Most airlines generate pilot and flight attendant schedules on a monthly basis. For decades, my wife and I competed on the basis of company seniority for the next month’s “lines of flying” with 80-100 other pilots.
In the “good old days”, this process was done manually (3 x 5 cards, cutting the lines into strips, etc.), and could easily take 6-8 hours to complete, not counting the 5 AM trip to the airport on the day the bids closed. (My wife and I bid to have all our days off together.)
A talented young copilot (he and his wife were software engineers) created a program to do this. It took him over 6 months of constant work to get it debugged and running.
What a great deal - It cost us $100 and ran on my IBM 386. After that, every month, we simply downloaded the company schedules. Then, after we inserted the parameters we wanted, his program gave us the answers - the entire process took less than 20 minutes.
After a year of struggle, and over $20,000 invested, he broke even. He was sued by a do-nothing sharpshooter - the lawyers said “He thought of this first; that means you stole it from him.” The battle raged over the next three years; the end result: Although he finally “won” his case, he lost over $40,000 in legal fees. The slimebag paid nothing - his lawyer had taken the case on a contingency basis. Because of continuing legal threats, the project was finally abandoned. Sad.
The Patent and Trademark office doesn’t do much research looking for prior art before issuing patents. Several years ago they gave Roger Billings a patent on networking. IBM and Xerox had been networking for years before that but PTO ignored that little fact. The courts finally invalidated the patent. Google is likely talking about such patents, and they can probably show prior art when required.
The Congress has gotten so far afield with encroaching on the rights of the states and the people, that it's hard to visualize Congress deciding not doing something that the Constitution explicitly authorizes . . .
- Article 1 Section 8.
- The Congress shall have power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries . . .
The issue you describe is the reason for patents. The guy that wrote the software should should have gotten a patent. But the bigger issue is why we need tort reform in this nation. We should go to a loser pay system and make it harder to sue people. This guy never would have filed if he was at risk of paying the other guys attorney fees.