Patents fucking suck
From this article entitled Staking a claim in the patent gold mine:
Another company that could benefit from lucrative license fees is Picture Marketing Inc., which says it holds a patent for embedding photos in electronic messages sent for marketing purposes. The company, which has retained a former Microsoft attorney to represent it, will seek to collect royalties from companies that send (or have been sending) advertising e-mails that contain pictures. The patent was obtained in the late 1990s.
I used to be reasonable about intellectual property laws. Now I realized: intellectual property laws have their weaknesses which I believe any narrative about commercial creativity should include. What we should really be fixing is our government’s seeming fixation on handing out the silliest patents possible so that jerks like this can make millions in the name of so-called innovation.
Hey, has anyone patented linking to dynamically generated photos from within a temporal-linear textual content management system?
UPDATE: Just found this article about fixing the broken patent system by allowing for patents to be challenged.