America’s Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted a patent to Tableau (Salesforce’s visual analytics platform) — for a patent covering "Data Processing For Visualizing Hierarchical Data___
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It’s kind of a given that people are going to try to get patents for stupid things they obviously shouldn’t. It’s the whole job of the patent office to decline such requests. If people only ever applied for good and reasonable patents, then approval could be automatic. It’s not, only because they need to filter out the bad ones.
The real problem here is that the patent was granted. It seems dumb to apply for it. But how dumb is it, if applications like this actually get approved?
