The US Patent System at its glorious best.....

From Techdirt....the US Patent System in its full glory....

This past Tuesday, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent on "a mobile entertainment and communication device." Reading the patent, you realize it describes the quite common smartphone. It's a patent for a mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files. The patent holding firm who has the rights to this patent wasted no time at all. At 12:01am Tuesday morning, it filed three separate lawsuits against just about everyone you can think of, including Apple, Nokia, RIM, Sprint, AT&T, HP, Motorola, Helio, HTC, Sony Ericsson, UTStarcomm, Samsung and a bunch of others.

Techdirt notes that this was despite demonstration of prior art immediately beforehand by Apple. Heck, there are even Nobel Prizes awarded for saying this all doesn't work!

Update - one of the Techdirt commenters makes the point that the original patent was filed in 1997, and this is a continuation of that. But there has to be some tests of validity (one of which, iirc, was that a patent has to defend an actual product build - does this apply here?). We were all imagining devices of the future in 1997 - heck, BT invented the concept of the world wide web some 10+ years before it came about, but this is a dangerous path to go down if we allow people with funds to "imagineer" and patent things that could be 10 years hence.