Patent law really sucks these days.  Unfortunately, the insanity that is our patent system doesn’t get a lot of publicity.  The major issue is companies are patenting everything they can to either sue everyone else or protect themselves from lawsuits.  Patents and copyrights are meant to encourage innovation, not be used to scare off competitors.

So explain how Amazon patenting customized 404 error pages deserves a patent?  The Supreme Court ruled over a year ago that eligible patents had to be novel and not "obvious" to people of "ordinary skill" in the related field.  Amazon couldn’t have invented customizing 404 error pages.  That technology already exists and is very easy to edit even for beginning web developers using several hosting tools.  Amazon’s patent seems to make the process more complicated than just using the basic server services, so really they’re just patenting a harder way of doing something everyone does already.

This also reminds me that most blogs (and websites) violate another patent, held by notorious patent troll firm Acacia.  Acacia controls a patent over the "posting a JPEG to a website."  That’s why I plan on switching completely to PNGs.

So if you see calls for my legal funds, you’ll know why.