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Comment by Too | Hacker News Reader

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Too·

> combination of the manufacturer, make and serial number.

> patent that involves defining that as a unique identifier for aircraft.

Now i got mighty curious what makes this novel enough to be a patent.

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Go work at a big company. The patent lawyers come around and ask what you've been working on, and a month or two later, your name's on 10 patents, none of which make any sense whatsoever. If you're very lucky you might get a dollar bill for each.

For a while at google you would get $5k per patent submission and $10k for each approved(?) one. Given how easy it was, I could have matched my annual salary. It's depressing how easy it is to get a system architecture (unimplemented) patented at bigco.

When I was at Microsoft, years ago, it took more effort to avoid having my name end up on a patent than I'd have had to exert if I'd actually wanted one.

You burrow this simple idea in pages and pages of obfuscated tedium, and that's good enough that everyone is happy. Patent office gets their fee, lawyers get paid, company can say it has a supercharged patented innovation.

It's a unique identifier but now "not on a computer".

I was wondering the same thing. I've had to derive unique identifiers from hundreds of different data sets over the years. What makes it special when it's a plane?

>> it’s on a plane.

Exactly this. The domain space and a couple of good lawyers makes it patentable today.

Maybe its right-click level of patent.

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