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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?"
How do we know that this wasn't just some insignificant rider on some more important "terrorist fighting legislation"?
What is the House Bill number?
I have been pwned because my
Maybe this will head off a lot of the SCO/MS/Anderer bull****.
After all they have 20 more bogus claims coming down the pike designed to do nothing but extort monies out of the true inovators and risk takers.
Change it is coming.
I am not particularly a big fan of patents in general because of the amount of abuse that the system receives, this 'extra' cash in the coffers could either go one of two ways. Patents will be forced to become more realistic and used properly, or people will be able to 'specialise' patents to an even greater degree and so create more crap than before.
Patents in general are still a bad thing IMHO.
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
The facts are:
I'm surprised the patent office is undergoing such a wild goose chase with no data to back the project up. We expect more from services funded by tax payers.
Personally I think the patent process is a house of cards. At some point it will tumble. This bill will hopefully just make it happen faster
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
They must be trying to make up for the
Madrid Protocol
where now you have a direct means of applying for registration in 60 countries throughout Europe, Asia, Latin and South America by filing a single application in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
hmmmm......
A friend will come and bail you out of jail, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "damn that was fun!"
Wouldn't it be grand if when a patent was applied for it was sent out to a number of people who had signed up to review patents of a certain type. These people would provide feedback to the patent auditor and there would then be the possibility of a quick rejection.
Otherwise the auditor would have to do the same leg work as before, but this should reduce the amount of time a paid employee would have to review a patent, and allow more time for them to evaulate the "tricky" ones.
"My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality." - Muad'Dib
I used to work in the Trademark Division at the USPTO. One of the criticisms my friends on the Patent side had was that there were too many patent examiners who were engineers and not lawyers as well. They would issue patents even though there was caselaw to support not granting a patent in a particular case. My friends felt the Patet side needed more lawyers, who understand the legal theory behind the patent system and less engineers, who appeared to issue patents based purely on scientific theory.
I don't know if there are right or not. And I am certain there are some lousy lawyers as well as some lousy engineers issuing patents in the Patent Office. The question is, why should the Patent office be any different than any other Federal agency that requires an attorney to represent the interests of the public good?
The hope in this is that once Congress ceases to view the USPTO as a revenue source, they will be more receptive to the argument that overly-broad patents (and trademarks) hurt the economy overall.
What so called experts will they hire? Tech experts who have been in the industry for several years or more politicians who could siphon off a bit more money to advance their political status? WHy does it seem that whenever it comes to patents, everyone is either passing the buck, or chasing their own tail.
How do you differentiate the work done in the private sector by that done in the public? I guess you could find people who would rather review applications then prepare them but thats a long shot. Increasing salary is a sure fire way to get, and retain, people.
Personally this is one thing I'll never understand. People refuse to allow our governments to pay competitive salaries and then are upset when they have to stand in line because some clerk is completely incompetent. You get what you pay for!
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
I'll give an example, an absurd one. Somebody actually succeeded in getting a patent for a helmet that you wore on your head that was airtight - except you would be breathing oxygen generated by little cactus's that sat on a shelf near your ears inside the helmet !!!! No, it's not a gag!
The point is that anyone but that inventor knows that that patent is wasted time and effort on the inventors part, but he paid his share of the fees too. I dont want some one at the government looking at my patent for worthyness or not; that's NOT what they should do. The *marketplace* determines that, not the patent office. A patent on a stupid or unneeded thing is worthless.
We dont need armies of government types doing this. The marketplace does it for us.
You can't reform a system that encourages a person to "sit on" their ideas until some millionaire offers to buy it from them. There are many inventions out there that could save lives, money, whatever, that won't get to market beacuse the greedy inventer won't release it without a million dollar buyout. The drug companies are a prime example of this. They will watch millions of people suffer and die rather than give up even a penny to make a possibly life saving drug available. This is what all IP gives us. It's turning the creative process into a poorly run lottery. Doing away with IP can only help weed out the chaff. (Aw, jeez. No more "Pet Rocks"). Doing away with IP can insure that good inventions will be available to all, instead of rotting on the shelf waiting for those mythical millions to appear. Doing away with IP will insure that old works won't be sold again and again as new. All the creative geniuses(sp) can work for hire, like the rest of us, instead reaping millions from great grandpa's 75 year old cartoons.
What?
(emphasis mine)
I get your gist, but have to disagree on a slight technicality: you mean software algorithms, I assume, because the word "algorithm" can constitute all sorts of processes that I believe should be protected by patents. If I come up with a process to cheaply digest organic matter into hydrocarbon chains (i.e., oil), and the temperature, pressure, composition etc. are all crucial to this process, how are those parameters and that sequence of reactions different from an algorithm? But when the algorithms involve manipulating numbers, rather than molecules, I certainly agree with you.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
If the patent office recieves a fixed budget regardless or the number of patents they grant, they can objectively determine whether or not to grant the patent.
If their budget depends on the number of patent applications they get, which depends on the number of patents they grant, then it is in their interest to grant more and more patents - regardless of merit.
The facts are:
1. There are bad patents. No one disputes that - like the amazon patent on one-click shopping and the transmeta patent on code-morphing.
2. There are good patents. Patents on compression are a good example of such patents. They involve some serious work by one or two geniuses who deserve some monetary reward on their work.
This is the whole problem, too many people don't see patents for what they are. They are not a form of "protection", they are a form of controll. Sort of like saying "well the King disallows bad religions, and the King disallows good religions - so we should do a study of which religions are good and which religions are bad" . NO, Pull your head out!!! Annytime you restrict how people can use any type of innovation you are going to have negative and unpredictable consequences. Some are worse than others, but lets get real - as long as patents exist you are not going to have a fair patent system any more then we could expect a King to fairly choose which religions people can worship. (eg. how do you know that 50 other people wouldn't have independently invented similar compression routines within the next year or so anyhow patents or not, is their work and effort worthless)
The end in itself is to get rid of Patents, anything that goes in that direction is inherently good, anything that pulls away from it is inherehtly bad.
Depending on how you look at it, more "bad" patents could be better for the consumer.
;) )
If developers still want to produce a product after one of its underlying technologies has been patented, then they can come up with a different, possibly better, way to produce the same overall functionality of their product.
Unfortunately, it can lock out small developers unless they can get some VC, or maybe a spouse who wins the bread in the meantime. (I suspect that second method would be less stressful.
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Here's a new funding formula.
Funding = (# patents passed) / ( (length of time to validate patent) * (number of people who contest the patents in court) )
Take this new appropriation and use it to reward diligence by examiners to correctly declare a patent obvious and/or covered by prior art. This should reduce the frivolous filings and motivate the examiners to perform the job to the best of their ability. Findings by the initial examiner should be anonymously verified by a more senior examiner. Take it a step further, REQUIRE that a minimum number of possible "prior art" candidates be attached to the patent by the initial examiner. Points off their bounty for those that do not pass muster and bonuses for those that do.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
So what are all of the scientists employed by pharma companies doing? Playing tiddlywinks?
Come on... its not a perfect industry, but its not populated by evil people who want to watch people die, either.
If a drug company has developed a drug that actually works, they're not going to sit on it. If its not cost-effective for them to take it to market, chances are they'll out-license it. The problem is, developing a drug that actually works is hard and expensive. Once you have a drug that seems to work, actually proving that it is safe and effective (i.e., getting FDA approval) is also hard and expensive.
In my opinion, without IP protection, no one would ever do it. The primary output of a pharma company isn't the little pill you swallow: its the knowledge that making a pill with those ingredients produces a good medicine. Getting that knowledge is expensive... producing the pill is not. This is why generics are so much cheaper. If you don't let the people who spent the money to get the knowledge benefit from it... well, you aren't going to get many new medicines.
I'm NOT saying drug companies are paragons of virtue. But really, villifying them isn't going to solve the problem. There are real market forces at work here. Any solutions you present must take these forces into account, or its no solution at all.
In the debate on HR 1561, Howard Berman said, "Using a random sampling methodology, the PTO estimates its error rate for patents issued in fiscal year 2003 at 4.4 percent. That means more than 7,000 patents were issued in error. That means that at any given time given the 7-year pendency term for patents , there are over 120,000 bad patents in force. " He meant 17 year life, not "7-year pendancy", but his 120,000 figure was in the right ballpark. PTO currently gets $1.2 billion dollars to examine patents on everything under the sun... from blue lasers to new cleaning solvents to fishing reels. While some /.ers question whether giving PTO more money is wise, I can't see where starving it for cash will make it operate any better. Because it takes years not days to get a patent, USPTO is under pressure to speed things up. Speeding things up either means hiring more people to handle the cases, or spending less time on each application. Hiring more people requires more money. Spending less time means there will be more than 120,000 bad patents floating around at any given time.
When judgements for single patents can cost $500 million, as in the Eolas case, and patents on drugs can be worth a billion a year (e.g., Viagra) does it really make sense to cut back the PTO budget? Again, PTO gets a mere 1.2 billion. It's not like an extra billion will break the US budget. HR 1561, which was supported by the National Association of Manufacturers, the Intellectual Property Owners Association, and the American Intellectual Property Lawyers Association, will only add an extra $300 million.
$385 billion gets spent on the military and national defence. $332 Billion gets spent on interest on the national debt. $278.5 billion on health care. $46.2 billion on the federal Department of Education.
Only $1.2 billion for the agency that is supposed to protect all the R&D investments made in the US?
>>"new legislation that will stop Congress from siphoning off money from the Patent Office."
This isn't about throwing money at the problem, it's about removing some of the profit motive from recklessly granting patents. As things stand now, Congress is profiting off of the current patent madness. A Congressman can use that money to buy votes in his state with pork projects, which'll make him damn likely to support any patent that comes along.
Basically, no government agency (short of the IRS) should be turning a profit. If they are, they're either over charging or under-funding themselves.
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