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Bryar Takes On Patents And Their Friends
Jack Bryar's column over at Andover News comes out swinging; not at software patent holders themselves, but at the convoluted, corruptable machine of the USPTO. Bryar points out, among other things, that "the time available to Patent Office employees to process, review and approve a patent application -- an application which may run to hundreds of pages and be highly technical in nature -- has been reduced to less than eight man-hours." (Raise your hand if you think that's adequate.) Interesting, and mostly unflattering, information, too, about Patent Office head Todd Dickenson, and the changes which he's ushered in, or ignored.
After almost a year of being owned by Andover, Slashdot finally links to a story on Andover News, one of the most underrated tech news sites on the web. I've read fascinating articles (and some duds along the way, too, of course) there for the last several years, yet few (if any) of them have been linked here. Granted, there's the apprehension associated with giving the appearance of being "taken over by Andover" or "pandering to your own ad sales department" with putting too many links up, but really -- most of the columns written by Andover's "three Bs" (Bryar, Bresnick, and Blankenhorn) are substantially better than what usually runs in the "Features" section here otherwise :) Yet they typically get seen by a much, much smaller audience....
In a more "on-topic" light, I'm glad that Bryar had the guts to point out that the number one thing wrong with the patent system today is that the inmates have effectively taken over the asylum; it makes you long for the days when the nation's entire body of patent examiners were three members of the Cabinet who met a couple times a year. If I were to propose a fix for what's broken with the patent system, it would go something like: (1) Only legitimate innovation is patentable. Patent inspectors have to either deny a patent, or produce (and attach to the patent) a written description of why the patent is valid. and (2) Patents are valid for exactly TWO product lifecycles within a particular industry. Thus, software patents might last three years, while the term for pharmaceutical patents might be extended out to seventy. Yes, I know this second part is basically what Jeff Bezos said in his reply to Tim O'Reilly -- he was right. You can't abolish software patents entirely, there really is legitimate innovation (new techniques in wavelet compression, anyone?) in software that is and should remain patentable.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
I was a patent examiner, and hated it. Yeah it is great to see the new tech that is in dev, but there s no time to savor anything. I should mention that the amount of time that you have to work on your applications goes down as you go up in grade and get promoted. When I was a GS7 I had about 16 hours per application, and when I got promoted to GS9 I had about 12 to 14. I know that some people there were happy about remaining a particular grade as that was all they could handle.
The USPTO is one of the few goverment agencies that has quotas, that are that strict. They are also one of the few that actually make a profit, like the post office. Your taxes do not pay for a patent examiners income, it is payed through the patent application fees and patent maintenance fees. It can cost one thousands to get a patent.
I personally think that the only solution is to privitize the USPTO and make it gov regulated. One of the current problems they have is that they do not have enough examiners and Billy Clinton boy decidede that he would take money from teh USPTO to help balance the budget. Several millions of dollars that could have gone back into the USPTO to better train some of there examiners.
One last thing. Some of the examiners do a search if they find something great if they do not they allow it and figure that they can get soreted out in court. It is a screwed up system that desperately needs repair.
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I'd have thought this was obvious. Do you really need it spelled out for you? Every time someone files a patent they are in essence telling you, "This thing you may not build without our consent." Sometimes that is appropriate, if, for instance, the patent holder spent a lot of time and money inventing the thing being patented, but more and more frequently the thing being patented is either bleeding obvious, or else so broad that it covers not only the patent holder's invention, but also a whole bunch of other things that he didn't invent. All of this translates to shutting you (yes, you) out of the market. (Isn't it amusing how everybody flaps their lips about how wonderful the "free market" is; yet, nobody actually wants to compete in it?)
Let's use one of your own examples:
But of course your solution is complete baloney because if your analog processor were so superior you would have invented it without having been forced into it by someone else's patent. For a company to patent their own revolutionary CPU design is reasonable; a patent that covers any CPU that someone else may invent subsequently is way out of line. And for a slightly sillier example you say:
But, what if somebody patents "the use of man made utensils to facilitate ingestion of foodstuffs"? Will you then just eat with your hands?
Burying our heads in the sand is not the answer. If we "stop worrying" and "just hack code", we could well find a cadre of lawyers at our doors telling us that we no longer have the right to hack code unless we pay up to some bozo who has gone and patented whatever we happen to work on. If that happens, far from "dying of its own excesses", the system will perpetuate itself as large companies that can afford to patent everything under the sun enjoy a legalized monopoly on writing software.