Yes, indeed, anyone who wishes to compete for all the fabulous wealth I'm making off the GripeLog is more than welcome to do so. But pretend for a moment I actually wanted to stop someone from "stealing" my idea. What legal recourse would I have?

Well, if you actually ripped off my material, or called yourself the GripeLog or the GripeLine, I would certainly have a chance of making a case against you under copyright law. But if you just did an online computer gripes website of your own -- and some people already have, and some of them are pretty good, as a matter of fact -- copyright law would give me no claim on you. And that's obviously the way it should be.

But the way patent law works now, I conceivably could have an Internet business method patent on the very concept of people posting their gripes about technology products. (The fact that this business method doesn't have a viable business model behind it wouldn't count against me.) Since I haven't applied for such a patent, someone else could file for it tomorrow. And given all the extremely inane patents that have been granted in recent years -- NTP's patents being not even close to the worst -- it's possible they'd succeed. Once they had it, they could easily drive me out of this lucrative business.

That is the way patent law is being interpreted by the courts these days. By the way, as pointed out in this Slate article, we can attribute this plight to a case of "judicial activism" run amok. So if the judge in the Blackberry case does shut them down, it is only another step in our judicial system's march toward the supremacy of intellectual property over all other considerations.

Ed Foster

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