I don't know why it takes so long to grant a patent when all they do is slide it under the rubber stamp machine.

Some articles I've read suggest that it's intentional on the part of the applicant. The idea is to extend the useful life of the patent by delaying the application's completion as much as possible.

Definitely worked well for some people:

"By April 1988, when Gould's use patent was approved, optically pumped amplifier patents covered 80% of the lasers made in the United States. The market for lasers had ballooned to more than $500 million per year. Suddenly, Gould was a multimillionaire."

http://electronicdesign.com/article/components/gordon-gould-...

Presumably, Gould had delivered a useful and valuable invention to the world and the patent sets him up to be compensated accordingly, if the premise holds.

> The idea is to extend the useful life of the patent by delaying the application's completion as much as possible.

That hasn't worked for around 20 years - the "if issued term" clock starts ticking the day that you apply.

This is a huge problem for drug companies because their applications take a long time to issue.

Wow. Where I live, since at least 2005, I can choose the seats in a movie theatre when buying a ticket (even online now). Seems like a lot of prior art.

The patent in question (which I believe is 8,024,234) only covers a method for people selling tickets to compare prices for tickets across a venue in the form of a venue map. It does not describe an interface for purchasing them.

(Don't construe this as a defence of it though.)

How is this substantially new? This type of article makes the US patent system laughable.

The patent thing may look laughable from the outside but inside the US it's pretty much required by how everything in business has been set up - to squeeze everything out of anyone using so-called 'legal' methods.

The legal system in the US is basically a self-feeding machine that produces crap you have to pay for.

It seems any unique process can be patented.