We (U.S. citizens) do, and we should be telling our congresscritters that this has to stop.

How about the business model of filing an idiotically general patent, suing a new entrant to your market before they have millions of dollars to defend themselves in court, sucking their coffers dry and driving them out of the market, thus ensuring your market position?

________ with a touch interface! Patent awarded!

You mean continue talking to the guys that routinely ignore their constituents, lie to us in the face of obvious factual contradictions, and only listen to those throwing hookers, bags of cash, and coke at them?

That's worked so well so far, hasn't it?

The definition of insanity comes to mind.

Toss all incumbents out. Demand term limits. Eliminate career politicians.

Strat

And what is wrong with hating the hateful player that plays the hateful game? Apple has gone out of its way to make itself perfectly hateful so I for one must comply.

Okay, so your soon-to-be congress-woman candidate gets elected and becomes a real congress-woman

What she agrees to do now?

I mean, what can you expect _anyone_ in the Congress to do, while the USPO is protected by corporations, patent trolls, and the lawyer union?

Be careful what you wish for -- there's no reason to expect that the replacement politicians would be any less corrupt than the current ones, and every reason to expect that none of them would know what the hell they were doing for the first year of their first term in office. The result would be a completely dysfunctional government after every election.

The goal shouldn't simply be to have new representatives, the goal should be to have good representatives. And the way to get good representatives is to change the electoral system so that the path to getting elected isn't "raise the most money", but rather "best represent the views of the largest number of constituents". Only then will have you have politicians who are motivated to listen to people rather than to money.

Because of course anyone who replaces them will spring from the forehead of Athena, walk on water then turn it into wine, poop vanilla ice cream, and give us all sweet fuzzy kittens to make us happy when we're sad.

Why not try to create a better informed electorate? One which understands that software patents deter competition and stifle innovation.

And I'm sorry, they're suing *Microsoft* for anti-competitive business practices? How is this not the definition of an antitrust situation?

Many of us do... the problem is the other "legal personhoods" speak louder and more frequently and with more money.

Indeed. Imagine somebody patenting the steering wheel of a car, or the order of the pedals, or the order of the gears. That would be ridiculous. You'd never be able to switch brands of car.

Now besides USER-interfaces, I think actually that one should not be able to patent interfaces in general. Because any patent in this area will block interoperability and, as a result, innovation.

If only we should be so lucky.

But what about the rest of us?