Amazon and Wile E Coyote

OK let’s look at what Patents are in the REAL WORLD.

Space-X is currently building rockets that will soon be landing routinely on boats and other platforms, allowing them to re-use their rockets and HUGELY reduce the cost of space access. This will revolutionize space access as much as much as building an airplane that can be re-used would revolutionize air travel if we were currently throwing airplanes away after a single use.

The planning, engineering, testing, building, failing, re-designing, re-building, re-testing, and all around genius, work, and attention to detail that have to go into this is simply beyond description.

And, so far, Space-X is making huge strides, and is now within mere moments of succeeding. Here is a recent test:

Now, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com is trying to do the same thing. What does HE have?
The answer, THIS, a PATENT:

Does this look familiar?
You have seen it before. This is the same level of detail that Wile E Coyote used to plan his capture of the Road-Runner in Saturday morning cartoons for children. Really: How much better is the Amazon.com patent than the Wile-E-Coyote blueprint? What is the difference between them?

Seriously. Compare Amazons’ PATENT to Space-X’s ROCKET.

And, according to the United States Patent Office, Amazon.can can SUE Space-X… because Amazon dew a picture basically taken out of a Wile-E-Coyote cartoon, while Space-X actually BUILT something.

This is absolutely typical of the absolute INSANITY of the United States Patent System: The shocking, shocking, SHOCKING incompetence of the United States Patent Office results in their spewing out non-sensical, cartoonish patents by the thousands… and those that have their cartoons of something happening then proceed to SUE anyone that actually BUILDS something.

Check out this far-worse-than laughable picture coming out of BOEING for a (wait for it) LASER NUCLEAR JET ENGINE!

OK, so Boeing drew a shockingly vague, crude image of a LASER NUCLEAR JET ENGINE that looks like it was drawn by Beavis and Butt-head.

So what?

Why should we care?

Here is why:

Let’s say that 10 years from now, nuclear fusion really starts working, and Elon Musk, Pratt and Whitney, or some other incredible institution decides to actually put in the billions of dollars and thousands of man-years of work needed to actually make this incredible engine a reality. What happens if they actually succeed in BUILDING such an incredible device? Well, the Boeing lawyers are going to be there, crude drawing in hand with a PATENT number on it, claiming that they OWN the idea.

Now, if Elon Musk or Pratt and Whitney is actually considering BUILDING such an incredible engine, knowing that the reward for actually SUCCEEDING will be a lawsuit from Boeing as soon as the first engine flies, are they MORE or LESS likely to actually build this engine?

In other words, does the patent ENABLE innovation or DESTROY it?

And we see this in the computer world, constantly. I, myself, am currently being sued by a company called Uniloc for USING THE GOOGLE-PLAY STORE.