I feel a rant on software patents coming on.<p>I&#x27;ve been in groups that have been on the receiving end of patent lawsuits twice.  Both times the patents were transparently invalid.<p>The first time involves my dorm at MIT.  Back before I arrived there some enterprising student had hooked up our laundry machines to the internet so we could all find out when there was a free one and when our laundry was done.  The internet at large got wind of this and sadly the servers were Slashdotted in both senses of the word.  Shortly after the idea appeared on Slashdot some enterprising entrepreneur filed for a patent on the idea of hooking laundry machines up to the internet and was granted it.  Several years later our dorm, through MIT, was sued for patent infringement.  Luckily the MIT administration had spines so they didn&#x27;t get anywhere.  But the patent is still in force and other universities still have to pay millions of dollars to this group to hook their laundry machines up to the internet.<p>The second time involved the first company I worked for out of grad school, a sensors consultancy.  They had some ideas about structural health monitoring using piezoelectrics and sent their designs off to another company to be fabbed.  They filed for patents on their ideas and shortly after the fab house filed for patents on those same ideas.  They mostly got their patents but for some reason the fab house got one in first despite filing later causing their patent application to be denied.  Then the fab house sued them and somewhere in the process there were layoffs and I lost my job.<p>Just because something is patented doesn&#x27;t mean that it is original and non-obvious.  The Patent Office doesn&#x27;t actually have enough resources to do the job that has been set out for it.  The number of patent applications being submitted has increased exponentially over the years but the USPO staff hasn&#x27;t.  You might ask why they just don&#x27;t fail to grant a patent until they&#x27;ve examined it carefully.  Well, they used to do that but the backlog got big and Congress In Its Wisdom passed a law saying that they couldn&#x27;t have a backlog.  You might ask why they don&#x27;t raise filing fees and use the money to hire more workers.  Well, Congress In Its Wisdom has decided what the fees are and has also decided that the USPO can&#x27;t keep all the money it collects since there are needy people in many other Congressional districts.  So that&#x27;s where we are.<p>It would not surprise me in the least if many NVidia and AMD patents cover the same ideas in different language.  But just because AMD happens to have a patent on the technique they&#x27;re using doesn&#x27;t mean that NVidia can&#x27;t sue them with their own patent on that same technique.  Legally patents have a presumption validity behind them so courts are bound to assume the USPO gave them the sort of inspection the USPO is unable except in certain complicated cases.