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The Difficulties of Patent Busting

Posted by michael on from the uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow dept.

wheresjim writes "An article on CNN.com entitled 'Tough road for patent-busters' describes the hard road one has to follow to get a questionable patent revoked. According to the article, of the approx 7,000,000 existing patents, only 614 have been revoked, and only 3927 have had their claims narrowed."

3 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. That's a pretty crappy article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why not link to the EFF's patent busting project to get some decent quotes from Jason Schultz? The ones on CNN were very weak and seemed to imply we are just whining about people having important patents... not that they have invalid patents which should never have been granted.

  2. Re:This is obvious by mdf356 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Well, of course one starts out with as broad a claim base as possible. Doing otherwise does not make business sense.

    But most patents go through several rounds of non-final rejections by the review board for overly broad claims. By the time they're issued, there's a resonable chance for most of them (please note the qualifiers) that the claims are valid.

    When trying to invalidate a patent, there's several good ways:

    • Show the listed inventors are a subset or superset of the actual inventors.
    • Show that the patent does not describe the best method ("the preferred embodiment") for solving the given problem (many Japanese companies have trouble with this one in the American patent system).
    • Prior art
    • Issues regarding obviousness (hard to argue that one), or being implementable by someone of ordinary skill in the art within one year

    Patents are actually often very specific, and a company that wishes to sue another for patent infringemnet will find out too late that theirs is so, and the defendent is in fact not infringing on their too-specific patent.

    Cheers, Matt

    --
    Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
  3. Ruling Against Acacia Last Tuesday by SallyDivInorum · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article doesn't include the Markman hearing results that were filed on tuesday. After the filing ACTG lost 40% of its value. Judge Ware ruled against Acacia several times and even invited the defense to file for summary judgement on a significant number of claims. It is not the end, but let's hope this is the first step. More info on Acacia at - http://www.fightthepatent.com