The most foolish patent of the month. New competition from EFF

A month ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced a competition for the most foolish patent of the month , issued by the US Patent Office (USPTO). 30 days have passed - and the first winner was determined!

Last December, the USPTO issued patent number 8,609,915 for a "potent medicine" that "fights cancer, cancerous cells and kills cancer." From the description it follows that the "medicine" is also effective against many other diseases. What is this wonderful invention?

The magic medicine consists of "evening primrose oil, rice, sesame, green beans, coffee, meat, cheese, milk, green tea extract, primrose seeds and wine." As stated in the patent, "it works."

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the person who applied for such a patent, writes EFF, but how could an expert who is reviewing the documents approve it? In theory, an expert group should refuse applications, in accordance with a variety of established grounds for refusal, including uncertainty and lack of benefit.
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This application is suitable for many reasons for failure. The main one is the lack of evidence that the “drug” actually works. However, the current patent system is so inefficient that even doubts arise that the expert read this application at all. By the way, the "inventor" served time for fraud . At least it could be checked by searching in Google.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes: apart from the winning patent, other applicants for victory were not hard to find. According to EFF lawyers, all this clearly indicates the need for patent reform.

The EFF is intended to draw public attention to the problem of the quality of patents granted by official bodies. “We have seen the patent for “ email scanning ” , for “ bilateral and multilateral decision making ” . There are so many stupid patents that we singled out an individual employee in the EFF to eliminate them. We would like to compile a catalog of them all, but tens of thousands of low-quality software patents are issued every year, so we don’t have enough time and resources to solve this problem, ”writes EFF.

The first results of the competition showed that there are foolish patents not only in the software industry, but also in pharmacology, if the medicine from coffee and meat can generally be attributed to pharmacology.