The recent furor over the issuing of the patent to Steven Olson for his "Methof of swinging on a swing" interested me a lot.
The patent was completely absurd and was almost definitely a joke. But it set people off in many a strange way. Invariably people complained about the US Patents office for issuing the patent. This, to me, is the interesting bit.



When you take out a patent it gives you grounds to sue someone who tries to use your invention without prior consent. The person being sued, however, may counter-sue if they believe the invention existed prior to the patent. So we have lots of sueing going on. So now Mr. Olson can try to sue someone who swings sideways on a swing. And he will lose. We all know this. So now it comes time to apportion blame for allowing such a stupid thing to happen (because that's what we do, isn't it?).



Should we blame the Patents office for issuing a dumb patent? Well, they make money out of it. The Patent didn't already exist, which is a cheap check to make for them, and they
are not responsible for how the patent is used once it is issued. So it would appear that they really have no responsibility for the stupidy or otherwise of the patents being issued. Blaming them is a bit like blaming the car salesman for selling the fast car to a young driver who promptly kills a family of four.



So, should we blame Mr. Olson? Obviously he decided to have a joke and got some publicity for his pains. This reminds me of someone buying DVDs and then, while leaving the store yelling "I don't have a DVD player. Hah! I can't even play these! How stupid are you for selling them to me!?!"
But in this case we have a crowd of people out the front yelling "How stupid is this shop, it sells DVDs to people who don't have players!!"



Which means we've sort run out of people to blame. Unless we want to blame ourselves for missing the joke......