More public floggings of patent examiners perhaps required.

Directive 10-289, all patents etc. will revert to the government. Is Wesley in charge?

It appears that the details do not support the title of the article I posted. See William Shipley's posts on this topic regarding the details of the patent.

Disgusting, but not one bit surprising. The Federal Government has gotten so big and bureaucratic it thinks it is the "people" and center of attention, versus serving the people.

This would be an excellent place for Trump to weigh in, take a quick look, and direct the Bank to negotiate a license, making a statement to the public and inventors.

Appears to be a lot of leftover high and mighty bullying Obamadominal attitudes out to give the dirty finger to the little guy.
"We The People? We don't need no stinkin' We The People."
Now I recall a scary day during the 90s when I walked back to an apartment, reading a false accusation against me by the IRS along with a demand for a hefty fine.
On the way me dino saw an ant that I'd normally step on. I recall not stepping on it after staring down at it and saying, "I know how you feel."
Me dino got out of paying that fine but I haven't stepped on an ant since. .

Because they realized it was common knowledge, open source, not uniquely their idea.

I have read stories in the past where someone obtained patents to an everyday item that was never patented before...isn't it, first one there gets the prize? unless one can prove otherwise.
(not saying that is right or wrong...or even ethical)

If the solution was so obvious then why didn't anyone else do it?

The necessity for doing so is also obvious. I can't see any evidence he actually did that. He just patented the idea of doing it. Actually building such a system and getting the banks to connect to it and store the data would be a multi-million, possibly multi-billion dollar effort.

And getting all the banks to agree to share information probably wasn't a given either. If that was the patent, I agree with you. I have written many systems using that concept over the past 40 years.

I found and read the patent. Unfortunately the patent office seems to be happily passing out software patents for relatively obvious ideas, many of them in that have been in use for years -- just never patented.

Patents are supposed to be for inspiration that would be unlikely to be repeated by an experienced practitioner in the field.

As a software engineer, not even in the banking field, if you tell me we have a problem with duplicate checks being submitted to multiple institutions the idea of a single repository that they can be validated against is almost a reflex.

The trick is actually building the damned thing -- which, of course, the 'inventor' didn't actually do.

He was awarded a patent. Someone with patent knowledge thought it was unique enough.
Do you have any specific knowledge of this case?

A patent troll goes up against someone with enough resources to actually fight him rather than pay him off -- poor fellow!

His "invention" is the idea that you could have a common database of all checks and make sure that no one tried to cash a duplicate of a check already cashed.

An idea that is utterly trivial in comparison to the work of actually building such a database, the software interfaces and processing as well as getting everyone signed up. Claiming an 'invention' for something that anyone in the industry could think of is absurd..