He spoke briefly with the Mercury News during a meeting of patent lawyers in Sunnyvale. The courts have ruled that business-process patents are valid. And Congress hasn't overruled the courts on this. The debate isn't over. It's just starting, partly because Dickinson's overworked, underpaid and occasionally undertrained examiners have been issuing so many bad patents.
Bad patents abound in the software and business-process arenas.
They will harm the Internet. Many of them mock the fundamental nature of the Net, which was built on open standards. Tim O'Reilly, a publisher of technology books, put it best when he described the damage done by the Amazons and other companies that have won some of these outrageous business-process patents. It's a bad idea, maybe even a violation of federal law, but it's not the civil-liberties disaster some people are suggesting. These are public forums, after all.