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How to Fix U.S. Patents
Frisky070802 writes "IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article on how to fix the U.S. patent system. It starts with an example of how broken the system is, with Smuckers suing a small company for crustless PB&J. It has a great overview of how the system has evolved and how much it favors the big patent holders, and suggests 3 specific fixes: 'create incentives and opportunities for parties to challenge the novelty and nonobviousness of an invention before the PTO grants a patent,' examine the important patents meticulously; don't waste effort on the unimportant ones that can be ousted early, and for examining prior art, use judges and special masters rather than uninformed juries."
And the chances of these kind of reforms going through are... what? From a national economic standpoint, even the US has an incentive to pump out as many patents as possible, no matter how frivolous, in order to extract money from corporations in other countries, since the US is using the WTO to push its "intellectual property" regime onto as many countries as it can.
Europe has a patent problem too, don't just pick on the US!
From the article:
First, create incentives and opportunities for parties to challenge the novelty and nonobviousness of an invention before the PTO grants a patent.
Prior art 'bounty hunters' and adding some common sense to the patent process sound like great ideas. Too bad they'll never be implemented, due to expensive lobbying efforts by those who stand to lose the most (i.e. the megacorps).
~Philly
Instead of bitching about how broken the USPTO is, and how the patents they grant are obvious...
Get a job at the USPTO as a patent master.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Originally patents were invented to aid competition by allowing a small business with an orignal idea to avaoid being sunk by a flood of copy-cat products from an established business. The obvious problems however quickly emerged: large businesses can get patents despite the fact that they don't need them, and the ability to patent an idea instead of an actual product. These two problems have completely overshadowed any benefits of the patent system.
Philosophy.
Patent reform will NEVER occur before Political reform. Political reform will NEVER occur without Citizens strongly voicing protests... and frankly, I don't feel like getting up from my computer.
Seriously, they are anticompetitive and aid MONOPOLY. If we want monopolies, do it the right way and institute Communism already.
Governement-endorsed monopolies in a free-market system are bad. That's why Linux beats 'doze.
How insightful.
Twice as insightful would be the realization that "doing away with patents" is equivalent to embarking on the road to corporate fascism, where the individual is powerless and the capitalist pigs own your life. Gone are the days when a person can start a small company and bring something new to the marketplace. Gone are the days when a company can lower its prices by developing a more efficient process and retain that advantage. Gone are the days when innovation is rewarded.
Take, for example, your typical Soviet boot factory. You get 100,000 monies to produce 10,000 boots per month. Your dumb ass innovates a new process which produces 10,000 boots for 80,000 moneys - you just proved you have been wasting 20,000 monies every month since you were given your job, you inefficient exploitative bastard. Now your process will be snatched up by all your competitors because you can't legally protect and you end up with no economic advantage - but you DO have tighter profit margins. Congratulations, you clever communist, you have been penalized by your own innovation.
So if you really ENJOY being a powerless cog in a fascist machine who is rewarded for keeping his head down and penalized for independent thought, by all means move your dumb ass to NW China and don't fuck it up for me
I believe Patents were created to aid innovation not aid comptetition. They exist to protect the inventor. The idea is that if you create something, and don't have the money to bring it to market, someone with money shouldn't have the right to come along, skate your idea, and elave you uncompensated for your invention.
In fact, it's been proven that patents hinder competition, but they don't hinder innovation.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Or Americans could just put down the pipe.
Yeah, put down the pipe, and embrace alcohol! It's legal, so it must be better.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Such patent monopolies are important for society, though not in the realm of computers. Pretend company C finds that drug D cures cancer in mice. It then performs many human trials to make sure it is safe and effective in humans as well, all at great expense. It then brings the drug to market.
Without patents, company C will never disclose what is in drug D, hence stopping future research down related veins. (And thus preventing improvements down that avenue.) Furthermore, other companies will find out what drug D is made out of and then sell it generically. Company C is screwed because it had spent all the money doing the research; it can't compete on marketing, etc., against the companies that are free-loading. Future drug companies will do no research.
People say that we should make all research government-funded. Right. Government-regulation has been such a boon, right?
Not all monopolies are bad.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
as opposed to, say, the Kodak vs. Sun trial which had a jury selected from Kodak's back yard (read: factory city where K. was the main employer) which would obviously be completely impartial.
One judge can be held responsible if he sells an obviously bad decision. How do you revoke a city from providing jurors?
Are you including drug dealers in your "nonviolent drug offenders"?
Drug dealers are the scum of the earth. Prison is too good for them. MHO of course.
Yes. Most of the drug dealers I have met are nice people who take great personal risks to provide people with freedom of choice. They make a nice profit at it, but still, if it weren't for them our freedom to alter our minds would be lost forever. There are some nasty violent characters in the business, but if they commit assault, they should be tried for assault, not some other bullshit charge. And think about it, how many times do you see turf wars between liquor store owners?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That is called "invalidating a patent" and it is the first thing your lawyers do when you are sued for infringement.
Guess what a patent is worth outside of a courtroom? $0. Guess what a flimsy patent is worth inside a courtroom? $0. The only patent that's worth anything is that which can withstand a validity attack. It's offensive how poorly this idea is understood in the media and the public at large.
"Twice as insightful would be the realization that 'doing away with patents' is equivalent to embarking on the road to corporate fascism, where the individual is powerless and the capitalist pigs own your life."
So how is that different from what's already happening in the US?
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing - and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Welcome to the current system ... find a patent that someone didn't invent, gather proof, and have the patent invalidated.
The definition of "important patent" could keep lawyers dining on goose liver for years. What may seem like an unimportant patent today may turn out to be horrendously important many years later.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Of course you would include the drug dealers.
Why are they the scum of the earth? They are people that see a high-risk, high reward market. Why is it high-risk/high reward? Because it's illegal to sell drugs. They choose to sell drugs because they perceive the reward to be worth the risk.
If you let people make their own decisions about what they can and can't ingest (especially those things that occur in nature, as opposed to some of the current things our wonderful pharma-corps are peddling), and make it *their* responsibility as to the outcome of said behavior, you have immediately introduced incentive for responsible marketing of said substance.
It has been proven ad nauseum that marijuana has far less detrimental (if any) effect on the human system than your average cigarette...but those are legal.
And why are drugs illegal? Hmm?
I suggest you do some googling for the 'marijuana gin', and popular mechanics. You may want to also research the "king's acre" among other things.
To prevail in an infringement case, an accused infringer has to present clear and convincing evidence that the patent is invalid.
Simply reversing this standard might be good: someone who wants to obtain a 20-year monopoly should have to present clear and convincing evidence that the idea he is seeking protection for is novel, useful, and can be reproducibly implemented based on the patent application. If he can't make a clear and convincing argument, then the patent should be found invalid by default.
Furthermore, patents should be found valid and invalid not claim-by-claim, but all-or-nothing. That way, applicants for patents have themselves a strong incentive only to claim what is actually novel and useful. Right now, almost every patent has claims in it that are ridiculously broad, that create unwarranted uncertainty and risk for competitors, and that courts need to spend enormous amounts of resources whittling down.
I think those two changes alone would do wonders for the patent system. But the IEEE suggestions are also welcome.
Amen. I am amazed that more people don't see what a problem this is. The problem is at least partly that we think prisons are for people who break the law. The word criminal is too broad. Prison should be for people who are dangerous.
Some may argue about non-violent drug users being dangerous on some level. But honestly: which do you think is more dangerous: a pot smoking hippie or anyone who just came out of maximum security prison? In general, being gang raped and subject to chronic violence tends to make a man more dangerous. Why would we want to apply a "solution" like that to someone who isn't violent in the first place?
I am strongly for the legalization of marijuana. I donate to NORML regularly. I've never smoked pot in my life.
Cheers.
PS - Another point nobody seems to like is that our prisons have become torture chambers. Sure, it's not our guards doing the torturing (usually) but they turn a blind eye. I don't have much sympathy for violent criminals, but again, we're processing these people to likely become more violent. This is stupid.
Bullshit. A worker/friend of ours was once a big time dealer running keys up from Florida to NYC. He made millions, spoiled himself for about 10 years until he was busted. He did his time and now has a good job and a family. He never was violent unless he had to defend himself, he was no Tony Montana. And did he force the dope on anyone? The users are mainly to blame for most drug related violence (I mean hard drug users like coke, crack and heroin users.) So don't group everyone in the drug pyramid from the producers to the users into one big "scum" category.
Oh well you should visit Europe, Amsterdam in particular. You see, there's this little protestant, burgeois, probably a tad cinical country called Netherlands where pot & mushrooms is legal; the dealers are just weird shopkeepers... and the stuff you get is premium quality... and it's all properly taxed. The bad chem stuff you find in raves & discos is illegal but these people are sensible enough to understand that fear of arrest and SWAT assault dissuades people from looking for treatment rather than from getting fsck'd into the substance abuse. So, since there's no SWAT lusting to rape your butt if you get a bad trip, once you're back from the dead a thoughtful shrink helps you out of your problems and keeps an eye on you in case you're still too rabid to come to terms with your shit. You know, one thing that really helps is having that warm feeling that if you stumble and fail you have a community that doesn't want to trample you; actually they want you out of trouble, if not out of goodwill, at least to avoid having a looney shooter on the run. It helps a lot, lot more that a gun in your pocket and paramilitary officers on patrol. Think about it... it's the essential diff between Old Europe and you guys
without offence,
e
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Child rapists are the scum of the Earth, dude.
Drug dealers barely even mention a nod, particular those truly "non-violent" ones.
Private individuals inventing things in their basements need the patent system (much more than corporations who have vast resources) in order to profit from their hard work. Generally speaking, these guys can't make and market their inventions themselves and instead rely on selling patent rights to larger companies that can make and market them. But usually they need the actual patent awarded to them in order to sell those rights. If it takes 5 years to get the patent, it will take 5 years before they can finally start to sell their product. Imagine if it took you five years before you could get a paycheck. And by then their invention may well already be obsolete. If it takes too long for patents to be processed, you will only end up killing off private inventors.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Even if it does have an effect, all it does is give the patenter an opportunity to craft their claims to carefully avoid the prior art while still being annoying.
For this reason, patent lawyers will often tell you *not* to challenge a patent application until after it's granted.
that patents ought to have a sunset provision, kind of a use-it or lose-it. Something along the lines of patents holding for 6 or 8 years, with a mandatory renewal at the end, and every two years after that. If the renewal is not optioned, an expiration notice is sent, with a 180 day grace period for renewal, and revocation afterwards. This will weed out a lot of dead wood in the patent world, and make the patenter's clearing house firms that make a killing on buying up old patents do more work to keep the system in check.
Ok, it's just a thought but...
1) Since inventors are people, how about restricting the assignee to people only.
2) Make all payments to the assignee and or inventor a matter of public record.
3) Make it illegal to withhold license of patents to individuals or corporations willing to pay more than the current maximum amount stated in public record.
(Wordy example):
So Joe Inventor creates a widget for Company Z. Joe would be the inventor and some other person is (maybe even Joe) will be the assignee. Z Company will license the ability to make widgets by paying $1000 to the assignee. The $1000 is posted as a mater of public record. Now anyone or any company can pay $1001 to the assignee and have a license to produce the widgets.
A market effect of an open auction etc..
All the worlds indeed a
An even better way is to just reduce patents from 17 years to 5. This reduces the incentive for patenting trivialities, and if they do get patented, it becomes a more reasonable strategy to just wait it out.
The patent system was concieved to protect unique, innovative, and useful ideas. Now, I may not be one to complain, but I seriously doubt the uniqueness of the spiral stack of post-it notes, which is almost identical in its description to the patent on a straight stack of post-it notes. Also, software patents just suck in general. There should be no such thing as a software patent, merely copyrights on source code. For instance, the original patent on the Windows OS ended several years ago, because patents only last 7 years. At the time that the patent ends, the patent holder is required to release the product to the public for use. I don't know about you, but I payed good money for this crap-o-rific Windows XP. Do you know why? Because Microsoft filed a patent for every single friggin' line of code they've ever written (obviously an exaggeration, but they have taken out multiple patents as ways of extending expired patents). I say we abolish the patent system, abolish all forms of unbacked currency, and go to the liberty dollar.
Smart businesspeople? In order for them to sell stuff like that, someone has to ask for it. If someone wants to get addicted to some drug and die young then that's their business. If someone wants to sell that person drugs then that's smart business. I'm not saying it's morally upstanding, but it is how capitalism works.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Drugs are iilegal which makes them expensive. If drugs were legal and sold at the cornet drug stores there would be no violent drug dealers.
evil is as evil does
As much as I agree that people can do whatever the hell they want with their lives (to the extent that it doesn't bother other people AND it doesn't cost the tax payers money through public rehab programs, etc), I still find your statement there pretty funny. No legitimate study would ever say marijuana doesn't hurt your body. Even if you just consider the fact that you are breathing in smoke and depriving yourself of oxygen, it still hurts. Anybody who says otherwise is either a complete moron or a pothead.
The last time this came up someone posted an interesting idea. If the USPTO can't reasonably review all the patent applications simply accept them all. But change the expiration to say 2 years with an option to renew the patent for the full 17 year and make the renewal cost a considerable amount of money (eg $40,000). This will give legitimite patents the protection they need to develop their idea enough to know if it's worth more effot. It wouldn't stop people from filing frivolous patents but the submarine patents would probably disappear almost entirely.
Hmm, the article seemed like a good overview with some useful suggestions.
But it completely left out the biggest, IMHO, problem with the patent system: triple damage for "knowingly infringing." This one policy (not sure if it's in the law, or a court precedent) simply has to go before any reform based on competitors will work.
As it is, every IP lawyer tells every engineer to go out of their way not to learn about competitors patents. And certainly don't write down that you know. And abso-friggin-lutely don't let the patent lawyer know that you know. Because if there's proof, boom! triple damages. Regardless of whether you also "knew" that there was prior art, that your company already had a patent that covered the same thing, that the patent was invalid, or that it was obvious to a skilled practitioner of the art.
Overturning this one aspect of the patent system would let tech companies actively monitor their competitors patents, get valuable technical details out of them, and challenge the patents *before* infringement suits are brought by the holders. It would curb the worst of the submarine patents because companies would *know* when someone patents a standard (esp one being developed) without being forced to turn a blind eye to avoid tripling their liability later.
Nicotine is the most physically addictive drug. Pot is not physically addictive.
Nicotine is the most deadly drug (LD50/ED50); the LD50 of smoking pot is so incredibly high it has not been reliably established.
You are FAR more likely (percentage) to die from causes relating to smoking nicotine than smoking pot (in fact, more like then with ANY drug habit, including crack and heroin).
So yeah, pot contains carcinogens, probably as many in raw amounts as cigarettes, but the damage and addictiveness make it absolutely pale in comparison to smoking cigarettes.
Since most people think that option (a) is unacceptable, we are left with (b) -- and so our money goes to bail out the drug addicts. Therefore, it is our business, and we have the prerogative to do what we can to discourage people from getting addicted to drugs.
(Not that I think throwing them in jail is a very effective way to discourage them, mind you)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Most of the drug dealers I have met are nice people who take great personal risks to provide people with freedom of choice.
I agree 100%, and don't believe that this is a troll comment at all.
I do make a distinction between 'mind-altering substances' (DMT, MDMA, various shrooms) and the few highly addictive 'hard' drugs that really do fuck people up (ice and heroin come to mind), but that can come up for debate after we finally admit that people have the right to do alter their own minds and bodies at will. You get people who sell harmful products, get people addicted to them, and milk them for all they're worth, and yes these people are scum. Some of those people are drug dealers, but sugarcane farmers, tobacco companies, pharmaceutical corporations, McDonalds and American Express also spring to mind.
"If the words "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on."
-- Terence McKenna
Scientific studies have been done, and we know that pot is less harmful than tabacco.
To say otherwise without scientific backing of any kind, is mere noise.
Changa hates change.
...and why do people overdose? There's 2 leading causes besides suicide attempts:
Lack of education about effects of mixing things. - Because we're too busy trying to convince our kids of all the evils that we don't bother teaching real facts. Abstinence-only does not work in sex ed, and it doesn't work in drug ed. People are doing it no matter what, so the best approach is to reduce the harm that may come. And when you lie to people so much about drugs, they stop believing it when you're telling the truth.
Contaminated doses and/or doses in unknown amounts. - When you buy something on the street, you have no idea how much of what is in it unless you take your stuff to a lab before doing it. This causes a very large percent of overdoses. If people inject a solution they KNOW is 10mg/ml, they're not going to accidently inject around 150mg that's required to OD. Not to mention the much lower safety margin and wildly inaccurate dosing of fentanyls that make up for shortages in actual heroin supplies.
and I think it's quite obvious prohibition does a piss poor job of accomplishing real results in harm reduction.
I have to strongly disagree with this as a universal truth (that is, I'm not saying that it isn't true sometimes). It simply isn't the case that the current patent system necessarily favors large companies.
I work for one of those "large companies" (I won't tell you which, but it's one of those referenced regularly in these pages...).
In the case of a large company, patents can act as protection from lawsuits from other large companies (and small ones) through a kind of mutually-assured-destruction type of argument. However, they provide no protection whatever from lawsuits (even though they may be frivolous) from "intellectual property" outfits that ship no products themselves, but file a few patents and wave them at an entire industry demanding money. Even if the threat is entirely without merit, it can tie up a huge amount of engineering effort to defend, especially when there are so many of them (and there are - unless you have been subjected to this, you really wouldn't believe just how frequently this happens).
The important factor which isn't considered in the spectrum article is exposure. A large company is always going to have a much larger exposure to being sued for alledged infringement than a small company that doesn't ship as many products, and is completely defenceless against a company that doesn't ship anything. Your only option is to pay up (if you actually think the patent is valid) or spend a ridiculous amount of money on attorneys.
What should a large company do when somebody shows up at its door every week waving an obviously invalid patent at them and claiming that it owes them a dollar for every of the gazillion products it's ever shipped?
The patent system is broken alright. But I don't honestly think the prescription in the article is the right one. All it's saying is that large companies will be authorized to spend even more money on attorneys earlier in the process. What we really need is much stricter definitions of what constitutes "novelty" to make it easier to toss out obviously unworthy patents whenever it does make it into the hands of the lawyers.
Just the 2c of a weary engineer who spends a hell of a lot of time talking with his employer's attorneys...
Simple - abandon software patents, and cut down the times for the other patents back to what they were to start with.
The reason to have a patent system is to encourage the inventors to promote and freely disclose their inventions, rather than keeping them to themselves. Not to protect inventors rights, or anything like that.
Since abstinence education doesn't work, wouldn't the more enlightened way to curb gun violence be to have gun training programs at every high school, and teach people how to be responsible assault rifle owners?
This is my sig.
but it's hard to tell because regular dope smokers often fail at education and end up unemployed
That's true only if "education" is the word for a pee test in your language.
I think fundamentaly we need to have three alternitives for punishing people and we need to make these alternatives as well suited to the crime in question as possible.
1 - Fines/Fees/Suspension of specific rights/privilages: This is what we allready use for the enforcement of traffic violations etc. This can be used to deal with people who make stupid decisions but aren't a real threat to anyone. Consuming a drug that society terms "illegal" would be well covered by this.
2 - Community Service/More severe suspension of rights/privilages: Essentialy a method of dealing with people who've clearly done something wrong but who don't represent a physical threat to anyone. This would include the "white collar punks" you refer to. Penalties could range from the most simplistic and easiest forms of community service (helping out with an inner city school) to more distastefull and unpleasent work. Similarly options up to and including a form of house arrest and seizure of assets would be possible. It's key to avoid putting these people in prison, but what's to say that we can't restrict the kind of work they can seek, restrict their freedom of motion, and seize assets?
3 - Prison/Execution: An option reserved only for violent criminals who represent a clear and present danger to society at large. These are individuals we simply can not afford to have on the streets.
The trick to this system is making sure that the teir two section is well executed and well administered. If people get the idea that it's a cakewalk it won't be effective. If utilized properly it can be just as effective as a minimum securiyt prison without any of the disadvantages. Moreover, it can allow retribution in kind for those white collar criminals that hurt so many people. Riches to Rags in the rap of gavel.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
And I bet if you looked at those 19 cases, you'd find that those kids had willingly and intentionally done some sick shit. 18 years is a guide, IMHO. If a 17 year old has the balls and brains to hack his Aunt Millie up and feed her into a wood chipper, well, he should get the same treatment as a 19 year old that did the same thing, don't you think?
That's one of my main problems with amnesty.org, they really don't seem to have a whole lot of common sense. They also seem to cling to the idea that criminals have more rights than their victims did.
Murphy was an optimist.
popping a tire
Not one but four, and it's not a big deal to you because you're the one who has to pay for it.
they probably became homeless when the developers paid off the city and took away their homes to build your condos.
Nice try, but these condos we built in 1986 on a vacant lot. And, BTW, this isn't some girl, but a 37 year old WHITE woman, so don't even try to play the race card.
Obviously this woman needed help, nice to know her neighbors that live in the same building would rather lock her up and take away her HOME instead of *gasp* trying to help her.
Several residents did talk to her, and the condo board repeatedly warned her before taking police and legal action.
Addiction of any sort is a sickness, not a crime, ask any doctor in the world if your too high and mighty to take an anonymous cowards word for it.
It may be an illness, but it was HER choice, not mine, for her to start using drugs, and therefore she is responsible for her own condition. HER choice. SHE chose to use the drugs. That's like saying I should pay for someone's lung cancer treatment because they chose to destroy their lungs by smoking for 40 years, or I should have to pay to keep someone plugged in who chose not to wear a helmet and smashed their brains out against a bridge pier and is now a vegetable. It's fucking ridiculous and, even if there are some who think that, yes, I should have to pay for the actions of idiots, just because you brought a medical condition upon yourself, it doesn't give you the right to commit crimes against other people. I don't even think you guys in Europe (or Canada, or wherever) are allowed to do that.
And BTW, I would be more than happy that some of my tax dollars went towards her cell because since she's gone there is NO CRIME HERE. Not a single incident.
If we shot everyone who used drugs, there wouldn't be any customers, and thus there wouldn't be anyone for the criminals to sell to so we'd be able to recoup them into the productive workforce. And the now-dead drug users wouldn't be a burden on that workforce either.
And what about that warm, fuzzy feeling feeling mercenaries call killing? I'm a pacifist, but I recognize the value in snuffing out an addict's existence. It's a good investment and our species' success is a testament to that survival strategy called killing off the weak.
More seriously, it does seem somewhat illogical to write-off the costs of treating millions of addicts as cheap while viewing the costs of treating thousands of criminal violence survivors as expensive.
paintball