Did IBM invent outsourcing, or was it Al Gore? I don’t think IBM did—and my guess is that no one else outside of IBM thinks so, either. So it wasn’t surprising this week when IBM decided to withdraw “a controversial application for a patent on ‘Outsourcing of Services’ that describes a way to make it easier to figure out which jobs to send overseas to countries such as India,” according to a story in the Journal News of Westchester, New York.

If you think it is ridiculous for a company like IBM to try to claim it has a right to patent outsourcing, well, you aren’t alone. As the Journal News story points out, IBM’s decision to withdraw the patent application “followed days of buzz among technology bloggers who criticized IBM’s move to patent a strategy many viewed as obvious.”

IBM has the reputation of being a supremely arrogant company that employs a great many arrogant, condescending people (something I know about firsthand, because I have an arrogant, condescending IBM retiree in my family), but filing for a patent for outsourcing seemed way over the top, even for IBM. Blogger Jim Stroud probably had the best, and briefest, comment on the whole incident, but TechDirt had a pretty good take on it too.