America's Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted a patent to Tableau (Salesforce's visual analytics platform) — for a patent covering "Data Processing For Visualizing Hierarchical Data^___^

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[–] Steve@communick.news 20 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It's kind of a given that people are going to try to get patents for stupid things they obviously shouldn't. It's the whole job of the patent office to decline such requests. If people only ever applied for good and reasonable patents, then approval could be automatic. It's not, only because they need to filter out the bad ones.

The real problem here is that the patent was granted. It seems dumb to apply for it. But how dumb is it, if applications like this actually get approved?

[–] irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone 17 points 3 days ago

Unfortunately, the current state of the patent office is extremely understaffed and mostly nontechnical. So, there's not enough qualified examiners to examine patents, not just in software, but medical devices, voting machines, and lots of other industries. So essentially if a patent is submitted by a major company, it just gets rubber stamped. And it's up to the courts to sort it out. Unfortunately that sorting out is biased and understaffed, too, so usually the initial case will go to the patent holder by default and it's not until an appeal or two on those biases and technical misinterpretations that it can be invalidated. So it's rare for a smaller company to be able to spend that much money to invalidate an obvious idea like this. Of course this is by design to give large corporations an unfair advantage. If they want some tech, they just sue for a stupid patent, wait until the company either folds and then they can steal it legally, or goes bankrupt fighting it and they can acquire them hostilely.