Just today it came to my attention that the GNOME Foundation, a non-profit free software governing foundation, has been approached by what seems to be a patent troll trying to squeeze money out of the non for profit GNOME foundation over a patent, which can only be laughed at. Here is the information that the GNOME foundation gave:
https://www.gnome.org/news/2019/09/gnome-foundation-facing-lawsuit-from-rothschild-patent-imaging/
Looking at the linked patent claim you really need to be seated safely or you will loose it completely laughing! This is so lame! They are indeed trying to claim a wireless image transfer of a digital image to be an invention. Seriously? Even in 2009, when the patent was first filed, this was already a standard in mobile phones, to transfer pictures via Bluetooth from phone to PC or phone to phone.
It is not the first time that an ominous company starting with „Rothschild“ runs around claiming a trivial idea as a patent. Rothschild Connected Devices LLC has been awarded the „stupid patent of the month“ by the EFF and was mentioned in the Washington Post in 2015 among the four most ridiculous software patents:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/12/14/the-4-worst-patents-of-2015/
This time it is Rotschild Imaging LLC – go figure.
This case again clearly shows how ridiculous software patents are. In many (most even) cases the invention is shallow and almost trivial, like in this case. The claims are so broad that they cover way more than the initial intent. And finally these are very often never implemented and get filed with no intent of implementation from their initial inventors – they just get filed in order to own one more patent for the patent wars, another weapon in the arsenal to either fight back patent claims from others or to troll competitors or to simply make money from trivia.
This must stop!
So please help educating people about the total disaster these software patents are. Advocate for pushing back and to help legislators understand the bigger issue of idea patents, because this is basically what software patents are, patents on ideas. Not only free software is massively endangered by this patent systems but society is as well! If ideas start to get patented we loose the ability to teach, learn and to invent new things based on this patented knowledge. This system has been perverted into a money printing machine where organizations with no engineers and no intention to ever implement and use an invention try to make big money. This is not what the patent system was intended for, this is a perversion.