WHAT CAN I DO TO PROTECT MYSELF?

By protection, I mean reducing chance of someone counterfeiting or altering your checks, as well as reducing your liability when it occurs.

Be aware that is is impossible to prevent fraud. But you can significantly minimize risk using a two-prong approach. It is critical that good procedures related to your check processing are put in place, and that you use a check that is difficult to counterfeit or alter (see sidebar).

* Reconcile your bank statement promptly. Now that bank statements are available online, you can do this as frequently as you feel is necessary for your situation. * Restrict access to your checkbook/check stock. Ensure that only trusted staff that need access have it. * Audit your checks. However, this can be difficult because often checks are removed from bottom or middle of book or stack. * Use a custom design. While this isn't an affordable option for many businesses, look into it. The next best thing is to ensure that your check supplier uses comprehensive security features. Remember though that a custom design is not a substitue for security features. * Advise your bank branches' officials of security features in your checks .. in person or in writing (and keep a copy of letter on file!). * If you issue a large number of checks, particularly with a low amount (eg. rebate checks), open a separate account and alert bank staff of an upper limit for that account.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Don't take unnecessary chances. The more security you have through procedures and choice of check form, less likely that someone will tamper with your checks.

Martin Willcox, an IT Manager from Manchester, United Kingdom cut to chase:

"The McAfee case clearly demonstrates just how absurd and anti-competitive notion of patenting software really is. Very little software is genuinely new or novel - in reality, most of us in development community spend our lives either refining and extending ideas that go back years or porting those ideas to new technologies."

Martin Willcox's assessment of situation is right on mark. Companies are now using Patent system to try and bury their competition.

Think about Amazon for a moment. Two months after Amazon received their Patent, they filed suit against BarnesandNoble.com --- their number one competitor. If BarnesandNoble had not been as strong as they were financially when this suit began, legal fees could have buried them! "This nonsense raises cost of doing business, since it takes years and costs $1 million or so to break these junk patents."

( Quoted from: http://www.trudelgroup.com/pwars.htm )

What if BarnesandNoble had been a young upstart? Could they have survived if they had little cash and a million dollar legal bill? How many small companies could have afforded this attack? How many small companies could have survived litigation process even when they were in right?

To obtain a patent under our system, an inventor must file an application describing and claiming invention (which must be -- in broadest sense of word -- new, non-obvious, and useful) with U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). The PTO assigns application to an examiner who conducts a search of existing inventions (known as "prior art") and then issues a patent if nothing fishy turns up.

Under this system, which was last modified in 1999, only real method for weeding out bad patent is through costly litigation.

There are indications that there are actually several factors at play in problems that exist within our Patent system:

* The PTO examiners are not given kinds of tools they need to complete their jobs as they would wish, as indicated by this story:

A September, 1999 letter from Patent Examiner's Union Chief to Patent Advisory Committee stated in part, "What examiners are asked to do, and what impact those directed activities will have on quality of patents, are clearly matters of great concern...." PTO examiners are being pressured to solely use a system called WEST for their patent searches, an "information retrieval system with debilitating flaws; not only is system frequently incapable of performing even simple word searches, results are often woefully incomplete and even inaccurate," and that "searches using new system take longer to perform, produce fewer results than systems that they replaced, and thus prevent us from doing our jobs."

(Source: Washington Post, November 19, 1999).

* The staff at Patent and Trademark Office is understaffed and under prepared to meet challenges of system in today's rapidly expanding technology sector and technological knowledge base.

Consider this. If a net-savvy programmer worked for PTO, then none of these patents would have occurred, as he would have knowledge available to him to make sound judgements.

* Unscrupulous companies are taking advantage of inadequacies of our Patent system to position themselves in such a way that they can legally extort their competitors through use of U.S. Patent and legal systems.

* The only recourse available, to those who feel that a bad Patent has been imposed, is expensive litigation or submission to legal Patent holder.

By signing our petition today, you can contribute to our project to bring U.S. Congress to consider possibility of repealing application of Patents to software industry, or to investigate processes and procedures of U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to discover and solve inherent problems that are allowing for system to be abused.

http://www.PatentTrail.Org/petition.html