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US to Give Web Patents More Scrutiny
bitFliper was one of the people who sent us the public version of the Wall Street Journal article that talks about the USPTO proposed overhaul of the way it examines patents for many computer practices. Woo-hoo! Here's to sanity!
If more evidence is needed that the USPTO is completely out of control, I offer the following patent, granted just last month:
...
... I thought that you could only patent REAL inventions, not fantasy inventions. Write up your warp drive and dilithium crystal patents now, kids, because they'll give you a patent on ANYTHING these days. The most important criteria for a patent to be issued these days appears to be the inclusion of a check for the patent fees. Your "new improved" self-funding patent office at work ... for you!
US Patent 6025810: Hyper-light-speed antenna
Some actual quotes from the patent:
The following describes, in simple terms, what the present invention actually does. The present invention takes a transmission of energy, and instead of sending it through normal time and space, it pokes a small hole into another dimension, thus, sending the energy through a place which allows transmission of energy to exceed the speed of light.
And if that isn't spiffy enough
For accelerated plant growth, first, you need to create a hot surface that is more than 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. Next, you need a strong magnetic field. Only one device is needed for this function. This allows energy from another dimension to influence plant growth.
Silly me
things will not really be what i would call acceptable, though, until it's as easy for someone who notices a bad patent to lodge a complaint, have the patent publicly reviewed, and have the patent struck down
as it currently is for a corporation to file a bad patent, get it approved, and then use it to harass/sue/destroy people.
Currently it takes how much money to go into court and have a frivolous patent struck down? There are so many frivolous/dangerous patents out there that no ACLUish organisation could make a dent in them, and each one would be a long, long, drawn out legal struggle that would take forever and drain a huge amount of money. Meanwhile if a corporation has a patent that they should have no right to, and some other group or company annoys them, they can just do a few quick things with the lawyer they already have, and bam, semiinstant results. Unlike someone striking down a patent, who must go all the way to the end of the legal process to get the patent struck down, the corporation abusing their patent only has to go a little way, because these things are _always_ settled out of court. Assuming they even go to court in the first place; the mere threat of a lawsuit is probably enough to get what they want, esp. against companies small enough that having to hire a lawyer to even look into things and make a settlement would be a major problem. Threats cost nothing, and in most cases the patent owner is large enough it will barely hurt them to sue even if they lose and it will destroy the other side to get sued even if they win.
I'm not sure how coherent what i just said was, but just consider that even if the USPTO _IS_ more careful about preventing bad patents from being put into use, if a bad patent does slip through, for the owner to abuse that patent will still be far, far easier than someone preventing the owner from abusing it.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Patents are already granted only to persons. Unfortunately, corporations have been declared legal persons. Therein lies the source of 90% of corporate evil. Abolish the concept of corporations as persons and you eliminate corporate patent holding, corporate campaign contributions, corporate lobbying, etc.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I seriously doubt these changes will have much of an effect on the way patents are awarded. As long as the US Patent Office continues to base examiners' pay and bonuses on the number of patent applications they review, the process will be rushed.
Since the field of computer/internet patents seems to be exploding, I propose this solution: after each individual reviewer has finished their work on a patent, they take it to a board or panel of patent "judges" (don't really know how else to describe them). The reviewer says, "Well I researched this patent and here is what I found/didn't find, what do you think?" This would hopefully eliminate a lot of oversight and possible bonus pushing by reviewers.
love,
br4dh4x0r
Under fire for his company's suit, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos has proposed a sharp reduction in the duration of Internet-related patent rights, which, like all other patents, are good for 20 years from application.
I'd like to see patents for anything involving computers to last 3 or 5 years from the time the patent is granted. It's just totally unreasonable that someone can patent something, and basically prevent it's use forever, since by the time 20 years rolls around, the technique is almost certainly completely obsolete (replaced by new patented technology, etc etc). Not to mention all the bogus patents (sliding year windows for Y2K fixes, one click shopping, etc) that have been floating around lately. Well, here's hopin...
But I doubt this is going to address the fundamental problem: the USPTO has greatly expanded the fields in which patents are granted, to include software, business methods, and scientific data. This happened without direction by the legislature, and it represents a change from previous practices. This is particularly unfair because a number of the inventions that the USPTO granted patents on in the 1990s were already developed by practitioners in the 1970s and 1980s, but they couldn't apply for them then because the USPTO wouldn't have granted them then.
If you permit patents in these newly created areas of patentability, no amount of additional examination is going to address the underlying problem.
I also have my doubts that even "senior" examiners are going to be significantly more effective in weeding out patents with ample prior art, in part because the definition of "prior art" that the USPTO and courts apply seems to be very narrow. For example, patents like the shopping cart, e-commerce, on-screen television program grids, etc., have already been used for many years on the Minitel system, but I suspect that despite their technical similarity, courts and examiners would consider Minitel and the Web to be different uses.
Altogether, I don't see this announcement as much progress. I think it's pretty clear that Dickinson is doing it because he can use this as an argument to get more money and resources for his agency, a common goal of federal fiefdoms, not because anybody convinced him that something is wrong. If he gets the resources, he has more power and gets good PR out of it ("see, we are responsive"), and if he doesn't, he has an excuse for granting more bad patents ("if you had only given us more people").
Not to be misunderstood, given the current system, no matter what Dickinson's motivations are, more careful examinations are a slight improvement. But this doesn't address the underlying problems and issues at all.
I think that this is absolutely the right first step to handling the internet/software patent issues. A lot of casual talk here on slashdot (and elsewhere) has focused on making fundamental changes to the law, when in fact, the law as it was written by Congress has never really been in effect in the real world because the PTO has been doing such a lousy job of examining software patents. A large number of the complaints about individual patents that have been raised on slashdot have centered on the "that technique is old" or "that's obvious, any skilled programmer could do that" type of complaints. If the PTO does correctly implement this more rigorous examination process most of these kind of complaints will go away.
There will still be the larger policy debate on software/internet patents in general, but I think that that debate will be much more focused without the distraction of the really bad patents. This is important because the truly lousy patents aren't so much the fault of bad law but more the failure of the PTO to do its job. And in the spirit of using the right tool to do the right job, changes at the PTO are probably a better tool than changing the law, at least at this point.
Additionally, changes at the PTO will not require the incredibly long process of new legislation to change the law, etc. We may see results sooner this way.
It will be interesting to see if the PTO can actually pull this off given the usual government bureaucracy problems.