A victory for the trolls

I guess you could illustrate the issue closer to home with something like recipe patents .. then open a restaurant, throw a party, or put together a recipe book that deals solely with infringed recipes. The temporal nature of food consumption seems sufficient to perhaps help illustrate the illusory nature around "intellectual property" patents.

What I find humorous in much of this is the almost deliberate taunting of the system. For example the Microsoft case a couple years ago against i4i (eye for an eye?) that claims infringement on an integrated XML editor in Microsoft Word but can't seem to even successfully use XML on their company website. And now Bedrock (Flinstone's reference?) that took some old patents from Bell Labs to try and cash in on a few foundational concepts in computing (funny how they reference Knuth 1973 - but nobody cries prior art.) Almost like suing a construction company for their use of a quarry.