Random Thoughts About Patents

Just randomly browsed the US patent office website and found that Microsoft has filed 1965 patents in just 7 months of 2007, that's an average of 9.35 patents/day. Some of the patents are kinda absurd, for example "Optical Mouse". Hmm, when did Microsoft invent optical mouse, that's interesting. And many other titles look funny too. After learning the story of the patent war between broadcom and qualcomm, it reconfirms my belief that there's something wrong with the patent legal system. With some many patents being filed everyday and the ridiculous broad range of their claims, the small companies will certainly violates some patents even if they can deliver a new product to the market. For the big companies, they can benefit from unreasonable royalties and create an unfair entry barrier. To conclude, I agree that innovations are valuable and the inventor should be awarded. However the current mechanism of awarding inventors through patents are not efficient and fair. The legislators and legal experts should work on creating a better system.