WHY IBM'S KAPPOS IS UNFIT TO BE NEXT PTO DIRECTOR

I am totally opposed to Kappos being appointed as the next PTO Director, for his involvement in multiple IBM efforts over the last ten years to undermine any attempts to improve patent quality. It would be a horrible message to send to inventors to have a lawyer from the most abusive patent playing company, IBM, as head of the PTO. One reason the PTO's backlog is so great is that companies such as IBM flood the PTO with tons of crappy patent applications, to jam up the system making it hard for competitors to get patents that could challenge IBM's markets. Anyone forget IBM's airplane-bathroom-reservation patent? I also post this classic 1997 article from Business Week that pretty much describes how IBM invented trollism (shaking down companies by asserting lots of crappy patents, and some good ones, from their massive portfolio). IBM was a major player in the Software Patent Institute scam (a 1990s effort to deflect any resources from a serious attempt to improve prior art handling at the PTO), and is a major player in the SPI's child, the 2000s scam otherwise known as the Public Patent Peer Review project. For many of these undermining efforts, Kappos was involved. He should not be awarded Directorship of the PTO. Slashdot this week has a summary of criticisms of IBM's attempts to get U.S. bailout money so it can fire U.S. workers and move more of its jobs overseas. "As his company was striving to hide the bodies of its laid off North American workers, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano stood beside president Obama and waxed patriotic: 'We need to reignite growth in our country.', Palmisano said. 'We need to undertake projects that actually will create jobs." While Sam positions IBM to get a slice of the $825 billion stimulus pie, IBM is quietly cutting thousands of jobs and refusing to release the numbers or locations." The country deserves someone coming from some other company to be the next PTO Director, if the next choice is a corporate one. Kappos is a much smarter version of Jon Dudas, and will be as effective, if not more, in overseeing the further degradation of PTO capabilities with regards to patent examination (which again, is in IBM's interests). So everyone, make copies of the BusinessWeek article below, and send it to your Congressional representatives, asking them to not allow any lawyers from IBM to become the next Director of the PTO.