Losing patience with Patents - Flickr patents Interestingness?

A note on Helen Keegan's Musings of a Mobile Marketeer blog today linking to Alfie's Blog about Flickr trying to patent "Interestingness" resonated with me.

(The patent was published on 26 October and is here for those who wish to read it...).

I had spent part of the afternoon looking at various broadband media patents, and was left with a feeling of complete disbelief at what is allowed. It seems that anything, no matter how obvious, is now patentable.

Now I understand that some of the technology is fairly complex, but much of what I was reading about today was just completely basic. For example, I saw patents for having a side and top bar on a TV screen for showing interactive rich media navigation - filed in the US in 2005 - heck, I saw stuff like this 10 years ago!

The thing is, its easy to guess at a high level what can be done well in advance of it actually being technically feasible. How can anyone start a company with a bright new idea if somebody has been allowed to patent the overall concept long before its do-able, and is sitting on it somewhere.

(note to self...must look at the patents around YouTube's approach - people were certainly talking about video over IP at least 10 years ago )

Anyway, taking Flickr's patent for example - essentially they are arguing that stuff can be ranked in accordance with a new metric - "Interestingness" - which is based on crunching a bunch of old metrics. There is no reference to prior art, which is astounding considering that this is pretty much what everyone who is doing analytics on social network metadata for ratings is doing - chucking the same basic algorithms at the same basic parameters, using the same basic system architectures.

Now, I am sure Flickr has some tweaks to the algorithms, metrics and weightings etc thats are its' and its' alone, but the definition of the approach in the Patent is so broad, and so flexible, that it can mean pretty much anything you want it to.

Helen suspects it may just be patenting the right to use the term "Interestingness" for the output - its not clear from the patent, but I suspect if that were the case a Trademark would do.

But if so, must I patent the use of the words Serendipityness and Entertainingness therefore? Is the English language going to be privatised too, as well as our DNA?

By the way, there is also a related patent on the concept of searching organised metadata and ranking stuff - astounding, whoever would have thought of that? (Well, loads of people actually....but no prior art is quoted)

I like Flickr as a service, but its not just me who thinks this is off.....quick search on the 'Net reveals that its been picked up by Boing Boing, digg et al

Now there is quite a movement supporting Net Neutrality (check out some videos on dabble.com, but I wonder if the Internet also needs a movement supporting Protection from Predatory Patent Proliferation.