Patent in OR

Time has an article Patently Absurd. In this article, it said that BUY IT NOW is a patent filed by MercExchange in Mid-90's. A jury awarded this company $35 million in damages from Ebay.

Actually, oppositely to the opinion given by Time. I support patent in OR areas. Why finance people can make much more money than OR people in general. It is because they can earn money for company directly. Actually, I think OR can make at least the same contribution as financial people to the society. We need to use patent to protect ourselves.

For SCMers, maybe the mechanism of contact is the possible direction.
For Optimizers, specific algorithem related to industry may be possible.
For Queueing people, the ways to distinguish priority customer can be considered.