http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/appxl_35... http://www.hbci.com/~wenonah/new/tesla.htm http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/Our_Company/history/georg... That jealous old Edison would have destroyed our dear Nikola Tesla were it not for US Patent System and the economic incentive that would motivate men like Westinghouse to (effectively) underwrite his creative efforts. I fully agree that in certain domains the system is really broken: It is frankly deeply obscene that a corporation can "patent" naturally occurring phenomena e.g genes; and it is getting quite rare to see a "Software" patent that is not brain-dead obvious. What is broken in the USPTO is the fact that our government can not (or will not) effectively staff the USPTO so that no-longer-overloaded examiners do not routinely award patents and throw the buck at the court system. Naturally, this delegates a technical matter to a sub-system (courts and your fellow American in the jury box) that is completely unqualified to sit in judgment regarding the "merit" of the patent. If USPTO stops issuing bogus patents and hope for just resolution in the court system, then silly patents for entirely obvious matter -- streaming content over the network, doh! -- would never even make it past the filing stage. I wonder what is the angle behind the Economist playing dumb, but there is far more to this subject than simply "robber barons".