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Too Many Patents as Bad as Too Few
NonSoftAntiCurve writes "Forbes.com has an interesting article about how too many patents are as bad as too few when it comes to incentives for innovation. 'The tension between the patent as a way to stimulate invention and the patent as a weapon against legitimate competition is inherent in the system.' There is a scary example of how this plays out in practice."
The Forbes group of companies conveniently holds some of the most ridiculous patents on Earth, including nose hair pruning shears and random mom joke generators.
Do you want to remove linux?
and here all this time I thought it was just a beautiful thing!
sic transit gloria mundi
If you do not have enough laws, you would end up with chaos. If you have too many, then you are oppressing the people.
All in moderation, as one smart person said.. but I'm too dumb to remember who said it.
---
If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way.
Those FOB's can just get back on the boat and go home. We don't need them filling our patent office on new designs of rice cooker.
There is a scary example of how this plays out in practice
Beware this sounds a bit like a goats.ex link story.!!!
A multitude of laws is a sign of a sick nation.
So it is that a multitude of patents is a sign of a sick economy, IMHO.
Hey, didn't Jackie Chan make a movie about that Sun/IBM trademark meeting? No wait, that was a Chinese restaurant, not a Sun Microsystems boardroom. And hey, it was a triad, not IBM. And come to think of it Jackie Chan doesn't show up in the Forbes article and kick IBM ass.
Pity though.
www.clarke.ca
Too many patents, and nobody will want to do anything....
Let's see if I can use Slashdot as a free version of Google Answers...
Does anybody have the patent number of IBM's "notorious fat lines patent", referenced in the article? I searched a bit on uspto.gov, but couldn't find it.
I know of a medical researcher making great progress on a wonderful device that might eventually be implanted in many people. He notes that there is one problem he needs to solve, a problem with the body rejecting one of his materials. Someone else has solved the problem, but they've got a patent on using the material that they use, so he's got to find a different one that works almost as well or better. Would be a shame if many people wound up walking around with a second-best material inside of them.
From their site:" Meanwhile, the impact of the U.S. patent system on innovation is being studied by the National Academy of Science. The academy is expected to issue a report shortly."
Additionally from the National Academy" The question arises whether in some respects the extension of IPRs has proceeded too far. "
Guess I won't patent my perpetual motion device today.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
Last year in a show of how easy it was to disrupt and abuse the patent process by registering a common, every-day idea a Melbourne lawyer patented a "circular transportation facilitation device" with more info on the story here, here(pdf file), and here
Obviously it's too easy to get things patented these days, especially in areas of high technology as few if any patent officer workers are well versed in the areas of technology. Most of the patent office stampers would have little inclination as to how an intigrated circuit works or if an item of software recently designed is any different or unique from any other piece of similar software.
Sure, it's nice to be able to patent and protect your inventions and innovations, but when most of today's patent holders are larger corporations, it's hardly meant to protect the garage inventor anymore.
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
There will be a HUGE burden of patents which will need to be re-reviewed. It will be very difficult and I'm sure some people will advocate invalidating all patents from 1980-ish onwards. I would advocate such a process. Require all patents assigned to corporations to re-apply but waive the fees if the patent goes through the second time. For patents issued to individuals, the office could automatically review them. I personally think that corporate welfare should be kept to a minimum.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Nope, not me, I must be someone else...
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but my understand is there are laws against this thing, and SUN could easially have taken IBM to court over this claim. If IBM wants to pay someone to examine all 10,000 patents, that is their right. However the threat that they could is illegal to use.
Nothing in this article is news except for the source.
This isn't RMS, it's a patent attorney writing in Forbes.
I think I'll stay in tonight. Surely, there are pigs flying about.
Patents not only exist to help innovation, they also exist to grow the commons so that eventually everyone can use it patent-free. If there are too many patents, than the natural competitive system breaks down.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It certainly appears from this Supreme Court opinion, written over a century ago, that the US patent office was already out of control. Sad to say, things have only gotten worse. Thanks largely to the League for Programming Freedom (yes, I'm a member), software patents have gotten at least some of the notoriety they deserve. But the more patents I read, the more I come to the conclusion that things are just as bad in the more traditional hardware areas. It seems that every day somebody finds a patent that just makes everyone's jaws drop open in utter astonishment. Here's one I just discovered: US patent 5,443,036 covers the use of a laser pointer in playing with a cat. Check it out; this is not a joke, unless you consider (as I do) the entire US patent system to be one very sick joke.
To their credit, in 1994 the Patent Office put out a call for comments on "obviousness" standards for patents, asking if perhaps they have been inappropriately lowered. (Is the Pope Polish? Are your taxes too high? Does a bear...well, you know.) Here are the comments I filed in response. Naturally, they were ignored.
Recently a Slashdot reader hit on a brilliant analogy that ties it all together for me, and I'm not even a bearded linux hippie: patents, he said, are merely a form of industrial pollution. After all, both pollution and patents are economic externalities that can enrich individuals or companies at the expense of society as a whole. And both are often defended as economic necessities. At one time, society celebrated the belching black clouds of smoke and soot from steam locomotives, power plants and steel mills as signs of progress and economic prosperity, but this changed. I fervently hope that I live to see a similar sea change in public attitudes toward the patent system.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
According to the article, this is no longer the case because the nature of the USPTO has changed in the past couple of decades. If that is the case, fine. Reform the patent office.
But what if that is not the only factor? What if technology has gotten too advanced for any practical patent system to work anymore? What if genuinely new ideas can only be separated from the mass of old obvious ideas by the experts in the fields? It used to be that someone with a B.S. degree had a good chance of deciding whether or not a patent should be granted. If a doctorate is needed, can the USPTO sustain that? There is no way they could hire enough good people for every field. The people they would need are the people who should be out inventing. Maybe patents on IP have become impossible. Now there is a brave new world for you. I'm no rabid slashdot IP ranter either (you can be the judge though). I support a good patent system. But this article got me wondering if it is possible anymore.
..once someone tried to pull this off. Parents can be utterly stupid sometimes.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
Explain to me how a company with programmers on its payrool, and that supports open source can protect itself against code/ideas thieves if they don't patent their ideas? I just try really hard to understand what is the right balance between using open source to free users from proprietary software and still being able to have some ways of making a buck or two by protecting ideas. Very curious about you guys's answers.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
If it became cheaper to litigate these matters, it might not be as much of a problem.
Imagine if all patent litigation was cheap and affordable to all. The odds seem reasonable. If only half are valid, and a small percentage actually apply, this would not be a problem.
Or, we just need to decide to divide all lawyer's bills by 10 or 100 and encourage them to produce results and not bills.
I have a patent on the obligatory posting of funny patent posts on slashdot. It also appears that the same patent also covers recursion. All Lisp users, prepare to empty your bank accounts.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Isn't this always the problem? I mean, every problem? We can't live without something, but we can't have too much of it: Patents, seratonin, oxygen, laws, protein, etc, etc, etc. Hell, probably half of the discussions on Slashdot could be resolved by realizing that a middle ground equalibrium point needs to be reached.
Sadly every time a new subject is broached, two factions arise with the same redundant "yes but" arguments. And you always have the brave few trying to reconcile everything. But it's always pointless. After a point all the damn DeCSS/MPAA/RIAA/DMCA topics look the same.
The core of the problem: there is no concrete value of optimality that can be stated that is true in all infinite cases.
Examples:
How many patents should we allow?
How much protein should we eat a day?
How many rights does a corporation have?
What is music when you despise all sound?
The article describes ibm-sun case. wouldn't it be a case of criminal blackmailing? what if cops arrests you and when they find that there is no case against you, they still tell you to plead guilty and threaten you that if you don't plead guilty, then they will try to find another law you broke and given 10000s of them, you must have broken some. i believe, if sun had done secret taping of the event and send it to fbi, some ibm lawyers would have been in jail and ibm might have lost those patents because they used them as an illegal weapon in criminal case.
The article is quite silly.
If you have a lot of patents - this is good from your point of view since you can generate revenue and sue would-be imitators.
If you don't have a lot of patents - this is bad from your point of view since you will get your ass sued.
Is this the author's intended message?
If not - what is the point of his article?
IBM uses more than just patents to take out the competition. They also like to place moles into their competitors, such as Carly Fiorina at HP. They want a monopoly. Microsoft arent the only Borg! http://www.uncoveror.com/fiorina.htm
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
What is that toxicologists say? Something like "the poison's in the dosage."
It's kind of like that with patents. I work for a small engineering R&D company, and if we couldn't patent what we developed we just couldn't develop it. But too many patents, and future innovation (ours included) is stifled.
By the way there are lots of other problems with the patent system. For example, the way the system is set up it tends to discourage collaboration, e.g. between private sector and universities by making the "who owns what IP" so convoluted as to price it out of feasibility for small companies.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
loser pays.
-Peter
I believe that was a major part of Aristotle's philosophy. Err... not the self proclaimed Aristotle that plays for the Lakers, but the student of Socrates.
sHi
A friend of mine works for the US Patent and Trademark Office. They just found out that 1/3 of them are losing their jobs as of September 1. My friend doesn't know if he is getting the axe but is pretty nervous- heck, the #1 reason anyone works for the government is job security.
When guvmint lawyers are getting laid off in a Republican presidency, something is just not right.
More patents=more work for my friend and food for his children. So go, bureaucracy, go!!
Actually, too many patents are **WORSE** than too few. Especially if they are broadly interpreted. Especially if they are expensive in time and money to challenge.
Most of the patents that I've encountered recently seem to be of the sort that violate the basics of patent law. Prior art, trivially obvious, etc. But nobody can challenge them because it's too expensive. It can tie you up for YEARS, even if you can afford it (and we're talking millions here, when you count the appeals and all).
Plus, of course, you don't know *when* they will decide to drop the shoe on you. And when they do, if they win they'll be able to collect all of your profits, and then some, as damages. Unless you devote the time and effort to fight them at a time of their choosing, and frequently in a court of their choosing (though that's a bit limited).
The patent system is so broken that we would be far better off without any patents at all. It needs to be started from scratch, and not have *ANY* of the patent lawyers or members of patent cartels be allowed to take part in the redrafting of the laws. (Yeah, fat chance, I know. But that's what's needed.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Extortion requires a threat of violence or 'other criminal means' to get something.
... it'd be a shame if it burnt down.' That could be seen as a threat of future criminal actions (arson in this case) to force Sun to pay protection and would be extortion.
IBM mentioned that it had the legal right to examine it's patents to see if they were being respected by Sun, knowing that a court case could be found somewhere in that swamp of 10000 patents. Nothing criminal was threatened - they just threatened future legal action (a legal action to take - heh).
Now, if after hearing Sun's refusal to pay they said something like 'A really nice research facility you have here
So, no extortion. I'm not a lawyer of course - but a quick google reassures me that I'm on the right track with this.
Kevin
How about a patent on the method of swinging sideways on a swing as seen in this story.
I don't think there's any doubt in anyone's mind who knows anything about the situation but that our uncritical and over-generous patent system needs serious reviewal. Likewise the overly-broad and overly-long copyright system. The matter of EULAs hasn't been addressed at all in a legal sense. Nor have potentially discriminatory and damaging region locking and copy protection schemes.
What is needed now is for congress, the courts, business, or the people to take a long hard look at the situation and make some changes for the better, but I don't see anyone moving on these issues individually or as aggregate. And even if they were, there's a serious possibility it could just be made worse. Anyone have any ideas?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
[ Editorial ]Posted by bahtama on Fri June 14, early afternoon
from the patent-office-has-new-sinister-meaning dept.
The sleaze has gotten out of hand; it's time to roast a company whose profits are directly linked to creating fear about proprietary products and ideas in their readers, who have to keep discovering new sources of fear to improve their bottom line - or in the absence of new discoveries, keep inventing new sources of fear. Yes, it's time to take on Slashdot.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
The first part of the answer is: most companies with programmers on the payroll don't make any money selling the software or enforcing patents. Most software is developed for in house use or to solve a particular problem for a specific customer. So only the minority of companies need to worry about this at all.
If you're releasing under the GPL, your competitors will be unlikely to take your source. If they do, they either have to release their source back to you so you can take their improvements, or they're infringing copyright and you can sue them.
As for "stealing ideas," an even smaller number of companies develop any ideas worth patenting. Most software which is sold uses well understood, non-patentable techniques.
As for stealing your ideas, so what? Companies like Cygnus and Red Hat managed to do alot of business selling a product that wasn't patented. Only recently did Red Hat start getting defensive patents. There are other things to sell beyond a monopoly on an idea. Most notably, if you had the idea first and developed it to fruition first. Who is going to be able to have the first to market advantage? You. Who is going to be in the best position to push the idea to its limits and maintain the cutting edge? You.
Will the elimination of software patents reduce the profitability of some software companies? Certainly. But it will be a very small number of companies. Those companies will still have some advantages in the market. And if the market grows and competition increases as a result, maybe it's a good idea.
Drug companies are allowed 7 years make use of their exclusive products (which amounts to only 3-5 years after FDA approval process). Other manufacturers are free to move in after that point.
I'd like to think that this system could work for software as well. What would happen if Microsoft only had 7 years to make money with a product before other companies could market an identical product? Innovation and competition might return to the software market.
Or maby patents? And then you shake the patent office down for using your patents. Fair's fair.
FRA: STFU GTFO
IMHO, the biggest (perhaps the only?) problem with patents, is that the duration is not a function of the development cost. If a company really does spent a gazillion dollars developing something, then maybe a 20 year monopoly makes sense. Or maybe 40 years. Or maybe one year. But that's not how the system works.
And that's reason software guys, in particular, bitch about patents so much. (And it's not just Free Software guys. Commercial developers of less-than-megacorp size are going to tend to hate patents as well.) We happen to work in a realm where development is so ridiculously cheap, that the arbitrary hard-coded duration is completely inappropriate and senseless.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"The USPTO interpreted these new decisions very broadly and began to issue patents on computer software--hitherto considered uncopyrightable as mathematical algorithms, since they are not really human inventions."
First off, computer software, both object and source code, has always been amenable to copyright protection.
Secondly, the decisions the author refers to have nothing to do with computer software, only methods of doing business. Moreover, patent applications for computer software have been routinely filed and allowed for over thirty years.
The real problem is that thousands of dot.bomb corps were awarded patents on questionable inventions due to lack of funding for additional examiners and technology resources through which to carry out patentability searches. As for the PTO being a cash cow, sure, but because Congress regulary strips generated revenue to pay for general expendatures of the federal government, we aren't seeing a better system as a result of increased revenue.
Lobby Congress to stop taking PTO funds and maybe fewer questionable patents will be issued.
Just my 2 cents...
"Everything in moderation" is inscribed in Apollo's Delphi in Greece. So it goes way back...
Okay, well, same question I guess. ;-)
adéu,
Mateu
"And we're happy here, but we live in fear, we've seen a lot of temples crumble..." - Concrete Blonde
Patents to me seem a little bit useless in today's age. And I don't really think they don't inspire big corporations to invent things, making $ does that. It is true that royalities can bring a pretty penny though, but do you need a patent for that. If IBM produces a new technology, and spent 5 million on it, chances are the next guy is going to have spend a ton of money to reverse engineer it and to figure out the manufactory process, etc, etc. Chances are they would rather just buy the information on how to do it from IBM and sign some kind of legal contract that would be as good as a patent for IBM. Capitalism is all about competition and making something that was once rare and expensive, common and cheap. Patents I think are no longer needed and are hurting. As well cause all kinds of messy situations when someone accidentally or purposely violates them. This country was founded, at least I believe, on making everyone's life a little easier and free, not really to make everyone filthy rich like it has become. I'm not saying that patents should be completly wiped out, but that laws should change and the lenght of time that they exist should be shortened. I think their most useful function today would be to protect a companies investment until the product can be manufactored. But once the initial investment has been recovered it should be released so that the technology can grow and become cheaper.
While the slashcode wouldnb't let me post the transcript...go HERE and get the whole text!
x t
http://www.intriguing.com/mp/_scripts/peasant.t
There is a simple balance, you've just got to remember that there are brand new US patents being issued on things which were done about 100 years ago.
I know I'm not popular here for being in the "Slashdot party line" of Linux against Capitalism, but I think just about anyone can find name just at least a dozen patents which are plain old corporate recycling of ideas that were well known before the "innovative party" was even born or their company was set up.
Personally, I'd rather see some amount of responsibility taken by the Civil Service and the corporations because I know exactly how much damage playing monopoly with Geneticically Modifified Food causes.
Has anybody wondered why they have been addicted to junkfood, and exactly why nothing is being done about it ?
This wouldn't have anything to do with creative science tampering with life just for the bottom line ?
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Before coming to my senses, I was a patent attorney. The story described in the article where IBM was on a shakedown mission rings true. I have seen both IBM and Lucent use exactly this technique many times (including with clients of mine).
They don't really mind when you show them that your client doesn't infringe. They are perfectly willing to go get another bunch of patents and make you go through those. Understand what is going on here: the patent attorneys take a lot of time going through all these patents to show that they don't apply. Lawyers are expensive -- eventually the client realizes that IBM or Lucent isn't going away, and they pay up. Mind you, in all of the cases I have direct knowledge of, there was never any reason to believe that any of the patents were infringed. They seemed to be a random assortment that were generally in the same technical field as the victim company. But the result is always the same -- a payoff to the 800 pound gorilla.
It is sick, but true.
By the way, the author of the article used to work at the firm where I got my start (Fenwick & West). He got booted for being too much of an asshole -- and among lawyers, that is saying a lot. Wired did a cover story on him back around '97.
-Steve
Democracy is a poor substitute for liberty.
Reading the article, it occurred to me that this might be a self-correcting problem; but then I thought a bit more and decided it wasn't.
.gif files) was filed in the mid-eighties, and will be expiring in another couple of years.
My reasoning went like this: IIRC, patents granted in the U.S. provide protection from competition for 11 years, and may be renewed, but not indefinitely; hence the Unisys patent on LZW compression (used in
Once a patent has expired, that's it -- you can't re-patent it, and neither can anyone else. So logically, if people are currently filing zillions of frivolous patents now, that means in twenty years it will become considerably more difficult to file frivolous patents.
But then I sat back and thought "No, in twenty years they'll be filing a whole new set of frivolous patents on technologies that don't yet exist; and nobody will care about all those frivolous patents that they filed way-back-when."
A problem like this -- too many patents filed -- would be self correcting in an era with a more stable technological basis. When the innovation rate is slow it's a lot easier to make a patenting system work well; incremental changes are a whole lot easier to evaluate for patentability. This is why the USPTO did so well for its first couple of hundred years; innovation was definitely going on, and fairly rapidly compared to historical levels (eg the Middle Ages), but it was still occurring at a manageable pace. The car fulfills the same function as a cart; light bulbs are a light source, just like candles or lanterns. The technologies seen in the first couple of centuries of American history were, for the most part, logical extensions of and replacements for pre-existing devices.
But all that began to change when the pace of innovation really picked up. It's hard to assign a date, but for convenience you might pick the last years of World War II as the beginning of the rapid increase in the pace of innovation. Even then, it wasn't so bad at first. But as the rate of innovation picked up, two factors were greatly exacerbated: 1) the complexity of new devices, and 2) the increasing prevalence of new devices with little or no ancestral devices. Television, for example: a television is not only considerably more complex than it closest pre-existing analogue, the radio, but also performs a previously unknown function -- the transmission of images over distance. Evaluating the originality of the first TV is not hard; but what about all the subsidiary patents that soon follow? Patents on improved antennae and cathode ray tubes, channel selectors and so on. To seriously evaluate all of those, you basically need to be an electrical engineer, with lots of time to study each new application.
But when you're getting dozens of patents a day, and you have the same size staff as you had before, and the applications you get increasingly arcane, your ability to fairly evaluate each new app goes down the drain under the workload.
The current pace of innovation cannot be sustained indefinitely; eventually our tech base will settle down again. In the meantime, we need two things: more specialists at the USPTO charged with evaluating patents in a particular field, and stricter standards for what is patentable. Business methods should not be patentable, nor should software -- or compression algorithms like the LZW one mentiond above.
Unfortunately, these reforms are going to be difficult to implement. Stricter patent standards will not be practical until we have more specialists to fairly evaluate the influx of arcane high-tech patents. Unfortunately, those specialists are mostly the ones applying for patents. You can make a heck of a lot more money by getting patents than by granting them. In order to attract the specialists it needs, the USPTO is going to have to offer competitive salaries; and that, I think is going to take an act of God. Chances are slim to none that Congress would raise their budget without a pressing political reason, and the only other source of cash are the application fees and maintenance fees. Increasing the budget by soliciting and granting more patents would simply worsen the problem we're trying to avoid in the first place.
I sure hope this gets worked out, but I predict that the USPTO will continue more or less as it has been for the forseeable future.
I'm currently studying film history, and it's interesting to see how similar patent issues that effect the technology were causing problems on the technology use during the early days of cinema.
By 1907, Edison and his Vitascope (which BTW he did NOT invent, but licensed with Thomas Arnat et al) had alot of patents on movie camera & projector technology, including the crucial "latham loop" that relieved tension in the film. Since 1897, Edison had sought to force competitors out of business using these patents. One company, American Mutoscope & Biograph (AM&B) refused to cooperate, and won against Edison in 1908. Edison, refusing to give up, continued to sue AM&B based on the latham loop. The 2 parties negotiated a settlement, forming the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) in 1908, headed by Edison, AM&B, and a number of other smaller movie companies. The purpose of the MPPC was two-fold. First, to prevent the entry to market of new competitors to the field, and second, to limit encroachment of foreign films on the US market. It was collusive protectionism all the way -- the formation of a self-perpetuating oligopoly. With the patents the MPPC held, anyone who picked up a camera to make a film had to pay them or be sued. Ditto for exhibitors, 'cause the MPPC had patents on projectors as well.
Once they'd solidified their hold on projection & filming, they went for distribution, forming the General Film Company (GFC) in 1910. The GFC was the sole contractor for all MPPC companies' films. With this move, the only place to go for movies was the MPPC/GFC, controlled by the oligopolists.
In 1912 the US gov't finally began going after the MPPC as an illegal trust. They won in 1915 & broke it up, invalidating a number of the patents in the process, with the resulting companies devolving into the number of smaller movie studios we know from the 20's through the middle of the century. In the end, what was lost? Nothing less than all of the innovation small players could have brought to the technical end of the movie industry in its infancy. That's the problem with such tight patent restrictions in nascent technology -- the first out of the gate, not the best, tends to win.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
Too much sex as bad a too less
Obviously it's too easy to get things patented these days, especially in areas of high technology as few if any patent officer workers are well versed in the areas of technology. Most of the patent office stampers would have little inclination as to how an intigrated circuit works or if an item of software recently designed is any different or unique from any other piece of similar software.
Kind of amazing to think 100 years ago Einstein was working in a patent office. My how times have changed.
GMD
watch this
It's quite obvious that there are a huge number of likely invalid patents out there that are in desperate need of judicial/USPTO review.
One possible way of taking care of this and perhaps decreasing the number of frivolous patent infringment lawsuits (redundant?) is to require that in order to file such a suit, the patent holder must first prove that the patent is valid.
Whether this would happen through a judicial review process or a quick-and-dirty PTO review I don't know. This way, the person/company filing the lawsuit would have to be damn sure that the patent was legitimate before firing off a threatening lawsuit.
I don't really know how well this would work but it seems (at first blush anyway) like a decent idea. But then again, IANALAIWKMIIW (And I Would Kill Myself If I Was).
Another (perhaps equally hare-brained) idea would be to require patent holders to provide less restrictive/expensive licensing terms to academic and non-profit researchers and groups with the option of changing the licensing terms if the licensee derives a commercial product from the patent. This way, academic researchers could relatively easily incorporate patented ideas into their work instead of reinventing the wheel but still provide the original patent holder with protection on the original IP.
Just a thought
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
Help! Help, I'm being oppressed!!!
I think the current patent system is missing a necessary part of what should be patent regulation. Complexity. A simple idea should not be patentable. The thing is, a simple idea requires insight, not work. No one needs to stimulate insight, it is part of work, you need to stimulate creative work. Now, perhaps if it can be shown that significant work was required to produce a simple thing then it could be patentable, but that's not a major issue.
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
I just thought of this, so I haven't really worked through the ramifications, but I thought of something that could fix the whole problem, and really wouldn't cost anyone anything.
In patent litigation, the plaintiff should have to prove (or at least show that it's likely) that the defendant didn't develop their own technology independently. In other words, if Person A invents a widget, and Person B invents the same widget independently, Person A can't enforce their patent against Person B. But if Person B took Person A's idea and built the same widget, only then is it a patent violation.
Compare that to the law as it stands, where Person A and Person B could both invent something, but Person A happens to reach the patent office first, and therefore Person B can't use his own invention.
By redefining patents in this way, the USPTO could still grant as many patents as they want, and companies would still spend money in R&D because no one could steal their idea. But it would go a long way toward preventing patents from stifling competition or innovation.
Obvious ideas could be patented but the patent would be all but meaningless because they couldn't use it against anyone.
Business method patents would be weakened considerably, but IMHO most business methods are either obvious ideas or natural results of changes in the economic climate.
Software patents would also be weakened, since software is based upon mathematical algorithms, which are also easy to develop independently.
Prior art would make a stronger case for the defendant, since they wouldn't have to present enough evidence to invalidate the patent. They would only have to show enough evidence to prove that their invention was based upon research/inventions that preceded the patent.
It seems like a win for everyone, except the Patents-As-A-Weapon business model, which is what we're really trying to get rid of, after all.
Or maybe I'm wrong and this would be the worst thing to happen to patents. If you can think of any reason why this wouldn't help, I'm willing to rethink my opinion.
OTOH, BTW, FYI, IMHO, AFAIK, IANAL.
How about this?
I was searching for the butt hinge patent, but all kinds of wild things showed up on google. This is a riot.
It used to be that someone with a B.S. degree had a good chance of deciding whether or not a patent should be granted. If a doctorate is needed, can the USPTO sustain that? There is no way they could hire enough good people for every field. The people they would need are the people who should be out inventing.
I'm sorry but I disagree with your last sentence. I think the patent office needs some intelligent people with critical minds and willingness to rapidly come up to speed on some new technology that they aren't familiar with. I would imagine that being an inventor requires a whole different set of intellectual skills. They have to be sharp also but rather than being critical, they need to be overly creative and imaginative. Whereas a patent reviewer should be good at identifying what's been done before, the inventor has to create something that hasn't been done before. I don't think that stocking the patent office full of excellent reviewers would hurt our nations ability to innovate.
GMD
watch this
I'm sick of you anti-competitive socialists! "Booo hwooo, I can't, I can't, I can't booo hooo, the big bad capitalists, oh if we just had "fair" markets"... If it were not for patents and IP I would submit that there would not even be a compatible material for use. You guys are always looking for the problem instead of fixing it Disgusting.
Clearly "Too many" patents are bad, as are "Too few". Thats what "Too many" and "Too few" mean. Its like when someone says "Too much of that is bad for you". Of course "Too much" is bad for you. That's what "Too much" means - that quantity that is bad for you.
Baz
You are highly confused. Patents are the very essence of socialism. Whereas government granted monopolies are the very anti-thesis of capitalism. They don't even have the "value" of having come about ultimaately through market selection.
If you are defending excess government interference and control in the economy, then you are the socialist here.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Patents were a good idea when there was less innovation. Now that there's a lot of innovation, the large number of resulting patents is stifling innovation.
This seems like a very strange position to me. The evidence for the innovation-stifling effects of patents seems to be almost entirely the rapid increase in the rate of innovation.
The reason a lot of things happen faster now is that things are done in software that could previously only be done in hardware.
While open-source development is a wonderful thing, don't get me wrong, most of the actual work in the country is done by for-profit organizations who are doing it because they think it will make them money.
If such organizations were unable to protect their new products against instant competition (remember, when it takes little time for the company to develop the product, it will also take very little time for their competitors to copy it), there would be very little motivation to develop them.
To my mind, the existance of software patents is patently (pun intended) obviously necessary for the rapid rate of innovation.
Of course, the term of those patents might be longer than is reasonable...
But us software geeks often seem to think we're unfairly impacted by patents. We routinely deal with thousands of software components in each of our products... why, if we had to worry about whether each of them were patented, we couldn't get anything done. And our products are obsolete so soon that we shouldn't be burdened by this ridiculously long protection.
On the other hand, I have first hand knowledge that almost every one of the 1000s of parts in your car is protected by one patent or another.
And each of those car models has only a 3-5 year product lifetime.
Let's face it, new tech both pays off faster - if it's any good - and needs to be supplanted faster. So let's cut in half the patent term for computer-related patents with each Moore iteration. Boy will that be a spur to innovation! Get it out this year 'cause next year you won't own it for as long, if you don't file 'til then.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Once a patent has expired, that's it -- you can't re-patent it, and neither can anyone else. So logically, if people are currently filing zillions of frivolous patents now, that means in twenty years it will become considerably more difficult to file frivolous patents.
But then I sat back and thought "No, in twenty years they'll be filing a whole new set of frivolous patents on technologies that don't yet exist; and nobody will care about all those frivolous patents that they filed way-back-when."
You are absolutely right, but you don't go far enough. Frivolous patents will be filed for (and granted!) on the same invention again and again. This is very common practice in the pharamceutical industry, where a slightly modified version of a drug (perhaps with a new coating) is granted a new, broad patent which they can then use to extort money from or even completely shut down attempts at making a generic version of the old (now patent-expired) drug.
This practice is not limited to the pharmaceutical field, BTW, that is merely the most widely known example (and most potent, since people's lives are affected and, quite possibly ended, as a result).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If I said Patents belong to the masses I would be a socialist "Whereas government granted monopolies are the very anti-thesis of capitalism." That's exactly what i mean about looking for a problem and whining. Since when does an existing patent restrict you from doing something another way or possibly even doing it better? "They don't even have the "value" of having come about ultimaately through market selection." I disagree, they become value place holders for innovation, They become value itself something marketable. They are expensive to procure and if you dont use it its a waste of development. Thus work done under the umbrella does indeed befome a function of market selection. I am defending a system that does dictate an environment for development and economic growth. It definately is not "regulation free" but it works... which is more than i can say for other non-protective systems. I mean comon you guys were lauding the Peruvian software initiative, look at their economy!
Mod me down, but they embrace alot of evil Zionism, and disgust for non Jews.
Make money, so my children are worth living on this planet and yours aren't.
How can you not have some racist feelings against a race who defines the lines of racism theirself. They feel their race deserves the planet even at the cost of being total perverts with the "law".
God spoke to me
This was the title of a Zine my friend Eddy Liddle in Japan used to keep. The title was in reference to the failures of semiotics because of the proliferation of symbols in the wake of the stunningly inexpensive media reproduction techniques that began to show up in the early twentiety century and are still proceding today in the likes of boradband, optical media and hard drives.
A similar idea is the basis of one of the chapters of Jameson's book Postmodernism although there are many earlier references along the same lines from many authors. The the general idea is that as language proliferates through the intervention of machines meaning becomes destabilized. The euphoria part is a choice made by the individual. You can love it or hate it although it becomes increasingly difficult to remain unmoved which is what most people seem to prefer.
The abundance of patent data to the point that it becomes a cloak of knowledge rather than a guiding light will lead to an overhaul of the system, but not until the majority of Americans are moved as they were in the early part of the last century. Obviously, that movement will only come with financial chaos.
On the bright side, (this is the euphoria part) we might not be that far away from reforms.
Plato was a student of Socrates, it was not Aristotle.
Aristotle was a student of Plato.
Aspects of special relativity were already recognized before publication of the 1905 paper. These include the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction formulas, the invariance of the speed of light in Maxwell's equations and various philosophical musings by Poincare. I am convinced that if Einstein had not developed the Special theory others soon would have, perhaps in another five to ten years. The more formidable acheivement is the General Theory and that too has a certain mathematical inevitability about it.
"Obtuse Anger is that which is greater than Right Anger" - Lewis Carroll
So, why not tax patents annually, such as real estate is taxed annually, to help society pay those external costs? Patents could be taxes at 5% of the self-assessed value of the patent, with the proviso that anyone wanting to have the patent put into the public domain could pay the current year's self-assessed value directly to the patent holder (or indirectly through the U.S. Treasury). Then, anyone sitting on a bogus patent would have to pay yearly costs based on their speculation, and thus deterring patent squatting, and there would be a way for industries to buy out a patent holder without allowing them to monopolize an industry (such as one poster showed happened with Edison and the film industry). Essentially, this is saying patent holders can't have it both ways. If they say they have something valuable, they should pay taxes on it; if it is not valuable, they should not be able to use it to prevent others from innovating.
The same sort of logic can be used to tax copyrights and other forms of so-called "intellectual property" as well. Essentially, a tax on intellectual property turns almost all bogus patents and indefinite copyrights into hot potatoes that people would have to make serious business decisions about -- keep it out of the public domain at some annual cost, or let it go.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This story with IBM sounds a lot like mafia people going around night clubs asking for protection money...
Well, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people already know this, but as far as the quality of patents go, they simply stink.
While I don't remember what date the special was aired (sometime in 2001), NBC (in the United States) aired a special on the USPTO and how patent examiners are given performance pay. The third paragraph in this article supports this fact. While the quality of a patent is not measurable, the quantity of patents approved by examiners is.
Since the USPTO does provide performance pay due to a lack of examiners, they have basically created their own problem. Since everything under the sun is patentable (including restaurants attached to hotels and bra size measurements), the examiners have basically build themselves a self-reinforcing problem that continually encourages them to rubberstamps patents, regardless of what the patent application is for.
I'm not at all surprised at what gets through the USPTO these days. Simply put, the excessive number of patents only serves the examiners and the legal system.
Colt, as in the company that made handguns, had a patent at the beginning of time for "the concept of a projectile weapon"
The process is a pendulum! patents are over- and under- used and enforced in cycles... the only true "happy medium" comes during an upswing or downswing... like everything else in economics!