FWIW, the USPTO has some real problems, but the Japanese Patent Office
is much worse. It hasn't come to the forefront here because patents are
rarely litigated. It's mostly large companies cross-licensing.
One of my favorites was the Electronic Arts patent -- not that EA, they
are a Japanese company that makes web-filtering software. They filed in
late 2000 and were granted a patent last year for filtering web-sites
based on keywords or lists of URLs. Such commercial products were widely
available years before the filing date, but no one had filed for a
Japanese patent before that so it was granted.
Tim
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Tim Romero
Home: http://www.t3.org
Hairy Barbarian Blog: http://www.hairybarbarians.com
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Received on Mon Feb 6 04:26:05 2006