Whatever happened to "reduction to practice"?

[mdlbear]

Anyone who believes that the US patent system is not completely broken needs to take a look at United States Patent 6,960,975: Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state.

A space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state is provided comprising a hollow superconductive shield, an inner shield, a power source, a support structure, upper and lower means for generating an electromagnetic field, and a flux modulation controller. A cooled hollow superconductive shield is energized by an electromagnetic field resulting in the quantized vortices of lattice ions projecting a gravitomagnetic field that forms a spacetime curvature anomaly outside the space vehicle. The spacetime curvature imbalance, the spacetime curvature being the same as gravity, provides for the space vehicle's propulsion. The space vehicle, surrounded by the spacetime anomaly, may move at a speed approaching the light-speed characteristic for the modified locale.

I would like to point out that this is an issued patent, not merely a published application, and that the application was filed March 14, 2005 -- which is amazingly fast work for the US patent office.

(From Slashdot)

Comments

[jslove.livejournal.com]

There is one good thing about this patent.

Patents, unlike the way copyright seems to be going, have a fixed term. 17 years from now, this will be in the public domain. Do you think this will be reduced to practice in that amount of time? I don't. If someone can make this work, I'm OK with letting them own the idea for a little while. Possibly they showed the examiners a working model that they claimed was an embodiment of the invention. I doubt the examiners could debunk it.

If they can't make this work, on the order (but not the close order) of 100 years from now, when someone else does, either they will be unable to patent it because it was already patented, or this patent will be held to have been invalid. This assumes that someday it becomes possible to assess the prior art, which the patent office is pretty clearly unable to do now (though that's a few other stories). If they are as broken as currently, they will just issue the patent again. Who would think then to look back as far as now for prior art?