Sunday, July 17, 2011

This is Broken.

Broken: the USA's patent system. The patent office is overwhelmed with new claims and rubber stamps them if the paperwork is in order, regardless of merit. The courts would rather defer to the US patent office than overturn a granted patent. This leads to companies doing things like patenting digital messaging and then trying to profit by suing everyone who has a middling-deep pocket who does anything involving computers.

Broken: cell phone company customer service. If you have to take your cell phone company to court to get an itemized bill, and they show up in court and say they are right because they trust their own billing computers, then the whole thing is just begging to be destroyed by a class-action suit based on common business practices.

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