The patent protection system was designed a long time ago to encourage companies to publicly disclose their industrial and trade secrets so that other companies could use them later. In exchange of this public disclosure, companies received a protection as a period of exclusive usage. In recent years, we've seen a growth in the number of submitted patents and surprisingly, the patent examiners have granted patents to dubious inventions such as :

• a method to entertain a cat with a laser pointer, patented in 1995
• hyperlinks, patent filed by BT in 1976 and granted in 1989, although the Xanadu work on hypertext clearly predates
• the amazon one-click button patent

We now have a new example of a strange patent. On Sept. 1st 2009, google was granted a patent for the design of their blank homepage... Be careful the next time you write a blank web page with a simple textbox, google could sue you...