According to a story in the Boston Globe, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has finally started to come to its senses over some of the meaningless patents that are being filed.

So far, the area is the Human Genome and they have decided to actually require people filing patents on portions of the Genome to explicitly state what they think they are going to use it for.

Until now, many companies have just been patenting areas of the Genome that they think are useful, and hoping to figure out how to use them in the future.