Pointless Patents

I did try a patent once, just to see what happened. My observations were that a patent almost never belongs to the inventor, as such a person never has enough money or autonomy to be able take out a patent. If anyone ever achieves this they do, they have to exploit it, and defend it.

I noted also that large research companies typically take out huge numbers of patents on the most apparently trivial "inventions" just in case one of them might bring in some value. The check for prior art also doesn't seem to be particularly rigorous, probably because of the massive volume of these patents coming in all the time. The patent concept is a good one in principle, but it is the tendency of humankind to corrupt any good thing that has dominated. The MS patent looks like just part of the patent diorrhea.

If this is true, it just confirms 2 things to me:

1. How corrupt and bereft of any value the entire patenting system is, and has been for many years now. Do you wonder why the likes of China, and most of the rest of us in the rest of the world simply pirate stuff now? But why does the USA support patents? Because you do not produce and export goods anymore, so you need royalties and patents in software and medicine etc to try in vain to prop up your economy and help pay for your immense debt and military forays. The business and economic aspects to the Great American Dream are bankrupt, and now so is America. Your housing crisis, stock market woes, and forced bail-out of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac are no more than symptoms of this. It does not take a genius to see this: its blindingly obvious. In a nutshell the wealth that the USA gained from the 2nd World War has run out.

2. Microsoft's strategic business philosophy of screwing money from everywhere it can, by whatever means it can. This great capitalist dinosaur, whose old leader rightly said that 'Linux is Un-American', is a dying part of a dying system. That system, capitalism, is based on supposedly open competition but in fact has led to the subversion of freedom, commercial viability based on obfuscation (partly stripped away by the internet), greed, and propping up the established and the rich via patents and royalties at the expense of everyone else.

An element of absurdity is a solid fundament of a funny joke. Unfortunately, if the absurdity became a reality then...
Anyway, the "'Page Up' and 'Page Down' keystrokes" Patent can be viewed at US Goverment's website:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL...

This is worse than Amazon's one-click-checkout. Who's gonna be the first to patent how to pinch a turd?