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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?"
This is just an overview of some ideas that have been pinging around slashdot and several other communities for a while. Namely, that because of some small changes that seemed to be for the better, patents are now under the jurisdiction of a court that loves them and the patent office is encouraged to rush patents through without thinking because they get their funding that way rather than from taxpayers.
The failings of this seem obvious after our discussions here, and I think that because the patent office is not supposed to be some pro business advocate but rather, a group of people set up to facilitate innovation into uncharted technologies(hence not obvious and no prior art) now just stifles innovation as obvious extensions of old ideas are inhibbiting their usage in useful R&D.
I think the review shows authors that really stand for a sane position, one that doesn`t completely remove the patent system but rather turns it back into what it was originally intended to be(not giving patents to companies for marketing the PB&J sandwich without crust, yes, its a patent according to the article). When this book comes out, I will be on the lookout because it seems these people have some ideas that need to get some attention and they have the clout to go somewhere with these ideas. Our representatives are only as sleavy as we permit them to be so we have to read up so we have some real knowledge and show our support for a complete overhall of the patent system and a review of many patents granted in the last 10 years(especially technology patents). Kudos to these authors for bringing this debate into what might become the main stream.
With a jury, at least you know they're generally ignorant and fairly easily swayed, but you can hope they'll all do alright. While a judge would supposedly be an expert on the subject, far too often they might not actually understand the technology at issue... and that's not even to mention what a little judicial activism -one direction or the other- could do.
One of Lerner-and-Jaffe's planks is the idea of allowing "obvious" patents to be challenged (like Amazon's one-click patent). The problem with this is the obviousness of hindsight. What happens to an idea that is merely one grade of brilliance beyond the "obvious"? You have twenty guys coming out of the woodworks saying "I thought of that." It seems to me that the obvious criterion will lead to just as much legal wrangling as the fights over who took which code from whom.
That said, I support what they're doing. I don't think that ideas can actually be owned. (*** ducks ***)
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Recently I attended a corporate IP (intellectual property) seminar. I work for a large, Fortune500 company. After 8 hours of 5 lawyers droning I came away with this. The starting cost of protecting a patent worldwide is $450,000 USD, to effectively attack an already awarded patent starts at $450,000 USD. Many companies looking to bust a patent are searching the old Soviet Union's past research journal archives for prior art. They are not computerized and evidently they have proven to be a rich source. They also discussed how some companies patent similar ideas in order to cause enough doubt in the plantiff's lawyers on a clear court victory, so the plantiffs lawyers will look for a cheap license arrangement.
[ I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance ] -- Isaac Asimov
When someone files for a patent, they are attempting to lock down a "non-obvious" solution to a problem.
What if patent examiners posed that problem to other experts in the field. If they come up with a similar solution, patent denied.
In light of such baloney and ignorance, it's no use trying to argue rationally.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I think one would remove a lot of the court sleeper patents if:
1. Patents were only issued to a demonstratable working device.
2. Patents were non transferable where the "rights" could not be bought or sold from one company to another.
3. For each patent category, peer standards commitees, for example such as IEEE, would oversee the initial granting, and re-evaulation.
The unfortunate part is that it is a balance between protecting the ability of someone to innovate and create with some protection from the vultures versus the same vultures planting the landmines trying to extort money from people trying to create new ideas.
The real question is : How do you balance both sides, when you can't count on any level of ethics, and really only greed, to drive decisions?