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 According to the article, of the approx 7,000,000 existing patents, only 614 have been revoked, and only 3927 have had their claims narrowed."

2 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Only 20 years of overturning patents by SteroidMan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Offensive Patents? by Dominatus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?