Stupid Patent of the Month: Microsoft’s Design Patent on a Slider
I get how we all intuitively want the PTO to not issue &quot;stupid patents&quot; but is there an objective, mechanical way to determine what is stupid? Do we care more about false positives (as in this case) or false negatives (a hypothetical alternative universe where too few, rather than too many, patents are awarded).<p>Now, before you start arguing against patents entirely, what I really want to know is: without patents, how are individual supposed to profit from their inventiveness when a larger entity could trivially copy the idea and profit based on their superior connections and capitalization? And yes, I&#x27;m talking about software. Are software inventors just supposed to give away their inventions as open source and feed themselves by working for someone else who a) got the ask, and b) defended their IP?