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The Difficulties of Patent Busting
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 According to the article, of the approx 7,000,000 existing patents, only 614 have been revoked, and only 3927 have had their claims narrowed."
The problem is the patent office doesn't have enough bandwidth to deal with current patents, much less overturn existing ones. There's a quote in the article by a member of the patent office saying that the goal is accuracy balanced very heavily against speed. All of the reviewers have quotas they have to meet, and it takes a lot longer to review a hairy software patent than a physical invention with drawings, but they aren't given the time. There wasn't even a mechanism for overturning patents until 1982, so its not suprising that they aren't good at it yet.
This is a serious question, not meant to flame. Has any one actually recently used a software patent offensively? I know most firms get them for defensive purposes only, not to go sueing other companies. Has there actually been lawsuits to test the validity of a patent on an algorithm?
See this leaked HP memo revealing Microsoft's patent strategy with regard to Linux and Open Source. This is why we must reform the patent system.
Benkler Lecture This is the most though prevoking essay I think I've ever read in favor of Open Source and the problems with the current state of the patent system.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
One of the biggest problem is the so-called submarine patent.
It would be nicer where after the patent is issued, they do a follow-up check a year or two later to be sure that you've made progress on actually building/using your invention, otherwise it's invalidated.
Similarly, if you don't actually sue anyone for patent infringement for a period of say, 5 years, you should lose your patent. There's too many companies that hold patents and wait until there are a signifigant number of companies to sue before starting anything. While it makes sense from a business standpoint (most bang-for-the-buck), it seems totally against the ideas behind having patents.
Speak before you think
"The real question is how do we help the patent office so they don't issue the crap in the first place?"
The patent office should charge a royalty. Corporate assets include valuations of their patented intellectual property. Their corporate federal income tax should include their percentage of the total of those reported assets as a percentage of the tax collected for running the Patent Office. That would not only finance the overburdened system that perpetuates their "limited monopolies" over their patents, but also encourage them to valueate their assets appropriately. And to obtain patents on only those inventions from which they derive profits, which are their only justification for that limited monopoly.
--
make install -not war
At one time the passes through the Alps were controlled by "robber barons" who taxed trade from the Mediterranean to the developing nations of Western Europe. In another era cartographers were secreted away as were their maps that held the trade routes to the spice trade and the new world. As world trade develops, trade pacts like NAFTA and the European Union have slowly opened markets while trying to protect the home markets of the various participants. Patents are the means to ensure profit in markets open to trade pacts. The intellectual property rights are the controlled mountain passes of today. Patents enforce a tax on trade. Patents ensure profits at "home" while permitting free trade and the development of new markets in the third world.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
My CNN doesn't have popups. Then again, I'm spyware free and using Firefox. Still don't remember the CNN articles themselves having popups even in IE.
argh ... anyway, for the misinformed:
Physics != Quantum Physics
When Einstein published his first papers there was no Quantum Mechanics yet. Planck had barely published his model for the black body radiation a few years before and Bohr was yet to come up with his model for the Hydrogen atom[*]. Einstein was actually one of the physicists criticizing QM later on (the EPD paradox, the "God doesn't play dice" quote). Also, General Relativity still does not play nice with Quantum Physics, but that's not Einstein's fault ^_^
So remember, kids, Einstein is best known for The (General and Special) Theory of Relativity. Quantum Physics (lumping together several things here) was brewed by (lots of) other people.
[*] nitpicking, Einstein's papers on the photoelectric effect and on explaining the Planck law through adding stimulated emission belong to 'classical' QM historically speaking, but that was far from his main focus (although it did bring him the Nobel Prize)
Quantum Mechanics? I'd say he made his fame in gravitation and thermodynamics. The quantum guys invited him to all their conferences 'cuz he was a smart guy, but he actually pooh-pohed quantum theory as "spooky action at a distance".
Please have respect for people with different abilities, especially children.
Therefore, the parent was right in asserting that a company filing for overly broad claims is trying to steal from society, when it tries to appropriate things to which it doesn't have the right.
Donate free food here
Out of the 7 million patents aren't the majority of them expired?
Of the rest isn't the subject matter on something that people do not care about. Also the stats do not include patents that the courts have invalidated or narrowed.
Even when you have an excellent case, it might never be heard. DEC, I think, had a claim that they "never" lost a patent case. If true, it would be because whenever they were about to lose, they'd turn around and settle and avoid having their patent invalidated.
I was involved in a case where DEC was suing a peripheral manufacturer for using a patented method of communicating with the operating system. Given that this was the only way to communicate with the operating system, this was a significant barrier to making compatible peripherals. The patent involved "ring buffers", and the patented improvement involved storing a pointer to a buffer in the queue rather than having the buffer actually be part of the queue. This allowed removing buffers from the queue for processing, allowing out-of-order processing, etc. Time scale of this patent was in the late '70s.
Our system used the exact same method, and we could document that not only had we been doing it earlier, the reasoning by the programmer who did the work to change the queue scheme was identical to the description in the patent. What was different from many patent cases is that we had kept the on-line discussions where people announced what they had done for the other developers.
We printed out the source code, including time stamps showing when the code had originally been written, and the discussion of the advantages of the method, and gave that to the company being sued. We heard later that they had "won", yet the patent remained in effect until it expired naturally.
Another case I was involved in helping out had to do with Bingo. Bingo, it turns out, is a huge industry, and there are an amazing number of patents. This patent was for a way of using a physical bingo card, with an overlay and some electrical contacts, to insert into a machine. The machine thus knew what the card layout was, and could call a bingo when it came up. It also used a centralized server to call the numbers and send them out to the various bingo machines. The physical card was simply so that the user could see which numbers were on the card. Somehow, this patent got expanded to include virtually any means of playing bingo on a computer!
When we provided "prior art" in the form of an on-line interactive bingo game, whose internal logic was almost identical to the patented game (one player was chosen to be the caller - his instance of the program generated the numbers, and distributed them through a shared memory queue with the other instances of the program). The only difference was that (a) our program didn't automatically "call" bingo - you had to press a key to claim it, and the program verified it. Isn't that the point of playing Bingo? And (b) our program was implemented on a time-shared system, not a distributed system with a server and a bunch of game machines.
I heard on that one that it eventually was overturned. However, our "prior art" was rejected by the judge because of the distributed processing issue, because the actual decision as to whether it was a bingo wasn't made in the individual "game machine". However, the patent was being used against systems that did all the logic in the server machine, where the boards were generated and the bingos were checked. In other words, the interpretation of the limitations of the patent were different when being used against a supposedly infringing implementation than when determining whether the prior art was valid.
Unfortunately, that patent was overturned after the company that was being sued went bankrupt.
In two out of two experiences I've had with trying to bust an obvious and non-novel patent, with clear prior art, in neither one did the system work well. The Bingo case in particular should have been one of obviousness - they essentially started out with "let's patent playing bingo on a computer", came up with a patentable idea (the thing with the cards, which I think was clearly patentable) and expanded it to cover all