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New Patent Legislation Makes Some Headway
dreamchaser writes "EETimes has an article discussing new legislation that will stop Congress from siphoning off money from the Patent Office. The hope is that increased money in the coffers will allow the hiring of more highly skilled engineers to look at technical patents, as well as speed up the sometimes ponderous process of securing a patent. The bill has passed the house with a resounding 379-28 vote, and now goes to the Senate. Given all the discussions about how so many bad patents are being granted, could this be a good thing?"
The legislation would keep patent office revenue in-house and thus could expedite the patent-application process, which grows lengthier and more costly as technology gets more complex, sources said.
Is it just me, or does this sound like it is just throwing more money at a problem and hoping it will solve itself? If the legislation doesn't have provisions to specify new procedures to actually get around to solving the problems, it is unlikely to solve much of anything.
You probably shouldn't click this.
If the patent office is still run the same way as it is now (with the quantity of approvals vs. quality), this will be worthless. Only with true reforms of the patent system (non-obvious patents, abolishment of software patents, protection of inventions, not algorithms) will the patent office really be reformed.
"Could this be a good thing?"
Well, it COULD... It doesn't seem likely to me, though. As far as I can tell, the people who grant patents tend to be missing the point entirely. How is one-click shopping really an innovation that should be protected???
No, if you ask me, it needs a complete overhaul, not just more money. And disregarding the practical considerations, I still think it's ethically ridiculous to lay claim to an idea.
Anything that could result in more engineers being hired is automatically good, from my point of view.
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The Patent Legislation has some inherent value in that it protects what most people perceive as property much as Copyright, Trade Secret, and morphing laws. But the "reasonable person" test MUST be made by the legislators and when we get Congresscritters like Grallice and Womit forming the senate majority including some of the industry reps. (Disney, Pixar, MPAA, RIAA, etc) what you get is a complete clash of culture involving Patents, Legislation, and new intellectual property. This tension is seem most recently in the USA where the DCMA act is a throwback to the days where physical processes are patentable much like when a Highway (Headway) act gets vetoed by the Pres. Bartlett and I'm not talking just about Pears here... Copyright will agree to happen in this same exact phase. It will probably just take a few years more to morph and develop.
Ohura
While I would hope that higher salaries would attract better employees, I seriously doubt that the government ever could (or should) compete with the range of salaries that these lawyers can earn in the private sector, especially if you factor in the occasional large jury award.
I think it's more important to attract more of the people who enjoy that kind of work and less of those who are using this as a stepping-stone. Increasing the salary is not very likely to accomplish this, unless the increase is for those who work there more than just five years.
to privatize the patent office. Contract out the work of reviewing patents, and renew the contracts of the best workers when the contracts expire.
what american people? not the average guy on the street that's for sure.
A good thing? LoL. All the article talks about is this making patents go through the system faster. "the company has been frustrated by the long wait for several key patents that, if granted, could strengthen its intellectual-property position in its target digital audio, infrared and MP3 chip markets" YAY! Maybe congress was siphoning off funds because the patent office is worthless? Congress isn't usually as dumb as you think :) What it sounds like to me is tons of intellectual property companies lobied congress hard for this change, they just want their patents to fly through the system faster.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
The question isn't whether more money for the USPTO will result in better engineers being hired, the question is whether it will remove the income incentive for approving as many patents as possible. Well, that and whether that change will shift the balance of interests enough to influence PTO behaviour.
Will there still be pressure from large corporations to get lots of patents approved? We've seen patent disputes cut both ways, so that may be a wash.
Anyway, don't hold your breath for this little change to result in massive review of the bad patents already issued. Patent law won't be in order until it's been thoroughly scoured by Congress with the express purpose of fixing it, and changing the status quo is the hardest thing for a legislative body of wealthy elites to decide to do...
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
This may be heartening news.
As things stand today, getting a patent, from the most complex biotechnologies, to the simplest gadget costs tons and takes years.
If, for once, the government does it right, ignores the lobbyists, and provides for the patent office to be less of a cash-cow by taxing crackpots, and granting every unscrupulous firm that asks a seventeen-year lock on breathing, we might see a time when it costs less to come up with an idea and use it to quit your day-job.
And on that day, I for one will shout 'Halliluyah!'
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
Smith, who chairs of the House Judiciary Committee's IP panel, said his bill, H.R. 1561, could result in 140,000 more patents being issued in the next five years. "That's 140,000 more economic opportunities for the American people," Smith said.
Maybe, but chances are for every one of those 140,000 monopolies there will be ten potential competitors who won't have any economic opportunities at all.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The fundamental breakage in the patent system today is that the patent office has only incentives from people getting patents. They get money per patent issued. They have every incentive to issue patents. They have no real incentives to be careful. That diffused cost is borne through society, but isn't an issue that is ever raised with the patent office.
This kind of feedback loop is well-known to economists. It goes under the name, "regulatory capture". And the patent office which was meant to regulate the patent system has indeed been completely captured by the interests of people who want patents issued.
Increasing how efficiently people get rewarded for existing behaviour doesn't help. Attempting to speed the process up while leaving the incentive system in its current broken state will make things worse.
Fix the incentives. First.
Not denying the fact that it took work to come up with some of these brilliant algorithms, but why should it be permitted that a process which can be _COMPLETELY_ replicated with pencil, paper, and a little bit of thought should be patentable?
If the process describes a physical process, that's fine... but if the process can be entirely carried out by mental steps alone (and any compression algorithm can be, the amount of time it would take to do this is immaterial to the fact that it *CAN* be done), then the process should categorically *NOT* be patented.
If they want to make money off of their brilliant idea, keep it a secret, give it trade secret status, and make money that way.... Allowing patentability on algorithms is almost tantamount to legislating what a person is and is not allowed to think about.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Chinese. :)
Fellowship 9/11
This is too little too late, even if it is well intentioned. There are enough bad patents out there to make a fortune for the owners for the next 20 years. Worse, the patent litigation process is so expensive for defendants that they often settle even knowing that the plantiff could never prevail in court. Not too many small companies have $1 million, which can be necessary to spend on a patent defense. So even with reforms, it will still be just as possible to bully small firms with patent barratry as a business model. Until it is more realistic for someone to defend themselves against bogus patent claims, new laws about what you can patent won't do much good.
It says Congress has taken away $750 million in revenue since 1992. That's less than $70 million per year. Adding that $70 million back into the patent office's $1 billion budget is only a 7% increase. Should we expect a huge difference?
And the logical extension of your claim is that circuits can't be patentable since they are composed of capacitors, resistors and inductors, all of which "behave" according to mother nature's rules. Or is there some obvious boundary that I've overlooked?
The existing rules we have about patents are not so bad, but they certainly aren't applied well. A patent cannot be obvious (check). A patent must be new, and of value (check). But how are these criteria to be interpreted? The only simple answer--to bar all intellectual property--doesn't apply to most of the world, because we are not communists. We agree intellectual property exists, in general, but we disagree about how it is to be managed.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
The patent system is at its weakest when the examiners make obvious mistakes, like granting patents for technological advances that have significant prior art or are blazingly obvious extensions of existing tech.
People question the system, with reason, each time it is obviously serving to stifle innovation, like when a company with a questionable patent uses it purely to bring lawsuits against "violators" instead of even trying to develop a product.
More resources for the patent office will probably result in more and better examiners who will be able to avoid these kinds of extreme abuses... which in turn will reduce press coverage and public awareness of the continuing (but more subtle) problems -- which will in turn serve perpetuate the patent system in spite of its fundamental flaws that remain unresolved.
Making a wheel less squeaky doesn't get it greased.
Personally, I think it's a good move, simply because I don't see the patent system as a "house of cards" type of thing. There will be changes eventually (probably later rather than sooner), but it's not the kind of system that will collapse -- after all, it does serve a purpose in spite of its weaknesses and loopholes.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.