The U.S. Patent office is increasingly under fire for approving silly patents. Amazon.com claims a patent for it's one-click ordering system. A few years back, an individual claimed he held the patent on computer networking. Of course, there's the recent patent scuffle over Microsoft's use of plug-in technology in their browsers.
Patents are out of control... and so is the idea that everything has to be owned and hoarded for financial gain. What ever happened to sharing ideas anyway?
CD burning software developer Optima Technology has sued rival Roxio
and threatened any other company that allows users to record information
onto a CD-R.
Optima's claim centres on a patent the company filed by the company in
1995 and granted two years later.
Essentially, it describes the technique used by many CD burning apps
and utilities of creating an image of the disc in memory or on the hard
drive which appears to the user as a CD.
The virtual CD's contents can be updated at will, until the user is
ready to burn the contents onto the disc, at which point the information
can no longer be changed.