Software Writers Patently Enraged

[Markus Kuhn]

After reading

  http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51689,00.html

I wonder, why US companies who suffer substantial legal claims from
defending themselves against ridiculous patent claims don't try to sue
the US Patent Office for damages?

Has this been tried?

It sounds to me, like going to court against the Patent Office and suing
them for unfairly disrupting business by issuing such patents might have
far better long-term effects than wasting money on defending against
just yet another single patent. It might even help to correct the
incentives of and pressures on patent examiners, who currently face far
more trouble when they want to reject a patent, but can't find quickly a
prior-art literature reference that documents that an ideas is clearly
fairly obvious. You just have to find a good lawyer who is willing to
slaughter the very cow (i.e., Patent Office) that is otherwise his or
her best source of milk.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>