Is US patent law completely broken?

[Argo]

http://www.wapatents.com/2009/07/who-is-big-baboon-inc.html

How can a company patent:

[a]n automated end-to-end business process for product sales that uses a relational database management system, the process comprising the steps of:

a first user inputting a customer payment record to the database ...;

automatically generating a customer invoice;

a second user inputting customer payment record to the database ...;

automatically determining a status of the customer payment ...; and

during each of the foregoing inputting steps, qualifying user inputs using experiential constraints, based on the then-current state of the database as a whole

WTF? If that's a true patent, then pretty much every company in the world is in violation. What's next, somebody going to patent "ability to type things into a computer using a device named keyboard in an effort to make computer perform certain action"

 

[MovingTarget]

Steamboat Willie should've been public domain ages ago...

 

[bas1c]

It's as wtf as the company that sued Microsoft for violating their patent. Which, if I remember correctly, amounted to a patent on an editor that edits XML.

 

[DanFungus]

6,115,690 and 6,343,275 are two patent numbers, not the number of patents that company has

 

[l0cke]

Yes, Amazon was denied their patent for 1-click buying, but then the resubmitted it and changed 1 word and it was accepted.

The new guy in charge is trying to change stuff, good luck.

 

[Argo]

6,115,690 and 6,343,275 are two patent numbers, not the number of patents that company has

Oops. Reading fail

 

[IAteYourMother]

6,115,690 and 6,343,275 are two patent numbers, not the number of patents that company has

OP fail.

 

[arrfep]

There's been an ongoing battle with this kind of stuff in the Event Photography business. Apparently, some guy patented the process of photographing an event, then uploading the images to a website to sell. This is essentially the exact description of most any modern event photog's MO. He's been suing people on a fairly regular basis, IIRC. Seems pretty bogus.