>The only unique identifier for an aircraft across its lifecycle from production to end of life is a combination of the manufacturer, make and serial number.
>I know this because I am on (for better or worse) the patent that involves defining that as a unique identifier for aircraft.
Isn't that blindingly obvious? If so, how did it get to be a patent? And is someone now extracting rent from it?
Does it matter if something is obvious or not for getting a patent granted? From some casual looks of various US patents, it seems to be "First who writes a obtuse patent about thing X gets it granted", doesn't really matter if the thing is "novel" or not, just that no one tried to submit it before.
Legally it's supposed to matter, yes. Non-novel or obvious ideas are according to the law not eligible to be patented. In practice the mechanism to decide both of these is broken.
I see, that's really not visible in practice. Silly example perhaps, but US5443036A comes to mind which just shows how broken the system is:
> A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.
How on earth is anyone supposed to be able to take the patents system as a whole when there are 100s (if not 1000s) of examples like that, which obviously shouldn't be approved if "novel" or "non-obvious" ideas are required.
It's not just the technology, it's the employment of it too. In 1993 this was a new way to use lasers, which a decade before were too expensive, delicate and power hungry to use as such.
Put another way, the change can be incremental. Building upon what is. Without this, pretty much all incremental science would lose funding, for the moment you invent, regardless of cost, it'd just be copied.
If you've ever done hardware, even a toy, it's not simple.
Extensive prototypes, testing for drops, hand fit, assembly at the factory, and more.
Devs today can't even conceive of making a 100% stable product to be shipped on floppy and never updated. Reshipping for bugfixes could break a company in the old days.
Now try that with hardware!
And all those tweaks, fixes, tests can be copied in a second without patents.
I think separating software and hardware patent discussions would be better here, because hardware patents are requied.
> In 1993 this was a new way to use lasers, which a decade before were too expensive, delicate and power hungry to use as such.
I think your timescale is slightly off, but I don't know enough about laser history to say definitely. But judging by what I could find, in 1981 Popular Science seems to have run an ad for laser pointer devices, aimed (no pun intended) towards consumers:
> It wasn’t until the 1980s that lasers became small enough, and required so little energy, that they finally became cheap enough to be used in consumer electronics — take this funky laser pointer from the early 1980s, for example. The November 1981 edition of Popular Science features a Lasers Unlimited advertisement for an assortment of laser pointing devices, including a ruby laser ray gun, a visible red laser lightgun, multi-color lasers and laser light shows, all of which were selling for less than $15 (equivalent to about $42 today) - https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/a-dazzling-history-of-th...
So if they became usable but consumers in 1980s, I'm about 99% confident at least one individual used it for playing with their cats.
But since the author of the patent just happened to have spent the time (10 years later) to write the patent, they got it awarded to them.
The US patent system seems profoundly broken. Given that the patent system seems much less broken in other developed countries and the vast wealth and resources of the US, I assume it is broken on purpose?
Obviously it doesn't actually work. I submitted the application as an experiment to see how hard it would be to sneak this past the patent office. The answer turns out to be: not hard at all. In fact, there's pretty much an algorithm for it:
1. Write up a half-assed patent application.
2. Submit it and wait for it to be rejected (which it almost certainly will be).
3. Read the rejection notice and tweak the application to address every individual point that was made.
4. Go to step 2. Repeat until the patent office capitulates and issues your patent.
In my experience (my name is on six patents) has never been necessary to do more than one iteration.
The reason this works is that the patent office is required by law to give specific reasons for rejecting a patent application. They are not allowed to simply say, "This is obviously stupid." If they see that you are going to persist, it's a lot easier for them to just give you the damn patent (it's no skin off their nose) than to keep doing your homework for you.
With AI, following this procedure becomes borderline trivial. In fact, I'm a little surprised that the patent office isn't being overwhelmed by AI-generated patent applications. (Or maybe they are and it just hasn't made it into my news feed.)
My understanding is that quantum entanglement can't be used to transmit information. Given this fact and the fact that Einstein started out as a patent clerk, the great man must be turning in his grave!
I thought I would have to disguise the bogosity under some plausible-sounding pseudo-science, and to be fair, it's actually quite tricky to figure out why my invention doesn't work (though the fact that it doesn't work, and can't possibly work, should be pretty obvious to a patent examiner). But at this point I think I could probably get a patent for summoning dragons to slay my enemies. (Hm, there's an idea...)
Isn't that blindingly obvious? If so, how did it get to be a patent? And is someone now extracting rent from it?