Some years ago, a collegue of mine asked me how I would stop music pirating.  I haven't thought about the problem before but it took me only a minute to decide P2P spoofing was the best intermediate answer.  It was obvious that traditional DRM wouldn't work and spoofing attacked the problem at reasonable cost, could be deployed fast, and adapt to changes in real time.  My collegue nodded and that was that.

According to Wired, someone had the exact same idea and filed a patent in 2000.  Now I am scratching my head.  Is this a silly patent or not?  Should I be filing patents on similar ideas?  Heck, I can pump out enough ideas like that everyday to keep an army of patent lawyers busy if someone would just keep throwing problems at me and file my answers as patents.  I even have ideas on how to efficiently generate new patents.  Maybe I'll even best IBM at the game.

If you are an idle patent lawyer, come to me and I'll keep you busy.  How does 50-50 sound?  Filing cost?  No problem.  Let private investors place 'bets' on the patent applications they like out of daily streams of patent applications.  Together we'll worsen the patent problem ten-fold within a year and force the Congress to come up with a better solution.  Now that's a silver-spoon full of patriotism for ya.  🙂