The doodle patent is specific to changing the top of the page (in this case the logo) for users to see when some special occasion happens. It has prior art dating at least back to some 70s message boards.
Congress deals setback to patent officeAction by Congress to end this diversion of funds -- a heavy tax on innovation and job creation -- is long overdue.Congress has dealt a renewed blow to America's inventors and innovators by stripping another $100 million from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, an agency incapacitated by two decades of raids on the fees it collects.
Legislators siphoned the funds as part of the emergency spending bill drafted hastily to avert a shutdown of the government this month. The stopgap measure, which President Barack Obama signed into law Friday, cuts federal spending by $38 billion and quietly offset a fraction of that amount by draining more than $100 million in fee income from the patent office.
"They will be running on fumes," said former patent office director Q. Todd Dickinson, who now heads the American Intellectual Property Law Association, a Washington, D.C., trade group.
The patent office is meant to act as steward of the nation's newest technologies, granting protection to new ideas and products so their developers can commercialize them - and ultimately create jobs. The Harvard Business Review this year described the agency as the "biggest job creator you never heard of."
But beginning in the early 1990s, Congress got into a nearly two-decade habit of draining funds from the agency - which is structured to be self-supporting by charging fees without any taxpayer support - and using the funds to pay for other federal projects....