The US Patent Office just (in 2017!) awarded IBM a patent over out-of-office email
No, it didn’t.
(Disclaimer: I am a patent attorney - but I am not IBM’s patent attorney, I’ve had no role in this patent, and the first time I encountered any of this was 10 minutes ago in this BB post.)
Here’s the part of the independent claim that you missed:
in response to said determining that the current date is PRIOR TO the start date … attaching the extracted availability indicator metadata to the e-mail…
In other words:
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I tell my computer I’m going to be gone from, let’s say, March 15th through March 22nd.
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Someone emails me on March 3rd.
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In an outgoing reply to that message, my email client automatically attaches a notification like: “Please be advised that I will be out of the office from March 15th to March 22nd.”
This is a future-looking out-of-office notification. Do computers typically do that in 2017? No, they don’t. They notify you of the CURRENT out-of-office period, but not a future out-of-office period.
You may think that’s a trivial improvement, and that the patent system should not be awarding patents for very small incremental improvements like that. We can certainly have that discussion - but that’s a different assertion than “the patent office (in 2017!) issued a patent over out-of-office email notifications.” Because that’s not what the patent office did in this case.
Now, it’s true that the misunderstanding over the scope of this patent is partly because it’s poorly written: the specification provides very little help in determining the important part of the claim, what’s actually novel and significant. Many applicants, including IBM, have a terrible habit of writing their patents with no context and minimal explanation. They absolutely shouldn’t write them that way, I agree. These obfuscated and lazy patent-drafting practices harm the patent system and the public, I agree.
(And I don’t write my patents that way. My patents read: “Here is a conventional technique for solving a problem. Here are some disadvantages to that technique. Here is an alternative way of solving that problem, and here are the advantages of solving it that way.” That’s how practically every patent should present practically every invention.)
But it’s ALSO true that critics of the patent system, including the EFF, have a terrible habit of either failing to understand patents or intentionally mischaracterizing them, and therefore lying about the patent system with “look at this travesty” types of posts.
Stop doing that.
