When I was younger and far more innocent I would do things because of the sheer love of doing, learning and discovery. I'd spend hours, no, days, wiring chips together, writing code, testing, soldering, dreaming, inventing. In college I even published a paper on some work I did in robotics when pushed my my prof's to publish. It was great. I'd like to think I "invented" a few things in the process too.

Then I was "born" into the real world: One where companies who do nothing (and some who do something) have patents for stuff I had been doing for ages. You know, stuff like using pulse-width-modulation to control LED intensity (ye'old Color Kinetics), clicking buttons (multiple companies) or putting a spring in series with a microprocessor-controlled motor to control force (MIT, series-elastic actuator).

That's when I realized that what I had been "sold" about engineering, entrepreneurship and research and invention was a huge pile of bullshit. The realization was that government incompetence in perhaps one of the most important human fields of endeavor --invention-- has all but ruined what I loved to do before this epiphany.

Now you had to study Sun Tzu. Now, without your own bullshit patent to act as a shield, you had live in fear of being sued for daring to make a screen area clickable or drag-able, attach a spring to a motor, dim an LED with PWM or the myriad of "obvious to someone skilled in the art" things that are patented. Or you had to hire lawyers to ride shotgun on everything you might want embark on.

The alternative is what most of us actually have to do: We use the tools we know and what we learned to create things and explore ideas. Unless you operate at Google/Apple/Samsung scale you have no choice but to stick your head in the sand and hope that someone doesn't come after you because you app sends an email (or whatever).

I don't know what the solution might be. I have done my share of heavy-duty hardware-intensive R&D spanning years. I get it. Sometimes the difference between something flying and not is found in a seemingly minor detail. The wheel was obvious to the second guy who so it, right?

At the same time, I think it is beyond-obvious to most in tech that the US Patent Office has done a dismal job of filtering that which is "obvious to someone skilled in the art" from true invention. I am not going to draw the demarcation line myself, the subject is too complex and each discipline has it's own boundaries.

That said, if you have ever invested any time in the process of patent search I would be surprised if you did not share my sentiment: the vast majority of patents I have seen should never have been issued.

I fully expect lawyer types to say something akin to: "You have to read the claims carefully. The differences can be subtle but important". I've heard this before. My answer has always been the same: As an engineer I don't have to dive into intricate lawyer-ese to know bullshit when I see it. A spring attached to a motor to control force, you know, "F=kx", is way beyond obvious to anyone who took first-semester Physics. Yet, you lawyers manage to craft convoluted language that takes "F=kx" in the form of a motor and a spring and turns it into a patent that I now have to worry about if I do robotics (which I have done in the past).

Perhaps one of the problems is that the USPTO (I can't speak for other countries) is like a self-feeding fire: The more patents they approve the more people and companies have to file protection patents, which brings in more and more money to support more and more bureaucrats. Every patent you approve is a patent that has "job security" written all over it. If, starting on Monday, they approved patents at a rate of 10% of what they did last year they would probably have to fire 75% of their staff (just guessing).

Maybe the way to fight nonsense patents isn't to make an intellectual claim at all. Maybe the only way is to act politically in order to funnel, say, 50% of USPTO revenue to the Department of Health, or Education or completely outside of government entities. The USPTO would cease to be a self-feeding fire and they might just be forced to only pass real patents.

What if there was a rule that everyone involved in a patent that is invalidated is fired and they loose their pension? Violent, yes, but it would sure raise the bar very, very quickly to a super-high level. Which is exactly where the bar should be.

The other aspect of this is that perhaps patents should cost a lot more money and be subject to a significantly more public process where prior art is defined far more liberally than it is today. If a patent application costs started at the lesser of a million dollars or some percentage of last year's revenue the bullshit patents would go away. In the case of organizations like Google/Apple/Samsung it might cost them ten million dollars to apply for one patent and dozens of millions of dollars to actually get one patent. If a patent costs fifty million dollars I suspect we are not going to see many "slide the button this way" patents filed. Yes, this is off-the-hip and not well thought out. I get it. Take it as more of a random though out of frustration than a coherent idea.

Sometimes you just want to cry when you learn about some of the consequences of the government-sponsored monopolies created through the USPTO. Here's a particularly touching example:

http://www.electronista.com/articles/12/06/14/speech.applica...

The teachers at my kid's school asked me if would collaborate with them to help create (free) iPad apps for their developmentally-challenged students. Of course, I will, but the above bullshit patent and the many more that must exist in the dark files at the USPTO sometimes jar your reality. It is a sad note that rather than sit down and start writing code one of the first things I have to do is a patent search.

Sometimes I wish things were like when I was younger and more innocent: I could choose to help someone with my knowledge of technology and we'd all benefit from what might result (commercial or not). That, sometimes, is a tough choice to make today.