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A Day in the Life of a Patent Examiner
ahdkd writes "Forbes has an older article which describes the world of patent examining: Search 500,000 Documents, Review 160,000 Pages In 20 Hours, And Then Do It All Over Again. Might help people understand the USPTO and patents in general a little better."
Rich and powerful interests don't want good patent examinations. They want the control that comes from having spurious patent approvals, which must be contested in expensive court proceedings. Those interests make sure that the U.S. patent and trademark office is under-funded. Twenty years ago there was better funding.
This is just one more example of the rapidly widening corruption in the U.S. government. Another example: Vice-president Dick Cheney, when he worked in the defense department, had the rules changed about procuring services during times of war. Then, as Vice-president, he pushed for a war with Iraq, and made sure the services went to his former company, Halliburton.
As David Letterman said, when you write a check for your part of the $87 billion that will be used to "rebuild" Iraq (after bombing it), remember that there are two Ls in Halliburton.
this article is yet another nail in the coffin of the patent system
Hopefully, but that is somewhere far off in the future. Right now we have to stop expansion of the patent system, like the way the EU is considering expanding it to cover all ideas implementable through software. How would patent examiners possibly get better by increasing their workload?
Plus it will be a lot harder to revise the patent system if it is embedded in every industry.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
There are certainly exceptions to this rule. For example, the pharmaceutical industry, because of its huge upfront costs, often will not develop a perfectly useful drug unless it can patent it. The reason is that without patent protection, other companies will free-ride on the FDA approval process and other startup costs.
Products which are high in intellectual content or up-front cost/risk and low in reproduction cost often need protection or they will not be developed.
There is no doubt in my mind that the patent system, applied to software, is extremely wrong and has the potential to destroy the industry or put it into the hands of gigantic corporations who can use cross-licensing to avoid patent problems.
But not every industry is software.
As to an economist "proving" something... well, give me a break. An economist can throw light on things, and come up with good ideas, but the idea of them proving things is, in most cases, absurd.
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over the last year there has been a company claiming a patent on streaming video/audio, (ie not live) but anything recorded that gets d/l and then is played back on a computer. I would say that 3/4 of the internet does that. They are now targeting the adult industry first and sending out letters to individuals demanding $1500 and up from each webmaster who has video on their site. Some of you might not care and say well its the adult industry let them get screwed, but this is a more serious issue for everyone who uses video/audio on their web site and will eventually get hit by this company for voilation of their patent. now this may see really silly to alot of people having a patent on this but they are out there sending letters and getting some people to sign. Here is a PR released by a site called fight the patent which is helping people who get letters fight this. http://www.fighthepatent.com/v2/PR-1117.html I cant seem to find a link anymore to a scanned in letter, but its very generic, and lits the persons name with some paragraphs stating their claim on their patents, how ever no web sites are mentioned in the letter and their demand is $1500+ and you need to have this in by nov 30th. this goes even further. if your a website owner and LINK to a site that has video/audio on it and make money off of sending users to that site you are also in violation.. now come on fokes this is really out of control it seems their patent is based upon an idea of sending data from one location to the next then playing back that video/audio content. There is no actual software technology they developed that people are using with out paying. just another reason these patent guys really need to look at older patents and start really removing them. Hell I saw a special on a father who patent his girl swining from left to right instead of front to back.. its all about prior art and acacia patent lies in 1990. so if there is anything or any proof of video/audio d/l, streaming this patent can be changed. sorry for the rant, its just a few of my friends are in this situation and i thought maybe a voice for them would help.. just search google news for the word Acacia to find out more.
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First, you are correct on the "proving" idea -- I will refrain from using the word "prove" along with "economist." I should have said "proved to me" instead.
As for the pharmaceutical industry, it should be known at part of the high up-front cost is FDA regulation. I believe the FDA is unconstitutional, and could be better created as a free market Underwriter's Laboratory type corporation. Target won't sell a lamp unless its UL tested. Why would drugs be any different?
If a company creates a drug, tests that drug, and brings it to market first, it would also be in its best interest to create contracts with distribution companies that they would not sell a competitors' version for a period of time. This is the best way to protect the interest of the discoverer of said drug.
Making a drug is only the first step. Testing is very important. Target and Walgreens and CVS won't just sell every drug. Your doctor probably won't prescribe a drug unless they know it is safe. If the FDA was knocked out, and patents dissolved, the drug companies would still have many incentives to create new products -- even with the threat of competition more visible.
What is the cost of creating a drug? It is the cost of discovery, the cost of development, the cost of testing, the cost of FDA approval, and the cost of advertising. I wonder how much the last two parts are compared to the first steps.
It's quite misguided to say the patent system as a whole is no good. Patents work well in some situations but not others. You can't cite a couple of bad cases from the software industry and conculde that the patent system is broken altogether.
E.g. pharmaceutical companies need to do a lot of research before creating new useful medicine. Research costs money and they can't make it back within just a couple of months of being first-to-market. They get a few years to control the market, make a profit, and move on. Another example, if you invent a better shovel, it'll be copied within a month easy, and there is no way you can make a profit from being first-to-market because people don't buy shovels every month. You need a patent of a few years to let you make some decent profit.
Patents work well for some industries but not others. There is also the way patents are used. Dolby Labs made a great use of their invention in noise reduction system. Nobody boycotts Dolby Labs, in fact everybody welcomes them, even though their patent and licensing increased the price of audio-visual equipment.
Dolby invented something, made it available to the public while making an honest profit and everybody's happy. Contrast that to the company who pops up with some vague patent and issues C&Ds or ridiculous invoices to the world, years after the public adoption of the patented system. We need to address and fix the latter stunts, not drop the entire patent system.
And the alternatives might be much better. Compulsory licensing coupled with compulsory investment reimbursement may work better than current patents.
I spend $10 bn to develop a new drug and plan to sell 100 mln packages for $200 each. If you want to join the fun and sell your own improved version, pay me about $50-100 for each package you sell. Let's also limit the total amount of royalty payment and time period.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Distributed patent processing -- have a bunch of (volunteer) people do the legwork etc. The patent officers can do the final check. It should help a little.
Exactly right. The law used to require that you actually produced the item you wanted to patent and give a sample to the patent office for examination. They changed that a while back and chaos is the result.
It used to be a major distinction in law that you could not patent an idea. In fact, many legal textbooks, ones which are not that old, say explicitly that you cannot patent an idea. However, with the relaxation of the requirement that you actually produce something, we have essentially turned the patent system into one that does the thing (patent ideas) which everyone agreed in years past they didn't want. The entire system has been compromised.
Here's a question for the opinionated Slashdot crowd...
Is it legit, ie: won't have me tied up with lawsuits for the next several years, to use patented technology for personal applications?
Think, perhaps, of a power-generation system that would be suitable for a small hobby farm. If I took the patent, built it, and used it on my own land, but did not sell it, am I violating the patent?
Yes, without patents the problem of unpatentable drugs would continue, and in fact would get much, much worse. Basically, the pharmaceutical industry would be destroyed and no new drugs would come to market.
The policy is a simple business decision involving weighing the costs against the profits, the latter being dramatically reduced by competition which does not have the same upfront costs.
In other words, someone has to do the testing. Without the testing, the drug cannot (or should not) be sold. Whoever does the testing is the loser, because the anybody else can make the same drug and free-ride on the testing of the first company.
Thus the best way to deal with non-patentable drugs is to have some other mechanism to prevent free-riders. Whether that is having the government assume the risk, or requiring the other sellers of the drug to pay royalties to the developer (i.e. something like patents but based on investment rather than originality), or something else.
We are already dealing with a major free-rider problem. Many countries in the world have price-fixing in pharmaceuticals (Canada is a major example). Hence they par far less than their fair share for the cost of drugs developed for the American market. They are being subsidized by the Americans who pay a greater-than-full-price for the medication in order to subsidize these countries all over the world. Thus Europe and Canada and some other countries are, through government action, free-riding on the American consumer. Other countries cannot afford the drugs at full price, and the pharmaceutical companies will sell at lower prices because the price still exceeds their cost of production, which is far less than the total cost of developing, testing, and producing the drug.
The only good weather is bad weather.
There are certainly exceptions to this rule. For example, the pharmaceutical industry, because of its huge upfront costs, often will not develop a perfectly useful drug unless it can patent it.
I remember a conference in which a guy from a lab told us that they did not look for certain efficient molecules because they were partly based on mecanisms patented by other labs. Thus, there are good molecules out there that could cure serious disease, but because they involve several mecanisms patented by different companies, nobody will ever look for them.
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...the (current) patent system ... is used as a tool to put sticks in the wheels of the competitors.
It's not a bug - it's a feature. Businesses want monopolies, so we set up this type of deal called a "patent" that lets them have one in return for financing and disclosing an invention.
The problem is that we're in many cases showing really poor tradesmanship: We give away monopolies for inventions that we would have had for free anyway. (Or we give excessively broad monopolies for barely non-trivial inventions.)
I shouldn't have to expatiate on why monopolies are mostly bad, and government granting them for free to corporations outside democratic control even worse. Go read Adam Smith.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Many people think patents are evil. The system of Patents, like any other system, is played with certain rules. Obtaining a patent does not mean that you have a ultra-strong right. Any issued patent is open to various challenges like reexamination and validty. When a patent owner sues another party for infringment, the infringer typically challenger the validity of the patent on all possible grounds. During such challenge a wide search of art, which is much more specific and comrehensive than that carried out by the Examiner, is carried out to invalidate patents. So even if there are patent examiners who have allowed crappy patents yet that does not mean end of the world. In a sense patents are the original open-source movement. It is to be more correct a open-concept with a little delay movement. Coke's formula is protected as trade-secret, and nobody can force them to reveal it. On the contrary, if Coke had patentended it it would have available to chemists to study as early as in 18 months (patnent App Publication). And anyone could make Coke after 15 years when the patent expired. Yes, 15 years seems long, yet within that time someone could have used the information in the Coke Patent and devised a better drink! That is the value of patent. Today no-one will ever know the software techniques embedded in proprietary products yet if they were patented or their techniques patented, we would have a printed record of such techniques which would enrich the knowledgebase of computer science. Without patents we can only rely on the charitable sense of these monolithic corporations to reveal their secrets. One must understand that patents apply to many things. A drug company keeping information secret is harmful to progress of medicine and society immediately, while a software company not patenting and keeping its techniques secret may only be a long-term threat to society. We must think of patent in more broader sense.