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I think there are 2 main problems here.

1) Patenting obvious stuff / stuff with prior art. "X, but on the internet"

2) Patenting stuff with no intention of releasing a product.

I see a lot of talk about the former and not enough about the latter. My question is this, could we put a time limit on releasing a product once a patent is awarded? Is it normal in other industries to patent something as soon as possible or do they wait until a product is ready to be released? What would be an acceptable time limit? In this case, the patent was issued in May 2007, 4 years ago. Is it reasonable for the inventor to not have a product using this on the market yet?




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