Patent Office Realizes It Never Should Have Granted SBC's Web Navigation Patent
from the funny-how-that-works dept
The Patent Office is really on a roll these days in realizing how badly it screwed up in the past, issuing patents that obviously never should have been approved. Of course, these always come years later after millions of dollars have been wasted. The latest is that they quietly rejected SBC’s web navigation patent. This was a patent that basically said they had invented the idea of having a consistent navigation element in a set of webpages — such as a frame or a navigation bar. Beyond being ridiculously obvious and in use by nearly ever website out there, there was also plenty of prior art on this idea. Of course, the Patent Office gets off with just a shrug. They don’t even seem to apologize for the bogus patents they grant that cause all sorts of trouble.
