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EFF, PubPat Each Seeking Some Patent Sanity
AbstracTus writes "According to Wired, The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to get the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to re-examine 10 patents that were selected from public submissions. We slashdotters often curse patents that should have been rejected, but are not. Do you think that the EFF can have any influence on the U.S. Patent Office? Are there other actions that are more likely to work?" And sharkb8 writes "The Public Patent Foundation is searching for
people with experience in all technical fields to help examine patents. This is the perfect chance for attorneys, law students, and geeks in general to do some pro bono work. PubPat is the group that recently
challenged one of Microsoft's FAT patents."
The best way to influence the PTO is probably through Congress.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
Don't forget to add Microsoft's Double Click Patent and Mcafee's patent on Bayesian spam Filtering (filed months after Paul Graham's paper was published). I'm not quite fond of AOL's patent on "evil points" either.
"2. The US government is pro-business (as it should be, IMHO). However, this translates into the default standing order at the USPTO being "accept", and not "reject" (whereas most /.'ers want to see "reject" as the default position)."
FYI
Giving the benefit of the doubt to the inventor is not "pro-business", it's because (and the same principle is followed in the EPO, and probably elsewhere) when the examiner can't tell one way or another, it should lean towards granting the patent: and if the patent is dodgy, then it will be resolved later.
The real problem is just that: in the EPO and elsewhere, there is a decent opposition system, where anyone can file and participate in opposing the patent. In the USPTO, the "re-examination" procedure is very limited and very poor.
I mean, just think of the scientist that comes up with an amazingly new novel way of doing something, but the examiner (who, you have to admit, could never be as on top of the field as a star scientist) isn't "quite" sure: denying the patent would be outrageous. By definition, inventions are novel and non-obvious: and that means "they go where no man has gone before", thus it's not surprising that figuring them out can sometimes be a problem.
2. The US government is pro-business (as it should be, IMHO).
No, it should be pro-*citizen*, not pro-business. USPTO being pro-business is the reason we're in the situation we're in. Patents and the patentability of ideas should reflect the good of the citizenry, not the business merits of the idea in question.
Patents for an idea makes sense, in part, when an inventor wanted to protect his or her ability to profit or control the result of their effort. Patents and intellectual property protections were designed to prevent people from using your idea or effort to their betterment at your expense. So far, so good. There's very little to argue with as nothing contained in the previous contains anything unreasonable.
Where the process has become abused is when the Patent Office began taking patent applications that didn't require a manifestation of some sort to "prove" your effort is unique or uniquely yours. There's nothing tangible in many of these contentious patents. They're just "ideas" and "descriptions". There's no "proof" or "gadget" that you can gin up to bolster what you're trying to protect. There's no math or engineering involved, such as programmatic effort or time in a machine shop.
That is where the demarcation should begin. When Xerox sued Apple and lost over the use of graphic icons on a 2D screen and similarly, when Apple sued Microsoft over "look and feel" and lost; That should have established the ground rules and in my opinion, neither Xerox nor Apple had a case. Instead, people have been testing the upper limits of what patents protections ever since based on nothing more than the motto, "You might get lucky.".
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
Pro is to Con like Progress is to Congress.
Unless you're a CEO of a large corporation or otherwise are a Man Of Means, there's no chance in hell to influence congress. And not only do you have to influence congress, but you have to influence a majority, and influence it *more* than your opponents. Which are the big companies holding the patents.
Yes, we have the best government money can buy.
Regards,
--
*Art
None of the items on the "patent hit-list" is what I would consider a high-profile "stupid" patent. These are all patents that are out there being enforced on a daily basis and are causing problems with business
They make no mention of the plethora of inane patents that have been granted (double-click patent, spam filter patent, swinging sideways patent).
The approach they are taking seems less likely to cause a big stir, because they are going to be hard fought with little gains in patent approval procedures
It seems to me that the easier way to get things to change (for the better) would be to gather up a list of 100 patents and systematically prove that every single one of them was extremely foolish to grant. Embarass the USPTO in the media with obvious claims of prior art.
Basically what we are looking for here isn't a few patents to be overturned, which is what the EFF is trying to do (its a nice start, don't get me wrong), but rather we need a change to the system, and unfortunately it appears it can only be done through an act of congress or through repeated abuses of the USPTO in the court system...
Wouldn't it be easier to actually find out what the 10 sane ones are?
I love C++
If these stupid patents aren't allowed to be created in the first place then groups like the EFF wouldn't have to fight to get them overturned later.
It's not just stupid patents that are bad though. Patent squatting (just sitting on patents) should be 100% illegal, as it just impedes the use of certain ideas by making them more costly than others.
Patents were intended as a means of helping inventors get novel products to market by creating a brief and artificial "honeymoon" period. Patent squatting is a complete corruption of that idea.
If you are not bringing product to market, you have no moral right to sit on an idea in the hope that someone else will do the hard work of developing a raw concept into a working reality. Companies with teams of lawyers that merely patent squat and actually create nothing are simply scum.
Patents should expire by default within 3 years unless you confirm in writing to the patent office that you are actively working on something that uses the patented idea as a central component or feature. And *all* patents should expire within 10 years, regardless, because skewing the market this way should only be a temporary condition.
Increasing the cost of ideas is not in the interest of humanity at all.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The following reasoning is also heard from time to time: if an invention is new (another requirement for patentability), this means it is consequently not "obvious", since otherwise it would have been invented already! Patent law is only a hair away from allowing one to say that it very clearly and literally allows trivial patents!
As the Deputy Director of the UK Patent Office once said:
And the fact that until now few people complained about this in the field, and that those trivial patents cause a lot more problems in the software field than in other fields (and that there seem to be even more trivial patents in the software field than in other fields), once more shows that software indeed is different. Patent law is simply completely and utterly unfit to judge advances in pure logic with.
Donate free food here
There are good reasons for not patenting something. The tradeoff to patenting something is that you tell you have to tell the world how to make your invention, but Congress gives you the sole right to profit from your invention for 20 years from the time the patent application is filed.
On the other hand, you can keep something a trade secret. That means you can pofit from your invention for as long as you can keep other people from figuring out how to reproduce it. Trade secret law covers your employees selling the secrets, but your competitors may be able to legally reverse engineer your invention.
And you don't want to start fining poor patent examiners. These are usually recent grads with a tenuous grasp of the English language from crappy schools. Don't forget, they ARE government employees.
It's the process of getting patents granted that's the problem. Most patents get rejected the first time. However, an applicant can purchase an unlimited number of re-examinations, chagning the wording of the patent slightly every time. Patent examiners only get credit for examining a patent the first time, and when they finally close the patent. You bother them enough, and they'll eventually grant your patent, or part of it at least.
As for fining those with dodgy patents, if there's a real question of whether or not a patent is valid, it'll end up in court. And what happens when Microsoft starts threatening some Mom & Pop operation with having a patent overturned and massive fines? How easy would it be for Gates & Co. to say "We have thousands of lawyers, and if you try to stop us from infringing on your patent, we'll get your patent invalidated. If we do, you'll go bankrupt."
$770 to file the patent (assuming it comes in under the 20/4 total/indpendent claims allowed) + fee X + fee Y during prosecution. Application is allowed. Now pay issue fee + maintenance fee 1 + maintenance fee 2, etc.
Second scenario:
$770 to file the patent + fee X + fee Y during prosecution. Application is rejected. No issue fee. No maintenance fee.
See the problem? No real monetary incentive to reject a patent. The PTO isn't harmed by patent litigation, so let the holder/infringers battle it out in court. No skin off the PTO's back.