The Good Old Patent Law - Revisited

trifakir writes "Scientific American talks about the imperfections of the current patent law, subject to the book of two authors from the Harvard Business School. It seems that even business people start seeing the insanity of the current patent system. This time it seems that they are not only criticizing, but suggesting some procedural amendments (e.g. patent conflicts resolved by a judge and not by a jury). Do you think that any of these has chances being heard by the big wigs?"

Comments

the UK uses Judges (was: Re:Judge vs jury)

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not an IP lawyer but my friend is (!)

Apparently the UK uses experienced judges rather than juries. The judges commonly have degrees in science subjects as well as law. The end result is that courts are prone to seeing everything as trivial and are therefore patent-unfriendly. It really has to be a clever invention to survive. The way it should be IMHO.

Re:Nothing changes for big companies

[freeduke]

In the software industry, because of the behavior of the giants, small companies, funded on a bunch of patents, can not develop their derivated software: if they did so, these small comanies would face the offers of cross licences offers from giants and would loose any benefit from their patent. Because everytime you create a software, you are sure to use a patent issued by a big company, which often owns more than 10000 patents each.

That is why it is far more lucrative to issue a patent, and then not to implement it, just wait 1~2 years, and then threaten everyone who use your patented idea to sue them.

After that, people must find a way to avoid the patent, but, because of the late claim it must be a standard for the implemented software, and here comes the problem.

If you've got an idea, you can patent it, but not implement it. If you implement an innovative software, you can be threatened at anytime (think about gif).