Joel Kills a Patent

2013-07-22 10:32 ☼ post

Joel Spolsky: Killing patents with Ask Patents

My dream is that when big companies hear about how friggin’ easy it is to block a patent application, they’ll use Ask Patents to start messing with their competitors. How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt. Wouldn’t that be something!

Along those lines, companies should start giving rewards for contributing to a blocked patent application.