How to Become a Patent Millionaire

An anonymous reader writes "SF Gate has an article about people who patent ideas for things they have no intentions of building, hoping to license technology or block competitors from doing something similar. As if the patent system weren't screwed up enough already."

Comments

Lemelson and the bar code

[snarkh]

Lemelson had to wait years before collecting royalties for some of his ideas, such as the bar code.

Lemelson did not invent the bar code. In fact he engaged in practices very similar to the ones described in the article. His patent was an extremely generic one for machine vision applications, which according to his interpretation covered bar code readers. He was one of the people who never implemented any of their ideas, preferring to wait for other people to reinvent them and then ask for royalties.

Interesting point in the French patent law

[franois-do]

The following is not related exactly to people patenting what they do not intend to build, but about corporations buying patents they do not intend to use productively.

There is one thing I learned some time ago about the french law on patents, and that times it is good news : according to these laws, if some organization buys a patent and has not begun to commercialize something in a given lapse of time after that (two years, if I remember well), the patent author gets his rights back :-)

That forbids a corporation to buy a patent just to bury it; the legislator here estimated that such a thing did not go in the way of public interest.

I do not know how it is in other countries, european or not.

Not having patents on software or algorithms is a good thing for mankind as a whole, I am pretty sure of that, but probably not for the inventors themselves. Don't you think abnormal that the inventors of the Fast Fourier Transform never got a cent for their invention (which was a bright one) from the people who use it daily, and even sell devices using their algorithms ? Did not Boyer and Moore deserve something from the community for their clever string-search algorithm? And what about Quicksort?

I guess that if software and algorithm patents are forbidden, something should be put into place so the human community recognizes contributions of great value, and rewards them accordingly. As there are perhaps not more than one or two VERY bright ideas (like Boyer-Moore's) each year, or at most a score of them, this should be a manageable thing.

Re:This is why

[The_Rook]

also remember that the purpose of the patent system is to encourage inventors to come up with new ideas and then publish them. without a patent system, every new invention would be treated as a trade secret. for example, you'd buy a television or computer with sticker on the box saying (or trying to say) that opening the box is a violation of the manufacturer's trade secret.

properly employed, patents eliminate the requirement to reverse engineer products because the complete schematics of how the products work are already published in the government's patent database. one of the problems with the patent system is that the courts screwed it up by saying only a lawyer is qualified to say whether a patent has been infringed. this has put published active patents off limits to the engineers who would actually use them.

imagine, for example, if the wright brothers had not been allowed to patent the airplane. they would have never published the wing warping technique, leaving it to other inventors to rediscover it independently. whenever they sold an airplane to someone, they would have to force a contract on the customer forbidding the customer from reverse engineering the machine.

interstingly, all these things are parts of eulas because software developers are not required to publish copyrighted software code. copyrighted code is essentially treated as if it were a trade secret.

Paid better than you think

[ProfBooty]

Patent examiners generally start at the GS-7/9 grades making roughly 50-60k a year. Promtion can be rapid, and it is possible to make 90k a year before bonuses/overtime. There was a pay increase several years ago to keep examiners from quiting to work in the private sector as patent agents.

http://www.popa.org/newsletters/julaug00.shtml

Patent examiners are paid on GS scale with specailly 1224, it tops out around 120k for a gs15/10. Attorneys generally make around 100k to start and go up to around 400k.

Re:jury

[mavenguy]

IANAL but IWAPE (I was a Patent Examiner (Damn, there goes any credibility I might have had)) but I think most patent infringment/validity trials are (or, at least, were) held in front of a US District Court Judge without a jury who makes rulings on both law and facts. A trial before a jury, however, is an option available to the accused infringer (defendant).

Re:This is why

[Moofie]

And what would happen if Mr. Curtiss had been an inventor working out of a bike shop, and didn't have the funding to fight the (now successful) Wright brothers legally?

And, finally, the situation wasn't settled by the courts. The Army nationalized ALL the patents and licensed ALL of them freely to anybody who wanted to build airplanes.

Patents exist for the sole purpose of encouraging technological development by rewarding innovation.

Particularly in emerging technologies, a ten-year court battle can make technology development stagnate.

A good book on the subject is supposed to be "Unlocking the Skies" by Seth Schulmann. I have it on hold at my library, but I've yet to read that particular account.