Do you know what “System and method for communication among mobile applications” is? It’s a ubiquitous technological process that JP Morgan Chase has recently and successfully patented. Could patent infringement lawsuits be around the corner?

Drawing from the official U.S. Patent description, Ars Technica reports that Chase’s patent is “a mobile app asking a user for permission to get information from another app; then, having acquired that permission, it goes ahead and gets the information.” It’s also the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest “Stupid Patent of the Month.”

Chase filed for the patent in 2013, and it was granted this week. Ars adds:

“Not only was the idea behind this patent not novel in 2013, it had been implemented many, many times.”

For more on the apparent absurdity, Ars quoted Daniel Nazer, an EFF attorney:

“[T]he Patent Office seems to operate in an alternate universe where the only evidence of the state of the art in software is found in patents.”

Naser goes on to say in the report that rather than promoting software innovation, the current patent system slows it by “placing landmines for developers.”

Recently, other of EFF’s choice patents include “using a computer for basic calculations” and “online voting.”

Last month, we posted about a podcasting patent that EFF also found intolerable. Like with the online voting patent, EFF stepped in to challenge the validity of the patent and was successful.

Of potential interest to patent watchers may be EFF’s “Saved by Alice” project, in which companies that were sued for patent infringement were able to use the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS Bank to defend themselves.