Slashdot Mirror
Scientific American On Bad Patents
dltallan writes: "Scientific American has a short article in which Gregory Aharonian presents his picks for the four worst patents granted. I like the patent for training with manuals (1998)." The Bustpatents site is worth spending some eye-rubbing time on.
From the article: "Three-Dimensional Presentation of Multiple Data Sets in Unitary Format with Pie Charts"
;)
Gah, and you thought Marketing was the only group that made up complex phrases to describe something so obvious.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
- Documented Research and Development
- Resource Usage on R&D documented
- Professional Acceptance of Patent (Maybe a part of the USPO acts as a mentor program(?)
- Possible Prior Art and Explanations why it is not (I really like this one)
- Penalties for Obvious Patents
- Business Models and complex sociological functions unpatentable
- Physical patents require working model
- Web related patents with comparable real-life applications unpatentable (Amazon One-click)
And the list goes on and on"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
This is a downright horrible idea.
1) With the way the system currently works, patents aren't easy to overturn, even with substantial prior art.
2) Everything and anything would be patented (things even more rediculous), and the USPO would have to spend more time overturning all the senseless ones. At least they're disalloqing some of the patents at the moment.
My 2/5 of a nickel.
--ravyn
___
I'm an exhibit on the mounted animal nature trail.
The USPTO has just granted my first patent, #6,356,233. Clearly stated, I claim that respiration of 21.4 small breaths per minute is the ideal respiration of a human and I claim that this specific breathing rate is a design of my own creation. Anyone currently breathing at this rate must license this FreelyBreathing® Respiration rate from me. Don't worry, my AUP and End User License are very flexible!
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
While this article is really funny to read, it just shows the problems that are now going on at the PTO. There are two main problems - the first being what this article points out - that the agents are not doing enough research to make good judgement. It makes you wonder how much of a background in these particular fields the patent agents have?
The other problem is that the PTO has gotten to the point where people are actually rewarded for issuing as many patents as possible. This is a system that really has to be reviewed. It has gotten the PTO to the point where they basically pass EVERYTHING and then let the courts throw out the frivilous stuff. What a waste of time, and even more money since court costs can be astronomical.
This doesn't even raise the problem of issues like people patenting something in HOPES that it becomes an industry standard and only when it is well entrenched - THEN do they say - I HAVE THE PATENT!!! Um, isn't the whole idea that anyone can come up with idea prove that the need for the patent is dumb?
While the PTO was origionally started as a great idea, over the past two decades things have just gotten out of control. Software and Business Methods are something that are just so unreasonable to patent that the PTO needs to either go back and decide:
1- this is something that will have to be SERIOUSLY researched before a patent is issued, OR
2- These are just things that CAN'T be patented
Good luck to them, because either way, they have a big problem facing them.
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
You know, I wonder if this wouldn't be a good way to fight the RIAA. I remember a quote from the guy who leads the patent office saying he thought legal arguments should be patentable. His argument was basically "Why the hell not?" as I recall.
Now, I don't think that you can patent legal arguments at this point in time, but you can patent business models. I mean, we're all smart people, I say why not just patent everything we can think of that the riaa might need technological to fight fair use, etc. I mean they already have things like digital watermarking, and some business models, but why not try to stay ahead of the curve? I remember thinking about a Digital Rights management system built into an OS a couple of months before Microsoft's patent was announced. If I'd thought of it years ago and patented it I would have stopped MS from ever implementing it in the core of the OS. Hrm... not that I wouldn't have been unbribeable, but, maybe this could be done through some non-profit organization like the EFF or something.
Hrm, maybe I should patent this idea... method stopping tyranny through abuse of the patent system...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Personally, I find that to be rather a bad idea. I think up interesting things all the time, and I think I should be able to patent them, even if I haven't got the capital to build a working model or anything like that.
Maybe the burden of proof could be higher or something for a corporation rather then an individual. But I don't really see a reason for not allowing people to patent something if it wasn't difficult to come up with, I mean sometimes the most useful things are 'obvious' in retrospect and their genesis consisted mostly of a flash of insight and a quick jotting down. I read a report on a guy who made most of his money coming up with new kinds of condiments containers. Those things do make your life better, and might not even ever be developed if the person who thought them up didn't think they could make money off of it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
IMHO one of the core issue with those IP problems is the notion that everything must be owned by someone. I suppose it makes kind of sense, if everything is owned, then money will be made out of everything.
When there will be a patent on the process of "a mother singing to help her children sleep", we will know for sure that we are slaves.
Part of the problem with the patent office is that technically minded people don't want to work there. Sure you get to learn about lots of creative ideas and there is good deal of job security, but who really wants to work for the patent office? As far as I know there has only ever been one really famous patent clerk, and he left shortly after that paper was published.
People with technical skills and training to solve problems aren't interested in a job that is largely research and paperwork. Who can blame them? At the University of Maryland (just outside DC), some people from the patent office came to give a well publicized lecture about their trade and next to no one showed up to hear it. The most knowledgable people will go off and invent or even just teach and then people who can't find positions elsewhere end up working for the USPTO. [I'm sure there are some bright patent examiners, but they sure aren't likely to attract many.]
One might try using pay and perks to make the job more attractive, but that's only likely to go so far. It occurs to me that we might do much better if there was a system resembling that of peer review for scientific research. A lot of problems might be solved if patent applications were reviewed by a pool of people that had recieved patents in related fields. Just add a priviso that people that recieve a patent are obligated to review 3-5 patent applications per year for the length of the patent. Remove all the identifying details and send each application out to several people to referee.
Of course there are lots of details to work out, but IMHO such a system could go a long way towards improving the current state of affairs with the granting of patents.
But they would never have to go as far as to the court (BTW, I've never understood the American court frenzy either). Let's say that company Foo.com submits a patent application for no-click shopping. Upon submission, the PTO verifies that the claim is potentially patentable (i.e., it's a formally valid and sensible claim). The application is acknowledged and made public. Then another company Bar.com sees the application and submits proof that no-click shopping has been used well before Foo.com. The PTO (not the court) verifies the claim and invalidates the patent.
The PTO would not have to find prior art itself if it could tap the resources of the community for that, otherwise it would make decisions on the same grounds as today. Also, considering the extended processing times of recent patents, especially IT patents are either obsolete or then overtly general in scope once they come out of the mill (independently of whether software should be patentable at all). The kind of shortcut I was suggesting would cut the processing time to minimum, if the patent could be immediately exercised until contested.
Ok, I'm a scientist, and on that field the process has proved to be very effective. Someone claims something, and then everybody is free to try to prove otherwise. Every hypothesis is held potentially true until falsified, but nothing is ever proved true, only the most plausible/widely accepted theory.
Comic-not
Existence usually comes as a surprise (Idem)
I think the USPTO should allow a time for public comments to be issued on pending patents before the research process begins. Perhaps via some easy to use Internet/Web interface. This would certainly reduce the work load of these guys, and pre-sort the bad/invalid patents out. Perhaps the ones with lots of comments would receive more attention by the USPTO as opposed to pending patents that recieve little or no comment. By essentially envolving industry in the process it is actually made more efficent. I suppose a possible draw back would be someone trying to slow down the approval of a good patent by making false claims, but a method could be devized to reduce or eliminate such behavior. Maybe the USPTO should install Slashcode and allow pending patents to be modded up or down depending on their worthiness. Regardless of how it is carried out, something needs to be done to change how the system works because it clearly doesn't work now. One idea I had would be to follow up on companies to see if they actually build/sell the patented product within a given time frame. If they don't then the patent would be lifted allowing anyone to use the information. Wouldn't that help a lot more mousetraps hit the street rather than being tied up forever in some government stack of paper work?
Check these patents:
Silly patents
Really silly patents
Really Very silly patent
Plain absurd patent
Even law firms admit many patents are silly
Are you getting bored of all this silliness yet?
I can go on
And on
And on. Even in Spanish
Incidentlly, I have just made my own patent application:
Method of recieving Karma Points from www.slashdot.org utilising process of relying entirely on external sources and/or hyperlinks - "Karma Whoring".
A method to induce sleep in young humans through the use of pressure waves generated by the female progenitor's vocal chords.
These patents that only get granted in the US don't happen in Europe. Certainly in the UK this is because other people can challenge the acceptance of a patent, and the people investigating it put it out to experts in that field.
Sounds all to simple, but why not just switch to a system that has worked elsewhere.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
In the software/internet field, I think that the main problem is not that prior art is not found -- in a new field it may not exist -- but that the obviousness criterion is not tested.
IANAL, but AIUI, in order to be patentable, an invention must be both novel and non-obvious. But read this interview in which the Director of the US Patent Office demonstrated quite clearly that he did not understand the difference between these two concepts.
It appears that the US Patent Office believes that obviousness can be ascertained by determining whether there is any prior art. Of course obviousness is much harder to prove conclusively. But until they understand that an invention has to satisfy both of these criteria separately, we will continue to get more ridiculous software and e-businness patents.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
The US patent office can only search things in the library of congress or their library (i.e. stuff that is patent pending or has been patented (they discard the stuff they reject)). They can't do a google search for prior art since that would leak info to google.
Because most of the inventors of the cool computer stuff didn't think their work was patentable, they didn't submit it and now if you can find something that hasn't been sbumitted, you too can get a patent on something you didn't invent.
The same is true for business practices which can now be patented. With no "prior art", anything can get a patent.
One easy fix to this would be to do something as patent a method to something uesless (but patentable) and submit all of google's database. the problem with this approach is that it requires the entire database.
If you don't do anything with a patent, then (a) it's officially invalid
Technically, that's correct; patents expire after 3 1/2, 7 1/2, and 11 1/2 years after grant unless the holder pays periodic maintenance fees. If you don't do anything, not even pay the maintenance fee, the patent becomes invalid.
However, most people would take this to mean "an unenforced patent becomes worthless." That's not patents; that's trademarks.
(b) you're depriving society of technology which they would otherwise have had, for no good reason
No good reason except your own bottom line. For any for-profit corporation, that's reason enough. (Corporations that claim to have ethics do so in order to build goodwill, that is, the value of their trademarks, and that can be measured in dollars.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
We don't need to automatically accept patents, we just need the review part. How about this:
Patents are first checked by the patent office for validity. If the patent passes that phase, then it goes on public display as a provisional patent. The person attempting to get the patent must post a bond of, say, $5000. Anyone can submit a challenge to the patent by paying a fee equal to the difficulty in reviewing their challenge. The first person to invalidate the patent by showing prior art, or any other method approved by the patent office, gets paid the $5000. If no one comes forward for a year, then the patent is presumed valid and non obvious, and the money is returned.
Each of us is an individual. And the name of that individual is Clancy Jones - Clancy Jones #185