patents can discourage upstream research and downstream product development. Government grant programs that encourage the privatisation of publicly funded R&D (like the US Bayh-Dole Act) can also move things in the wrong direction. It turns out this whole important topic is complicated. One area to pay attention to are the “Bayh-Dole” issues relating to prizes. In many of the US government funded prizes, and in the early X-prize designs, all of the intellectual property rights go to the recipient of the prizes. In some non-medical cases in the US, the government is barred from asking for licenses to use the inventions that win the prizes — an even worse outcome than for patents developed under federal grants, which are subject to (rarely used [fn1]) royalty free government licenses, and march-in and access requirements. So one debate is about obtaining the right bundle of rights in patents or data from prize winners, and managing also the disclosures. After a series of workshops on medical innovation inducement prizes, proposals also emerged to include new “open source dividends,” which involve sharing of prize money to entities that openly share access to knowledge, materials and technology. The open source dividends were modeled in several of the 2008 Bolivia Barbados prize proposals, and have unfortunately been ignored by some of those who have commented on those proposals. There are also much more transformation proposals for funding open source medicine, including the proposals to introduce “competitive intermediaries” that have as t