Stupid Patent of the Month: Sharing Your Hard Copy Documents, but on a Social Network | Electronic Frontier Foundation

"Back when you were a kid, you may (depending on your age) have checked books out of your library using a circulation card. The cards, like the one pictured to the right, would allow the librarian to keep track of the books, who had them, and when they were expected back at the library. (Ohio Univ Libraries / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) This month’s Stupid Patent is awarded to Xerox, who on January 19, 2016 was awarded a patent on essentially the library circulation card, but done electronically. The patent, U.S. Patent No. 9,240,000, is entitled 'Social Network for Enabling the Physical Sharing of Documents.' The patent discusses what it sees as a problem with current methods of sharing documents. Specifically, it says that 'systems and methods which enable the sharing of documents among people working in proximate locations, while still promoting worker efficiency and independence, is [sic] needed.' In addition, 'there is still a need for an efficient social networking platform which is organization specific and which allows members of an organization to know what other members sitting in the same organizational space are reading, what documents they are amendable to sharing, and to which documents they are providing physical access.' And how does the patent solve these problems? Claim 11 details one way ..."