More Patent Worries for Mobile Phones

loekf writes "After the story about NTP suing Research In Motion over alleged patent infringement (do your homework, U.S. Patent Office!), there's another story on The Inquirer about a U.S. firm, Antor Media, suing a lot of companies over a 'Method and apparatus for transmitting information recorded on information storage means from a central server to subscribers via a high data rate digital telecommunications network,' see: U.S. Patent 5,734,961. When does the hurting stop!?"

Comments

Vague.

[caluml]

'Method and apparatus for transmitting information recorded on information storage means from a central server to subscribers via a high data rate digital telecommunications network,'

Could it be any more vague? Sounds like a webserver to me.

when the hurting stops

[kraada]

The hurting stops when we get politicians who care. Right now the people who are in office simply aren't addressing this as an issue, because they don't see it as one. Their powerful lobbyists aren't pushing for patent reform nearly as much as other things (like laws which line their pockets better), so there isn't a real problem yet. When Microsoft, IBM and a few other big names start coming out and publically denouncing the patent system for screwing over innovation we might start to see some patent reform. But right now nobody cares, so nothing is going to get fixed anytime soon.

(Note: I did call my congressmen and senators about this issue prior to the previous election. I also have a friend who is attempting to get a job with the patent office specifically to try and fix some of these problems. I hope he succeeds.)

Let the [patent] madness continue

[bogaboga]

I wish the patent madness continues the more. This is because when it goes far enough to the point of hurting, things will change. Change will be faster when the madness begins to hurt sales/technology/growth.

And when changes do come, the direction of change will be for the better. As Americans, we pride ourselves for being objective and reasonable, but I wonder why this madness cannot be seen by those on positions of power. WHY?

When does the hurting stop!?

[iminplaya]

As soon as you all want it to.

But you have lawyers making the laws

[Colin Smith]

It's like having car mechanics design cars. What's better a 3000 mile service interval or a 30000 mile service interval?

They can see the madness, they made it, but they're also getting lots and lots and lots of money from the madness.

Open Society, Open Information, Open Source

[dAzED1]

The # of people "in" the OSS community that meaningfully contribute to the community (beyond just the contribution of expanding the user base by 1 person) is smaller now. There's many more ways to contribute than just coding too, that's the sad part.

Patent reform needs the same thing many OSS projects need - leg work. There is a review period, where people can make public comments. The major patent reform is for the area of simply improving the public review process; if we let them know that public reviewers exist and are ready and willing, I'm sure they'd happily take suggestions for an improved review process. You know, one where someone can actually find what they're looking for.

So yes, write your congressmen and ask for that - it's a much more sane thing to do than asking to abolish IP (even if that is the ideal situation...heh)

The Solution. Jail.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I'm sick of this, there is only one solution.

There should be a public enquiry, Macarthy style into the USPTO. It's directors should be jailed, the people who granted the patents should follow.

Too extreme? These people are crippling the economy of the world! They have broken their mandate and gone out of their way to turn the whole patent system into a joke.

I think jail time for those responsible for issuing patents like this isn't out of the question,

Re:When does it stop?

[rekrutacja]

Then the author and examiner can come to an arrangement... ..."2000 bucks for me for every year extra for you"?

Re:When does it stop?

[NickFortune]

Perhaps a patent ought to have a natural lifetime specific to the patent, which has to be claimed for in the patent application. Give the patent-examiners the right to barter the lifetime of the patent vs the generality, taking novelty into account.

That might now work as well as you might hope.

To begin with, novelty, as applied to patents, is supposed to be absolute. They're supposed to be granted to ideas that no one ever thought of before. To consider the novelty of patents as being relative is to accept that patents are allowable on ideas that not many people have thought of, or on ideas that are only proposed infrequently. Given the degree to which the current arragenment is abused, it seems foolish to slacken the requirements.

Secondly, the current patent procedure is not known for its rigor, certainly not as it applies to some technical sectors. Patent offices are gaining a reputation for simply rubber-stamping computer patents possibly (let's be charitable here) because they lack the background to effectively. As such, it's difficult to imagine patent clerks in the role of steely-eyed defender of the common weal, standing implaccably against the forces of corporate greed in order to limit the scope of a not-particularly-novel process.

Thirdly, the patent office, at least in the US, is swamped. Microsoft and their ilk are going through the Encyclopedia of Computer Technology and applting for patents for each concept in turn, justifying this bare-faced abuse of the system under the semantically bankrupt unberella of "good business". I even if those patent clerks were inclined to the role of steely-eyed-defender, I doubt they have time to evaluate that sort of trade off.

I know your idea calls for a lot more oversight on patents. Even so, the proposal cedes valuable ground unnecessarily. It opens the way for patents to be considered on relative novelty, allowing a whole new class of bogus patents to be de defended on the grounds that they were "fairly novel". It also opens the way for patenting corporations to badger courts and patents offices both for an extended duration for their own patents by talking up the novelty of the invention.

And for software, the proposal tacitly accepts the legitimacy of software patents.

It's much easier to keep rights that we currently have, then it is to regain them once lost. If we're going to think about how to reform the patent process, we need to make sure we don't conceed more than we gain in the process.

Re:When does it stop?

[leuk_he]

When the pace of technological advancement reaches zero

Wrong... 17 years after that! And at that moment they will switch to copyright & trademark infringements.