Darn it. I was just about to suggest “be a patent troll” as a Munchkin-y thing to do.
Apparently, it’s really, really easy to get patents accepted, even on things that are very broad, that have been done before, are blindingly obvious, or are even things you don’t actually know how to make! The way things stand, you could probably get a patent for a Star Trek style teleporter with a few block diagrams and some fancy-sounding bullshit, and I’m dead serious about that. You know what one guy managed to patent? “Machine vision”—connecting a camera, any camera, to a computer. He first applied for the patent in 1954, but years later enforced variations of it against people who used bar code scanners. You can’t make a submarine patent any more, so patenting a Star Trek teleporter probably won’t make you any money, but people have indeed made money patenting things that were impractical when they were patented. For example, someone patented remote online backup services, then someone else bought the patent and started suing people trying to offer those services.
In general, because defending a lawsuit in the U.S. is expensive, there are people who manage to make quite a bit of money by threatening to sue people on shaky grounds and offering to settle for less than the cost to defend the case. (Many other countries discourage this kind of extortion by forcing a losing plaintiff to pay the defendant’s court costs, but that has a chilling effect on valid lawsuits as well as bogus ones.)
Darn it. I was just about to suggest “be a patent troll” as a Munchkin-y thing to do.
Apparently, it’s really, really easy to get patents accepted, even on things that are very broad, that have been done before, are blindingly obvious, or are even things you don’t actually know how to make! The way things stand, you could probably get a patent for a Star Trek style teleporter with a few block diagrams and some fancy-sounding bullshit, and I’m dead serious about that. You know what one guy managed to patent? “Machine vision”—connecting a camera, any camera, to a computer. He first applied for the patent in 1954, but years later enforced variations of it against people who used bar code scanners. You can’t make a submarine patent any more, so patenting a Star Trek teleporter probably won’t make you any money, but people have indeed made money patenting things that were impractical when they were patented. For example, someone patented remote online backup services, then someone else bought the patent and started suing people trying to offer those services.
In general, because defending a lawsuit in the U.S. is expensive, there are people who manage to make quite a bit of money by threatening to sue people on shaky grounds and offering to settle for less than the cost to defend the case. (Many other countries discourage this kind of extortion by forcing a losing plaintiff to pay the defendant’s court costs, but that has a chilling effect on valid lawsuits as well as bogus ones.)