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EFF Runs Patent-Busting Challenge
markclong writes "Every year numerous illegitimate patent applications make their way through the United States patent examination process without adequate review. The problem is particularly acute in the software and Internet fields where the history of prior inventions (often called "prior art") is widely distributed and poorly documented. As a result, we have seen patents asserted on such simple technologies as One-click online shopping (U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411.), Online shopping carts (U.S. Patent No. 5,715,314.), The hyperlink (U.S. Patent No. 4,873,662.). The EFF is hosting a patent busting project to fight the most egregious abuses of the patent system."
That's right, slashdot readers are mounting a "Dupe Busting Challenge".
However it's still being ignored.
And then slashdot could apply for a patent.
How about a Wiki-type thing that lists some previous art for patents that a watchdog group lists out? Get some serious evidence and archive it in one place so the masses can check and see what patents they don't really have to pay attention to.
I hope every
Apparently the current US patent system does not want to spend the time/money to carefully check new patents. Now the EFF and volunteers are doing the USPTO's work for free.
It might remove the most harmful and obviously insane patents, thus making the idiocy of the current system less visible.
If only one or two of the folks in that office find themselves unemployed after an annual review, because to many of the patents they granted were overturned, it wont take long and the rest will actually take the couple hours required to document prior art on many of them.
An obvious next step, would be for the patent office itself to provide a public input period for feedback on various applications. Heck, if they posted new applications to /., they could save a lot of effort. At least half of the new applications would get responded to with a link documenting valid prior art within an hour of being posted, thereby saving the office the trouble of processing that application.
Not to be overly simplistic about answer this, but two wrongs won't make a right (the system as it is, and not doing anything about it), in an optimistic light if many patents get overturned it might embarrass the system into change, or at least expose it to more of the general public who use the common 'patented' technologies. Cleaning off the ridiculous patents might prevent frivolous cases from making it to court as well, and with a clogged up court system as it is, that wouldn't hurt either. I'm sure we can all think of a patent case that seems obvious that it shouldn't be in the courts but is. On an offtopic note, happy birthday me, still up to post on /. at 2 in the morning EST.
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
Essentially, you are suggesting that the US Patent Office use volunteers, rather than patent examiners, to determine the validity of patents.
The problem comes when these volunteers start submitting bad and misleading information, either unintentionally (by not understanding the patent) or intentionally (maliciously). For example, you are one of the volunteers. You are evaluating a patent of your competitor. So you might create a fake website with some "prior art" and point to it as an example.
The problem comes not in whether or not that fake prior art will be believed--it will be sorted out in the end, for sure--but rather that you've just created additional work for the patent examiner. Suppose everyone did this--submitted garbage that the examiners need to sort through. Some "prior art" might be valid, some invalid, some irrelevant. Notice on Slashdot how very few people RTFA? Well, consider how few people will RTFP. Much of the prior art suggested to be reviewed will be irrelevant. There are lots of people who will try to come up with something just to show how smart they are.
The net result will, unfortunately, be far more work for the patent examiner, not less.
This is not to say that your idea should be discounted entirely, but rather that implementing it would simply be a lot more complicated than your initial suggestion. It would probably have to be done more along the lines of an anonymous peer-review system like that which is used in academic journals. However, anyone who has had an article turned down for Physical Review Letters will tell you how well that works.
Indeed, it's a complicated problem.
When they say fight the outrageous patents, are they referring to the ones that already exist, or future ones? Or both? How would you combat a patent that already exist? Show prior art? Anyway, I think it's rediculous that we have to go as far as to create an organization to stop what should be common sense. Come on, a patent for double click? Oi..
Then again, if life were perfect, I'd have better things to do than rant on slashdot at 2 am in the morning. Hehe =)
Anyone notice that the EFF announced that they were going to be challenging bogus patents 2 days after PubPat announced that they had submitted a request to have Microsoft's FAT patent re-examined?
US patent system does not want to spend the time/money
The problem is that Congress won't give the USPTO the money it requires to do its job. This is on its way to changing with the new fee bill H.R. 1561, but it may take some time. It is still largely a step in the right direction.
h = openFile("regular_business_behavior.txt");
while (w = readNextWord(h)) {
if (random(0.0,1.0) > 0.96) {
w = w + " using a computer ";
}
print(w);
}
Table-ized A.I.
Currently, it is possible to request a patent re-examination of one of two types.
However, the person who must pay the fees is the person who wants the patent to be re-examined. Fees may start (for inter partes) at $8K, plus $12K for legal fees. Getting a patent accepted costs only about $1K. With legal fees and prior art searches (which I swear that a lot of these people don't do) that might get up to $8K or so.
This keeps the playing field quite tilted towards those that file patents -- there is little incentive not to file bogus patents.
I'd like to see this system modified to impose the fee (perhaps with some multiplier) on the *patent filer* if the reexamination finds that the patent is indeed invalid, rather than on the party requesting the reexamination.
If pro-bono legal work is available, or a simple walkthrough on how to do basic requests for review ("I wrote a program that already does this that was sold five years before the patent was applied for, and here it is"), the process could be made effectively zero-cost for organizations like the EFF that attempt to eliminate bogus patents.
I see few drawbacks. It does impose the difficulty of collecting fees on the USPTO, but besides being part of the federal government (and thus being in a good position to locate patent owners that refuse to pay), they can refuse to issue more patents to an individual until he pays his fees.
Old patents, many of which are quite bogus, will have to be grandfathered in. There's no other reasonable way to deal with them, but eventually they will expire, and this prevents future abuse of the system.
It also increases the potential cost of obtaining a patent (not good, if you want to protect the little guy). However, patent filers are *supposed* to do prior art searches ahead of time, and are *supposed* to only be submitting legitimate inventions. Thus, if a patent holder has performed his tasks as he should, there will be no additional cost added.
I don't think it's feasible (since the USPTO can't hire the best researchers in every field) to never let through an illegitimate patent. I do think that making the review process more oriented around discouraging people from filing bogus patents is possible. This also takes a lazy approach -- bad patents are only dealt with and the patent holder only imposed a penalty upon if an actual problem comes up -- otherwise, there's little reason for an organization to go after patents.
I would like to see review fees reduced if possible.
I would also like to see it be made possible for an inventor to freely invalidate a patent. This means that if a company (let's say Microsoft, or the FSF) discovers that someone is going after them with a patent, and they are able to produce prior art, it's easy for them to just send a letter to the patent holder noting that they have identified prior art, and unless the patent holder wants them to initiate a review, to mark his patent invalid within the next month.
That way, Microsoft or the FSF doesn't have to pay the legal fees associated with requesting a review (so it's in their interest to first send out a letter), review load on the USPTO is reduced, and the inventor is never hit with the fee associated with losing a review.
There are some details to be resolved -- how should invalidation of individual claims be resolved? Should a per-claim fee be increased, and fees for review on individual claims be lower?
I don't think any of them are showstopping issues, though.
I've brought this up once before on Slashdot and haven't gotten any idea-killing issues brought up -- I'd be interested in any feedback.
May we never see th
well, the most nafarious patent of them all was when an ozzie man decided he wanted to patent the wheel, and actually succeded.
the lawyer patented the " circular transportation facilitation device". so that means anyone who ever produced car, bike, even unicycle in australia would have to pay royalities.
dont believe me, well check the BBC or CNN
personally this is a prime example of intellectual rights gone amok. i would rather convert my car to square wheels before paying any damn royalites on a wheel. but i dont think it will be a problem. but just in case, im going to go patent the spherical rolling device. lets see MR. Keogh drive home without any ball bearings.
There was a recent slashdot post about Microsoft's patent on the autogenerated TODO list in an IDE. They filed in 2000. Well, as usual, it's pretty easy to find prior art for something like this, if you just search google on the grand-daddy of IDEs.
I was so confident, I went with "feeling lucky". Sure 'nuff, the very first hit, automated TODO lists in 1999, From Tulane University.
Apparently the current US patent system does not want to spend the time/money to carefully check new patents. Now the EFF and volunteers are doing the USPTO's work for free. It might remove the most harmful and obviously insane patents, thus making the idiocy of the current system less visible.
It should be obviousness that prevents such patents, not so much prior-art. Most software prior art is in the form of trade secrets, not prior patents.
They should use the "graduate criteria". If at least 20% of computer-sci graduates with a B or better could implement the functionality being claimed for a patent, then it should be tossed.
Table-ized A.I.
I got called for a job once when some friends had a patent and wanted me to dummy the technology in Flash - they already had the patent(?!), which I scrolled through, and some fun double talk about the technology. I said this was the 'Artist conception of flying car' patent. We haven't built it, but we want to sue you if you figure it out.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I hope the patent re-examination fee gets refunded if the claim is found to be legitimate. I mean, why should we have to pay for the USPTO's mistakes? That would be some racket!
I don't know the answer, but if the fee does not get refunded, things start to make sense. In this case, USPTO has no incentive to deny any patents, since they get more money for the patent re-examination than if they simply researched and denied the patent in the first place.
End of Line.
Guys (that's you guys across the pond). This is a governemt office. You have democracy. Your politicians will do anything for a vote. Tell your congress man that if he will make sure you vote for him again, he will do something about the hilarious patent office that's the laughing stock of the rest of the world.
This project might help an awful lot in proving that something is rotten in the state of patents.
Actually, the PTO is one of the few government agencies that brings in more than it spends. The problem is that that extra money is not used to upgrade what's there, it's put into the general coffers. Call your senator and tell him to help stop fee diversion.
Is this article a duplicate of an article from nearly two months ago? Or is there some specific news about this patent-busting project? The blurb didn't seem to help.
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the public call-for-submissions ("contest") part of the project was launched yesterday. the post wasn't very clear about that...
contest:
http://www.eff.org/patent/contest/
press release:
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2004_06.php#0016
There is a wiki page on How to improve patents here.
If your add to the page, remember to add a how not a just a what.
Knud
Why not implement a deposit sum for patent to be granted to the person that found prior art or faults invalidating it. This would probably end all talk about underpaid or overworked reviewers and spawn a new profession on the internet.
I like this idea quite a bit actually. It sounds a bit like this project is trying to do half of the patent office's job. But even if they were doing their own job, having a full fledged project of this nature would be a boon. Forums, mailing lists, wiki, the whole nine yards. If I was a bit older, and had lived through a little more history, I would gladly help patent bust as a hobby. I think there are many here on slashdot who feel the same.
It could just fix one problem this way. Without the type of feedback/interaction mechanisms you mention, projects like this tend to disappear from view. If there was a following to the project, there would likely be more items submitted to slashdot, drawing the long term attention of a fair percentage of slashdot users (and other news/forums). The effects could be a mild domino effect, not becoming the best known project in existence, but making its presence felt to those most able to help.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I just like to point out that Mr. Keogh applied for his patents to highlight the fact that so many bogus patents are allowed to stand.
Not to try and grab royalties from wheel users.
So show him the respect he deserves for standing up for common sense instead of trying to sound righteous about his nefarious act.
Economic Left/Right: -0.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.69
IBM got a patent on CAPS LOCK status indicator: Here's the link
It's patent 5,924,098. It's owned by Sun and it's basically on using the Boehm style GC to do well known lock-free programming techniques, one of which RCU is based on. I even commented on the obviousness of the technique before Sun was issued the patent here. It's not prior art but it does show obviousness to someone (me) versed in the art of lock-free programming. It's a standard technique that depends on some mechanism to delay deallocation of data nodes until they are no longer referenced. Which is by definition Garbage Collection. Specifying a known form of GC in conjunction with this technique is not an invention. Coming up with a new form of GC or proxy GC is an invention.