Evil Software Patents
This is NOT funny. Google has just this month received a patent on “highlighting matches to search terms in retrieved documents”.
How could this even happen? One of the criteria for a patent is supposed to be that an idea is non-obvious. There are plenty of RDF tools that could be considered to be covered by this.
There is no longer any justification, in my mind, for a 20-year patent (what business plan goes out more than 5 years, anyway?). And I’m seriously thinking of joining the camp that says all patents are worthless.
The point of a patent is that if you invent something, you, rather than some copycat, get to make money off of it. The problem is that in today’s world, you don’t - either you spend all your time and money in monitoring and litigation, or you use it as a weapon against competitors.
This patent should never have been granted. I personally had prior art in 1991, nine years before the patent was even filed. And I was still in high school at the time!