The state of patents in the tech industry is intensely frustrating to me. Patents on rounded rectangles, patents on "click here to upgrade" buttons, patents on delivering "educational content" over a network... the non-obvious clause has basically been entirely discarded over the last 20 years. And what's worse; for most of these patents, there are hundreds or thousands of other nearly identical patents.Digit wrote:I'm no patent lawyer, but this just seems too general to be considerable as novel and non-obvious. With the description "Electronic Device" and claim "We claim the ornamental design for an electronic device, substantially as shown and described." If you look at the drawings, they're not too substantial, just a rectangular parallelepiped with rounded corners and one or two surface lines.
The fact is, as a software developer, any new software I write is almost certainly covered by an existing patent. And there are firms out there that do nothing but buy up these bogus patents and then sue people for violating them. I'm frankly scared to release new iPhone apps, because it increases the chance I'll get sued for patent infringement.
Most of you probably don't care about this. But if you're interested, NPR recently did a really good piece on the mess we're in. It's called When Patents Attack, and it's dead on.