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.

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.