I think every tech corporation is currently the antichrist and tries to patent way too generic things. You know it's ugly as hell when it's this sketchy and Google jumped head first into it (given that they're kind of the benchmark for the "ethical" corporation.) Of course, they lost the bidding war for Nortel's patents and have since had some blog posts knocking the patent war- go figure.
The This American Life episode about it really put it into perspective-- that patents were meant to protect novel inventions and that the patent system did NOT scale up to the tech boom in healthy way. It was not built to handle the influx in "innovation" (which is not really a criticism, I wouldn't expect anyone with power to predict what would happen in the last half of the 20th century.) There were some signs, but the exploitation of the system through intense litigation is now getting ridiculously ugly, now that Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. are trying to do what "small time" patent trolls have been doing for the past 20 years or so.
word of mouth through various redditors, if they can be trusted, is that a lot of this has to do with the patent officers being overworked, under qualified, and under staffed...so all kinds of gibberish shit gets through and then litigated. The judges themselves probably don't even have time to read this stuff, let alone the requisite knowledge to cut through the bullshit jargon in every patent. So, instead, lawyers probably just present the cases by picking out a few choice sentences in some random patent to make it appear like there's infringement happening and judges probably judge it on more arbitrary terms than they even realize.
shit's fucked and hopefully this will lead to patent reform, rather than some bleak future where nobody can create anything because Apple and MS jointly own every fucking patent for everything computer related.
