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Comment by ktizo | Hacker News Reader

Could you automate a patent troll using a variation on the SCIgen software and effectively ddos the entire patent office with nonsensical gibberish?

Am I bad for thinking of such things? ;)

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No, but you can write nonsense claims (stuff that's obviously way too broad, and already in common use, or just plain silly) and publicize it if they are accepted.

I guess the problem is you need to pay a significant amount of money to file a claim. Interestingly, some have advocated the same method for preventing spam in email by requiring you to pay a very small amount every time you send one.

Yes, that's one of the oldest and most useless proposals that gets brought up by at least 5 people in every single discussion of email spam...

Which just happened to work well for the closest thing email has to a replacement. Text Messages. Think about this for a second, just about anyone can send you a text at any time using your public phone number yet it's not a problem.

Not a problem? Google for "text message spam".

Now think a second about the useful things emails are used for which text messages generally can't be: notifications for new releases of OSS projects or replies to a blog comment, mailing lists for OSS developers or hobbies...

I think you might actually be able to make some money with a program that searched expired computer-related patents for ideas which could be repatented for mobile devices instead of computers in general.

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