Quick, patent something technological!
Apparently, the U.S. Patent Office is simply approving anything relating to computers that it doesn’t understand. TechDirt is reporting that Carfax has somehow managed to patent the idea of a database search for a ‘clean car title.’ As the article accurately points out, a clean title search is nothing more than a database search for a particular boolean variable, namely that which indicates whether or not the car has a clean title. If this is patentable, it means that pretty much any particular database query is patentable, which is kind of a scary thought in terms of free-market competition on the web.
There’s an ancient Chinese curse that goes something like ‘May you live in interesting times.’ When it comes to online patent and copyright law, we sure do.
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