One of the oldest challenges in journalism is deciding what goes on the front page. How big should the headline be? What articles merit front-page placement? When addressing these questions, publishers deal with a physical limit in the size of the page. Digital publishing faces a similar constraint: the storage capacity of the user’s device. You can only put as much content on the device as will fit. If that sounds like a fundamental to you, and unpatentable, idea, we agree. Unfortunately, the Patent Office does not. They recently decided to issue our latest Stupid Patent of the Month: U.S. No. 10,042,822 , titled “Device, Method, and System for Displaying Pages of a Digital Edition by Efficient Download of Assets.” The ’822 patent adds nothing remotely inventive or technological to the basic idea of providing a portion of a periodical— i.e. , a newspaper—based on the amount of space available. The patent owner, Nuglif , makes an application for distr...