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 According to the article, of the approx 7,000,000 existing patents, only 614 have been revoked, and only 3927 have had their claims narrowed."

Comments

Bullshit

[Moraelin]

AGAIN: the MS patent is strictly for a new way to control a PDA device. It is _not_ about mouse double-clicks or whatnot. So please spare me the inflamatory "Microsoft patented the double-click!" bullshit.

Here's an idea for all you "all software/interface patents are bad/obvious" or "waah! but they're threatening small companies" folks:

Maybe you actually work for one of those threatened small companies or OSS projects. How much _research_ does your company do? Chances are it's _zero_. Nada. Nil. Zilch.

How many mathematicians researching new algorithms does your company pay? No, I don't mean "mathematician turned to programming crappy web sites in PHP or VB.NET". I mean how many are paid to actually do _research_? Zero, huh?

You oppose interface patents, such as Microsoft's double-click? OK. How many usability experts do you have on your team? Heck, how many are on your company's payroll? For about 99% of companies: zero.

If you do have one, when was the last time he/she actually did any usability _research_? You know, get a group of grandmas and actually try various new kinds of interfaces on them. Never, huh? He/she just regurgitates other people's results from books, huh?

So what do we have here? An entire industry which spends _maybe_ 1% of its funds on research, but mostly goes about just copy-and-pasting other people's work. Even if from a book, but still straight copy-and-pasting.

And you still don't see the kind of problem that lack of software patents has created? Geesh.

Compare it to the chemical industry, another heavy-on-the-IP industry, and see how much do those research. A helluva lot more. You know why? Patents. Because they're allowed to actually have 20 years benefit from that research.

Without patents they too would probably be at a point where everyone brews penicilin and aspirin cheap, but not much else. Because noone researched much more than that, for lack of any financial incentive to research.

And the benefit for society as a whole would be? Even with patents everyone can still make aspirin cheap. Because patents expire in 20 years. And we can make a lot of other stuff cheap, because those patents expired too. On the whole we're actually ahead, because those patents encouraged research.

And, you know what? I'd very much like to see that happening to software too. Back to the MS patent, at least MS actually did some research concerning PDA interfaces, which is a helluva lot more than other people did.