MSNBC Looks At Patent Abusers' Victims

Camel Pilot writes "Patent claims have reached a new low when "inventor" Witold Ziarno sued the American Red Cross for using the web to accept donations. This MSNBC article discusses this case and how it was beat using web archives and prior art! Also Pangia Intellectual Property has given up hope on extracting fees from small e-commerce websites for its supposedly patent on e-commerce. The only problem with the PanIP case is that they got away without having to pay for the legal fees for the defense in an obvious abuse of the system." (See this previous post for more on PanIP's dropped case.)

Comments

Re:Very strange

[inode_buddha]

There is a difference between the date applied for and the date granted - often measured in years. None of those facts alters the poor ethics of suing a charity (for purposes of the current discussion).

Maybe this is where tort reform should start

[eclectro]

If the patent holder loses it's case in court, it's forced to pay the legal fees of the defendant.

Oh yes, they get kicked in the nuts afterwords.

Also, the patent office needs to be held accountable as well. Maybe they could fire the examiner that issued the patent.

I'm not saying that this is the difinitive answer, just some ideas to change things for the better.

Screw patents

[pubjames]

The main argument behind patents is that without them, nobody would have motivation to come up with new ideas and no research and development would be done.

I say bullshit.

Patents are holding developments back. If you have an idea for a better mousetrap build it and sell it. If someone else copies your idea then you'll just have to improve it, or find a way to make it cheaper than them, or whatever. You'll have to act quicker to make money on your ideas, and innovate faster. I think that's a good thing.

Re:Screw patents

[thing2b]

I think that the speed that the patent office takes holding developments back. Personally I would like to see patents recevied and processed within a month and all small time I.T. patents expire in 5 years.

Re:Screw patents

[cdavies]

Oh come on, just because a few people abuse patents you think they should be abolished?

Your idea is merely a recipe for the rich getting richer. John Q. Inventor invents a new improved foo, then Big Foo Corp. comes along and reverse engineers his foo, and begins manufacturing them on a scale poor old John can never compete with. Economies of scale ensure the small business can never win.

So John either has the option of going honourably bankrupt, or of selling his idea to Big Foo Corp. in the first place to save them the reverse engineering costs. Either way, its a waste of his time.

Patents work. Its just that the US patent office is incredibly lax in investigating patent applications. This is easily solved by means of a massive cash injection. Though god knows where tha t money will come from.... (Further rant on republican fiscal policy clipped)

Re:Screw patents

[__aagctu1952]

Getting rid of patents altogether isn't the answer - the mousetrap analogy only works for low-R&D items. High/extreme R&D cost industries like medicine and aerospace on the other hand would simply collapse, or at least stop innovating with a no-patent system (it would create an entire system of free riders). Instead, we should get rid of bad patents. Sticking "on the web" at the end of an existing invention or trivial implementation is not, I repeat not patent-worthy.
We should start with a working patent review process and go from there...

Re:Screw patents

[nacturation]

That's all well and good for internet inventions where somebody slaps a cookie and a database together and you suddenly have 1-Click payments. But what about in the real world where companies can spend billions building a better "mousetrap" as it were? Have a team of 50 people doing R&D, with an average cost of a conservative $200,000 per year for each employee to cover salaries, benefits, overhead, materials, etc... and suddenly you've spend $10M for one year of R&D. If you're developing something really high-tech, you might put 5 years into it. So it's a $50M R&D bill at the end.

But that's okay, you've gone and built some new technology... maybe a better medical scanner or something. You expect to be able to sell 1,000 of these scanners to high-end facilities in a 10 year period, and each one costs you $25,000 in materials and engineering costs. Factoring in your R&D cost, each scanner had $50,000 worth of R&D invested into it. So you need to charge $75,000 just to break even and make no profit. So factoring in profit as well as marketing, insurance, and legal fees, etc. you'll likely charge maybe $200,000 for each one.

Along comes some other company with only 2 employees, they purchase your scanner, reverse engineer it, send it to China and have a couple thousand manufactured costing them $25,000 each. Subsequently, they release it into the market for only $50,000 because they didn't have to invest the additional $50,000 per unit in a major R&D program. Too bad the company investing in all that R&D couldn't protect their invention from copycats.

For trivial e-mousetraps, yeah... the Ayn Rand compete-at-all-costs-and-screw-government-interfer ence approach would serve you well I guess. But for any non-trivial mousetraps, patents protect those who invest the time and money into developing them.

Re:no conscience

[thryllkill]

What I don't get is people who are shocked at how low other humans will go for money. Like no one ever tried to take advantage of do gooders before.

Re:no conscience

[Anonymous Coward]

what does it take to chase a charity for alleged patent abuse. How does he sleep at night?

Probally the same malfuction that gets the RIAA to request license fees from the Girlscouts to sing *puff the magic dragon*.

In reality, a charity isn't immune to license fees. It's good PR and good on your taxes to donate the license fees, but you are not required to do so. I wouldn't blame anyone for charging the Red Cross for legit license fees. I would however blame the US patent system for allowing jarheads to patent trivial things like donations on a god damned website, as if this is a new and unique idea.

Pathetic

[Wolfbone]

"Something can be simple, but we shouldn't be deceived by this," said Jack Slobodin, another patent attorney. "If no one has done it before or thought of it, it deserves a patent. Like the paper clip, or the Post-it note." And the inventor deserves compensation, Slobodin said."

Protecting the rights of inventors is a necessary part of the research and investment fields, said Slobodin.

Otherwise, he said, there would be little incentive for taking risks: "The inventor should have a key to the courthouse. There's a long, sordid history of big companies stealing the work of private inventors."

The same old hopelessly flawed logic and a very good example of it: To make paperclips available to the World, which is what you are expected to do in return for the exclusive rights to profit from doing so, you need to invest in a paperclip factory, it's workforce, distribution network and all the other expenses associated with manufacturing investment. There lies the risk - a very great financial risk and rightly addressed by the patent system. If you consider an equivalently simple software or business method idea, where is that risk now? Just what exactly is it that needs to be protected? The only investment risk that needs to be protected in this case is the investment in the patent application itself and the litigation expenses required to extort money from legitimate and honest businesses and organisations.

Just who do the legislators think they're protecting when they engineer a system that enables worthless parasites like PanIP to persecute small businesses and others even to gratuitously attack charities?