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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 According to the article, of the approx 7,000,000 existing patents, only 614 have been revoked, and only 3927 have had their claims narrowed."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?
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
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
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)
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.
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