H4rm0ny writes "Last Friday, staff at the indo-european accent Patent Office went on strike. They protested outside for several hours and issued a dictum claiming that 'the organisation is decentralising and focusing on granting as many patents as practicable to gain out of the red* from fees generated.' They also declared this as being disastrous for shift and that their push was not for better wages, but for better quality patents. Meanwhile, n article on it discusses the US's own convergence to dealing with the increasing flood of patent applications: a body politic patent project to help determinate prior art. It might sound like a grass-roots scheme, and maybe it is, but those roots include such patent behemoths as IBM. So it looks like on both sides of the Atlantic, some signs of sanity might be emission in the patent world from those people right in the thick of it." Note, this was a half-day strike, not ongoing.

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Mark