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Patent Examiners Flee USPTO
john-da-luthrun writes "Soaring numbers of patent applications for software and business processes is not only leading to the ludicrous patents for the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. The stress of dealing with vast numbers of applications is leading to an exodus of patent examiners from the USPTO, reports FCW.com. A US Government Accountability Office report (PDF) says that the USPTO has made progress in hiring examiners, 'but challenges to retention remain'. The IP Kat blog quotes Jason Schulz of the EFF, who comments that 'The incredible surge of patent applications, especially in the software and internet business method arena, is just crushing them, and the management problems are rising to the surface with greater visibility for those reasons. Where anything under the sun is patentable, it puts an unbelievable amount of pressure on the patent office'."
A fundamental change will be required to deal with the ever increasing volume of patent applications. I would suggest some form of first level open community review is needed for a first round of patent research and possible elimination based on prior art (you know, as in the Bazaar part of The Cathedral and the Bazaar)...that, and of course outlaw patents on ideas implemented purely by software.
Of course, to have a public review of a patent application the applicant would need protection against someone stealing the idea before the patent was issued.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Some suggestions to help ease the tensions over at the USPTO:
Hope this helps.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
should create the USPPTO (U.S. Patent Pending and Trademark Office)
Long live the current patent system, for it is dead.
It is dead and we have killed it.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
My friend just took a job there. Priceless!
Unlikely. Is there some widespread alteration of the way that patents work that could make these things better, or is the stress a natural outgrowth of the explosion of possibility created by an extremely open new environment for "invention"?
Where are my GPFs? I WANT MY GPFS!!
(Yes, I realize you can't patent an instance of an object, especially a celestial object. If you're the type of person constantly pointing out flaws in other people's jokes, I'll bet you don't get invited to a lot of parties.)
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
ivanjs
lyzrdstomp.com
Careful what you ask for. Look around at the people you work with... Do you really want Naked Fridays? - Tiki
I am willing to accept that there are patent applications coming into the USPTO in torrents, but I can't accept the EFF's stance that it is because of this deluge that the patent examiners are leaving. It's probably something much more mundane like bad management or lack of upward mobility in the position that is the root cause of the fleeing.
Remember, this is the government we are talking about. They are under no pressure to approve patents in a timely manner. The applicants will wait for as long as it takes to get their patents.
The EFF is right, of course, in that the patent system needs to be overhauled so that the system can't be used as a weapon anymore. Unfortunately, they seem to make a non-existent connection between that valid point and the other vaporous point that tons of applications is leading to mass quitting at the USPTO. I think they damage their reputation when they try to argue in such a flawed manner.
We need to vote into office people who understand the issues, not those that are in the back pocket of the corporations.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
If we assume those patent officers are intelligent and familiar with the tasks they were assigned to perform, they must be able to see that so many of those patents either don't make sense, or fall into the 'common sense' category.
If you were an employee who had to deal with issues that seem unfair and unreasonable to you, especially if you were 'sensitive' enough as to even blame, in part, your very self for being part of this stupidity, you may have done the very same thing.
John Caramack puts it all in prespective:
"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." (on software patents)
Technology ramblings : Simple is Beautiful
Assuming, of course, that software could use some basic user interface techniques without paying exorbitant patent fees.
I have a friend that used to work at the USPTO and one that just got his PhD and tried to get a job there.
The guy that used to work there told me that the USPTO recently changed their benefits and no longer pay for their workers to get a law degree, etc., if they stay with the USPTO for a certain amount of time after getting it. This is the main reason he left - he did part time schooling for awhile but now decided to just leave and get it done asap to get his law degree faster.
The other was told, even with a contact inside the USPTO (this was right as the guy above was getting ready to leave), that the USPTO was not hiring and that they received over 5000 applications for the 10 slots they were trying to fill. This was for the biotech/life sciences division of the USPTO.
So, essentially, from what I've observed, there cutting some of their best benefits and getting more then enough applications for new people. I'm assuming this entire thing is primarily a budget issue - as almost everything is down here in D.C.
Sheesh. Silly patent examiners. Don't they know that if they flee from overwork, that will only make the overwork problem at the patent office worse? Logic, people, logic. :-)
Just pounding the rubber stamp on any piece of paper that comes into your office sounds like the easiest job on the face of the earth.
Maybe they should have paid me the big bucks on my patent "Method for Optimal Evaluation of Patentable Inventions"...
--Udo.
I say, d**n it, just hire the best people in each field and train them to be patent examiners. Pay them $100K a year (or whatever is needed) plus fat rewards for every application successfully rejected, and try to raise the various fees so that the applicants bear the extra cost. I don't care if small inventors can no longer afford to apply for a patent---much of the innovation seems to come from megacorps anyway, or from researchers that do not want to patent everything under the sun. If we can't have sensible patent laws we can at least limit its damage.
United States Constitution (amended 9-11)
Section 666:
Be it known that nothing shall interfere with the Holy Right of businesses to make money. Furthermore, this right is irrevocable in all cases where the agrieved party is a citizen of countries governed, by vote or military fiat, by this document.
1. Send one million rubber stamps maked "approved" to India
2. Ship all the applications to India
3. Stamp Away!
Also,
I've been dying for someone to "hack" the patent system and using different words patent the same idea twice (or have two people approved for the same idea).
meh
Like most of you, I am disgusted and disheartended by the state of the software industry. I feel as if its not worth trying to create my own product because of the dangers of stepping on someone's latent patent landmines.
But I'm wondering if the idea of dumping software patents can have any traction with the general public? The politicians are in the pockets of the big companies, and they're plenty happy to keep their entrenched positions with their armies of lawyers. Until the GENREAL public cries out for a change, it won't happen.
So far I have not heard anything about this matter outside of the geek community. (even some of my less geeky computer freinds have not heard/thought about this issue)
*** DRINK MORE COFFEE ***
/ex patent examiner
but where exactly is the stress if you are approving all the patents?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Just fill the post of Patent Examiner with ordinary people chosen at random, like jury selection.
"Sorry, boss...I won't be in this week...got a summons for patent duty."
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
What will not, in the end, cause an end to innovation and the internet:
- Spam
- 0-day virus
- Spyware
- Closed source software
- Phishing
- Hacking
- Child pornography
- Internet congestion
- Misleading information
What will, in the end, cause an end to innovation and the internet:
- Patents/Patent Law
Be sure to remember the Programmers Prayer
Examiners are on a quota system.
Yes...I am a rocket scientist.
He has finished his first year of law school for IP law, $55K+ and they are paying for the rest of his college
not a bad deal if you have an engineering/science background
The USPTO management is not concerned about the loss of human examiners. Trials of their new Pitney Bowes Stampmaster 5000-EX have shown that a fully automated application processing machine can rubber-stamp applications at a rate exceeding that of 1800 human examiners using old-fashioned hand stamps and inkpads. Current plans call for phasing out the examiners completely over the coming months.
"Microsoft has received a patent for Communications. We are now no longer
allowed to communicate without a license."
There is a commotion outside.
"What's that sound?"
The door explodes inward and the room is immediately filled with smoke and
overrun with stormtroopers.
A large and ominous voice booms out.
"You are forbidden to communicate."
I am stunned! I don't know what to think!
Then just as suddenly the first wave of stormtroopers are felled, one by one in
an unimaginably short flash of time.
"Don't know what to think a voice says?"
I look up and see Jeff Brazos towering above the carnage.
"That's fine by me. I just patented Thought!"
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Here's your chance to get employed at a place that can use your skills and can't outsource your job that easily.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Perhaps the USPTO needs to look into the patent filing equivalent of BitTorrent (quick, somebody patent that idea!)
surge of patent applications, especially in the software and internet business method arena
It's almost like the solution suggests itself...
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Where anything under the sun is patentable, it puts an unbelievable amount of pressure on the patent office
That's it! Patent the Sun! Such a method of gigantic energy transfer must be patentable, since it is so unique and original.
I know that no one has thought of this before right? But let's talk about what life would be like if software and business method patents were abolished? I think that should put things back in order.
I must say, I didn't expect to hear that the patent system is starting to collapse under the load. THAT is surprising to me... in a pleasant-surprise sort of way. I mean after all, FINALLY they will be forced to re-think software patents in the U.S. and in addition to that, there is more amunition to fight such patents in other parts of the world. ("you see what software patents did to the U.S.? Do you want that for us?") The lobbyists will not be able to convince any governmental body that THIS is a good idea now.
Outsource patenting. You can get 4 times the number of patent examiners for 1/4 the price from aspiring super powers nowadays.
Dear Patent Lawyers,
Could you please justify by reply in moderate detail the supposed net benefit to society (rather than just to corporations) of software patents explaining why you think that extending the patent system to cover software is not harmful both to society and to freedom of expression given the case of an open-source software developer who, as a result of
is threatened with a patent lawsuit by a corporation demanding he/she removes the allegedly infringing software from the project's website, leaving the impoverished developer with no real choice but to comply with the demand and close the project?
One recent unresolved case, which is not unique, is that of the German mathematician and open-source software developer Helmut Dersch who had no financial choice but to remove his software from his project website. He had no money to pay for a patent application at the time of his own inventions, which pre-date the patent application of the IPX company , to to pay for a lawyer to challenge the company which threatened him with the prospect of a lawsuit.
Here [ffii.org] is a summary of the case history.
I hope you will take the time to reply at moderate length for the sake of explaining to the open-source developer community why software patents are not a threat to completely unfunded open-source projects.
Thank you for reading this. If you are a patent lawyer, please mention that fact in your reply here.
When a similar comment was last posted here it got a brief reply from one of the patent lawyers who read slashdot.
Please copy and re-post this message in all available forums until some patent lawyers have the courtesy to write a thorough reply.
Pass a law that nullifies software and business method patents.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I am a past examiner and I can tell you that every examiner has production quotas. Their bosses (called supervisory patent examiners) get bonuses if all their people do over set amounts (e.g. up to 110% of quota), so some bosses really ratchet up the pressure. The guy that hired me even made me orally agree to do 110% of quota before hiring me.
Additionally, though, the bosses get alot of power. In training we were told to do things one way, but if our bosses wanted the opposite, we were to do that instead. Some bosses are great, to the point that people even have second jobs (maybe not now, but some did when I was there) and goof off at the USPTO, getting their quotas on one or two days work. Other bosses are from hell and get very personal on people, refusing to sign off on their work and requiring them to redo things time and again. There is NO way to meet quota when your boss refuses to sign off on your work, at least until you reach primary examiner status. People in such situations generally had no recourse, especially as the bosses could prevent transfer requests, so the people were forced to leave or be fired. And upper management had a "hands off" policy so no help there.
I literally know of dozens of good examiners who were forced out by recalcitrant bosses, including several primaries.
On the other hand, if you have a good boss and get into a schedule where you can get your work done in less than 40 hours a week, the USPTO can be very difficult to leave.
It is very obvious that the USPTO management doesn't care about examiner attrition. If they did, they would have figured out safeguards against it long ago. But why should they? After all, there are always people wanting jobs there, if not birth Americans, then all the Vietnamese, Indians, and Ethiopians who have gotten their citizenships. And it's not like the companies are going to go away - no matter how long it takes to get a patent, there is only one source for patents. And congress can't do much - the USPTO is self-funded, congress can't force the USPTO to improve beyond what they are doing without more money, and congress isn't about to supply that. So I think the system is stuck without some enlightened new management.
Maybe we need to stock it with OSS-Friendly folks! "I'm sorry, Sir, your patent is denied because you're an asshat. Yes, Sir, I said asshat. According to our rules: 'Any such patent as applied for in an attempt to circumvent or interfere with the GPL will be denied under the Asshat Clause.' Yes, Sir. You have a great day. Thank you....buh-bye!"
The EU doesn't allow for software nor business practices to be patented. Things like customer lists and such are still protected as trade secrets. They just have a heightened tangibility standard, as should we. It would probably clear half the "pending" load off the desks at the patent office if we did so.
The USPTO is a profit center for the government. Last December, the amount of that profit was set to DRAMATICALLY increase because of dramatic increases in user fees such as filing fees and examination fees, among others. Instead of letting the PTO keep that money to do its job, Congress "diverts" a large portion for other uses, including Homeland Security, among others.
Contrary to what the parent post said, namely, "Where anything under the sun is patentable, it puts an unbelievable amount of pressure on the patent office," anything under the sun is NOT patentable. Anything under the sun MADE BY MAN has the POTENTIAL to be patentable - so long as it meets the criteria of the Patent Act, namely, novelty, utility, and non-obviousness. Despite the seeming simplicity of these terms, there are very well-defined legal tests behind each one that must be applied properly. Each of those terms has thousands of pages of case law / judicial interpretation behind it.
The PTO's inability, caused by Congress, to keep adequate resources to properly do its job directly results in poorer quality examinations because the Examiners do not have the time, experience and training to rigorously apply the rules in every case. As a patent attorney, I have an ethical duty to provide valuable services to a patent applicant. My services are valuable if I can point out and properly describe my clients' inventions and the legal reasons why those inventions are entitled to patent protection. The way I do that is by keeping current in my technical field (Computer Science) and the law. However, I cannot know every piece of prior art out there. The best I can do is try to know as much as I can and write patent claims (the portion that defines the invention) that do not also describe prior art. Every patent applicant relies to a certain extent on the Examiner who receives their application to perform a good prior art search so that the Applicant can either point out how their invention is different from the prior art or can adjust the claims so that those claims no longer describe the prior art along with the invention. In fact, the Applicant is PAYING for that search.
A claim that describes an invention but also describes the prior art is invalid. I do my best to draft solid claims but the Examiner also has to do a solid search. Some people think that it is in the Applicant's best interest to have very broad claims so that people will have to litigate to prove the claims are invalid. I think that approach, if taken, is foolhardy because of potential legal liability on the part of the patent owner. It is also an abuse of the system. Abuses of the system can be minimized to a certain degree by having higher quality patent searches by well-trained Examiners. The best way to get that is to tell Congress to stop diverting fees.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
so then we can start patenting math equations - then they would get more revenue than they could ask for.
patents are just another revenue channel for the government - why would they want to do anyting to it - it is bringing in money and looking at the patents they hand out they can't be doing that much research. so it is low budget high profit department - why touch it from the governments point of view. Its a moneymaker.
I think a lot of the stress would be reduced if people were restricted to only patenting things that they created themselves
That would go against the purpose of the patent system. The idea is that you are granted a temporary monopoly in exchange for publishing your invention.
So you can either keep your invention as a secret or you can patent it. But you cannot have both.
C - the footgun of programming languages
It should probably be pointed out the law degree program has been reinstated (as of this year, I think, or maybe 2006).
Check your facts.
Easy, the patent is enforceable from the day it was applied for, since public review occurs after the application whoever stole the idea will have to pay damages for infringing on a patent.
Those who want corruption want stupid patents so they can scare others away from working in their area of technology. They don't care if they sometimes lose a few court cases due to stupidly weak patents. In general, taking something to court is so expensive that the corrupters win just because of the threat.
A major way those who want corruption destroy government effectiveness is by starving the agencies of operating funds. That's what happened to the patent office. The corrupters won't allow hiring of enough people to do the job well.
For a discussion of starving the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, regulates the stock exchange), see this article: Keeping the SEC on a Starvation Diet. The corrupters don't want their stock manipulations discovered. They want more of this: Enron fraud, this: WorldCom fraud and this: Tyco fraud.
They are corrupting the IRS (U.S. Internal Revenue Service, collects taxes), too. The corrupters definitely do NOT want their tax returns to be audited, so they arrange that there is not enough money for audits: Bush Request for IRS Not Enough, Report Says
They are corrupting the courts. Those who want corruption spend huge amounts to get lazy judges elected, and work for the defeat of judges who do a good job.
Another major way that corruption of the courts is accomplished by not giving the courts enough money to operate. A 2003-06-24 op-ed article by Charles Williamson, then president of the Oregon State Bar, in The Oregonian, the Northwest's largest newspaper, said, "The crippling loss of nearly one-third of their staff have left our courts unable to hear criminal cases such as car theft, shoplifting, prostitution, fraud and identity theft."
The Bush administration has been appointing heads of government agencies who reduce the role of those agencies. After they destroy the effectiveness of the agencies, they go back to running their businesses, and the corruption gives them more profit.
The book Other People's Money discusses corporate corruption. It's excellent. Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After: A Prelude to the Fall of U.S. Power in the Middle East?, by Dilip Hiro is an excellent book about the corruption that led to the most recent U.S.-Iraq war.
The corruption is extremely widespread. The books mentioned above and the 3 movies and 34 books reviewed in this article are not enough to tell the story: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
In general, most Americans don't want to know how corrupt their government has become. Most don't read books. The TV news they watch is heavily influenced by the corrupters. For example, GE, one of the largest sellers of weapons, owns NBC, one of the major ways Americans get their news.
Send it to China. Couldn't be any worse.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
That's it! Patent the Sun! Such a method of gigantic energy transfer must be patentable, since it is so unique and original.
Alpha Centauri A and B are both prior art (between 5 and 6 billion years vs. 4.6 billion years).
....accepts costly software products with NO warranty. They don't accept anything tangible without warranty, but for some reason software gets a free skate, people keep buying it, despite the huge number of bugs and the security issues, etc that are plain to see with various softwares. If they eat that, then patents on that stuff are so far down the radar it won't be noticed even if it's pointed out. That and joe consumer has been completely (and righteously) browbeat and brainwashed into accepting just about anything big business and the government throws at them. The population now has a collective mindset of like this: "what can you do about it?". This is because there isn't anything you can do about it, practically speaking. In theory there might be market pressures, in practice the industry as a whole profits from the phenomenon, so there is no pressure to reform, nor any pressure to inform. A consumer kept in ignorance is a consumer you can keep hustling.
I agree with the parent on the premise that there's probably another reason than simply quantity of patents coming in that examiners are leaving. However, it's not because of management or similar (government jobs tend to be pretty lax, actually).
I believe it's purely because of salary. Entry examiners coming in making about $35k or so, and topping out at about $50k after a few years (depending on the type of patents that you're examining - it varies based on the complexity of the topic or technology).
However, in the private sector, patent lawyers typically make twice as much as these patent examiners, and often have less work required of them, since it's often better *not* to research of a patent has been issued for a given thing, because knowingly infringing a patent automatically triples (yes, triples) the restitution that must be paid to the patent owner.
Less money and more work, or more money and less work? You tell me which you'd prefer.
A community-oriented lyrics site
People leaving their jobs at the patent office because they can't cope with the influx of new software patents... ...when it is they that lobbied for software patents in the first place in an attempt to safeguard their jobs.
This does not compute...
A simple solution: GET RID OF SOFTWARE PATENTS. Software patents totally hurt competition. Open source projects such as FreeDOS, ReactOS, FreeType, and Linux all either can't implement something due to patent issues, or are in violation of patents. Software patents are just ludicrous.
From my blog, 'cause I'm too lazy to retype it.
I was channel surfing last night, waiting for water to boil, and came across a hearing on patent reform. Dean Kaymen, inventor of the uber-hyped Segway, explained the need for massive patent reform. There was some disagreement among the panel of experts about what needed to be done. The corporate IP lawyers argued that they were unable to defend against frivolous lawsuits from what are known as patent squatters and therefore damages needed to be capped. The small inventors argued that damages should not be capped simply because the government wasn't doing its job. Considering the importance of this hearing for the future of capitalism I was surprised to find only two articles covering it. Kaymen argued in favor of the little guys but didn't mention trends. The Longtail/Democratization of Innovation trend could have been used to argue that the small guys will increasingly need protection as they become the main producers of intellectual property. The big guys have an ulterior motive with their push for damage caps. If the big corps do accidentally violate a patent they can't be held fully acountable because of the government's inability to decide which patent suits are frivolous. I don't think anybody bought the argument. Everybody seemed to agree that the patent office is underfunded and that judges aren't fairly handling cases. It was kind of nice to watch these inventors that I've read about actually teaching our legislators a thing or two about the realities of doing business. And the legislators were eagerly listening! I'm generally disenfranchised with what the government has devolved into but moments like this rekindle that weird sense of patriotism that sometimes rears its bald head. There's a good overview on Patently-O.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Actually, examiners are under very high pressure to process applications quickly. That can mean approve or reject.
Patents are meant to be a legal weapon for the inventor. For example, Tensor stole Walter Raczynski's invention of a desk lamp after he showed it to them. Since he had a patent, he was able to use it as a weapon to get compensation from Tensor.
If anything, volume of patent applications serves as an indicator of the level of demand for IP attorneys to help inventors file patents. Ones that have experience at the patent office are particularly valued.
Patent examiners with at least a year of experience at the USPTO can work for an IP law firm or begin their own practice for ***substantially*** higher income.
Secondly, the problem is the ***amount of time*** allowed to examine each patent which isn't news at all--it has always been that way for at least the past decade. This is why a patent application is rejected over 90% of the time virtually without any real consideration no matter the merits--this helps filter out hobbiest applicants that don't follow-up.
Since the problem with amount of time has existed for a while and remained fairly constant, the obvious reason for the new surge in exodus is higher income in private practice. Patent examiners in the past have almost always left due to workload.
The solution is simple:
1. Stop leeching excess revenues from the USPTO into other government departments now! And use the money to pay competitive salaries so that patent examiners are not making 50% less by staying. The patent office is currently "profitable", this shouldn't be a problem at all.
2. Allow more time for each patent using a rollover system so that time saved on simple applications can be used on more complex patent applications. Doubling the current time would be a good start. This alone will help address many problems such as improper patents getting granted or proper patents getting rejected (the public doesn't hear about improper rejections but they exist). This is only possible if #1 is implemented because without competitive salaries, retention will stink and this won't be possible.
Remember, patent system is like software industry. The fact that bad patents get issued is like buggy software getting distributed to users. The solution is to address the reason for the bugs rather than eliminating all software.
I'm surprised that what isn't getting news is the fact that the new Patent Reform Act of 2005 seeks to make patents relatively ignorable by large companies while remaining an effective deterrant for small companies and independent inventors. Why not discuss this MASSIVE change? They are putting caps on damages so that a large company that WILLFULLY AND FRAUDULENTLY violates a patent doesn't have to worry much (only $5 million tops).
And then sue the USPTO for infringement?
Problem Solved....
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
If we ditch software patents, a lot of comanies will lose out on their revenue. However, these same companies can violate others' former patents as well. This isn't quite a zero result because you still have to spend time and money tin integrate the previously patented stuff. But you can wind up with a greater product, which can push profits, resulting in an assumed 0-result
However that is not the only effect. The patent office work load shrinks, people are free and happier, and they enjoy their time on the computer with better software systems and devices.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Daniel Terdiman wrote about this same issue some weeks back. He spoke with Prof. Beth Noveck of New York Law School who had created the concept of "Peer to Patent" - an interesting proposal to this problem to say the least.
I'd be afraid to tell people that I worked at the USPTO at social events because they'd probably spit at me. I'd say I'm the reason why your business can't have one-click checkout. And then they would spit at me. Who needs that kind of stress, right?
In fact you'd be liked better if you worked at the IRS. Pretty crazy, huh? Of course working for Microsoft would probably get the most spitting I suppose.
Why is this insightful? If you really want someone of import to read this, try actually writing the Patent Office, or patent lawyers, or hell, even the letters section of a major newpaper.
Stop the patent sellout and bring the patent system to the standard levels it used to have, stop software patents and patents for everything aleady invented under the sun, and throw patent trolls into jail or fine them, revoke trivial patents and then the number of patent applications per year will go down to sane levels again in the immediate future.
- Over half of all patents being applied for now are in the areas of electronics and related technologies, so they are trying like mad to hire electrical engineers and train them as patent reviewers. This takes 4-5 years of training unless the reviewer has a legal background already. (Personally, I can't imagine what about the patent process could take 4+ years to learn when most medical residencies aren't even that long).
- "Prior art" is not limited to just prior patent filings, but can include a variety of publicly available pieces of information. However, finding those items outside the PTO's own database can be impossible for someone who doesn't know the field (I think this implies that a public review step might be necessary in the future).
- The growth in patent applications, especially those coming from foreign entities, is over 30% a year, and the approval rate has been declining (but not as fast as the submission rate growth, so we're still seeing more patents per annum approved).
Anyway, I thought it was interesting. Clearly, his job was more political (fighting for resources/funding from Congress, etc.) than operational, which seems to be where most of the PTO's problems are now.
First, I can't read the article you linked to because the link doesn't work.
Second, the net benefit to society is workarounds. If this guy can't do X because someone has a patent on it, then he has to come up with another way of doing X. Maybe he does it a different way, maybe he adds or changes a step, whatever. The net effect is that he increases the possible ways of solving a problem because he has to design around their patent. For example, say you have a patent on the combustion engine that uses spark plugs. To get around your patent, I would have to come up with an engine that doesn't use spark plugs. People make a distinction between software and hardware when thinking about patents and there really isn't any. People hate software patents because it is so easy for one person to build a sophisticated system. You are no less likely when building a car engine to infringe on someone's patents than you are when building a software system. In fact, because software is so easy to create by one person, that's probably why there are so many applications; you have many more people working on solving various problems and the lone individual can put up a fence for himself when he finds one.
Third, if this guy is in Germany and the company doesn't have a German patent, granted by the German patent office, US courts have no jurisdiction over him so they can send him all the nasty-grams they want, it won't make a lick of difference.
Fourth, one of the big problems is not the patents themselves, it is their use. There are a number of patent trolls out there that buy up a dying company's patents and then starts using them abusively. The patents are not inherintly evil, just the way they are being used by a new owner. I wish I had an answer for how to fix that (and anyone claiming patent shouldn't be assignable has no concept of how bad preventing the alienation of property would be for society)
Lastly, if his published code was published over a year before they filed in the US (or even a day for most internationally-filed patents), he blows them out of the water. Their patent is invalid under 102(b).
The story sounds like it sucks (again, can't read it), and it's a shame if an OSS developer was forced to take down his code because he was threatened. But the reality is he probably had other options like pro-bono or free consultation. Did he contact the EFF lawyers? They probably could have at least laid out what I just said for free. The worst part that I've realized lately is that nasty-grams are 75% puffery and 25% substance. They are meant to scare and people, not having dealt with lawyers and not able to pay for a lawsuit, cave. What makes no sense to me is why a company went after one lowly developer. You always go after the deepest pockets becuase really, what are you goign to gain besides an injunction from suing one measely developer? (with the exception of the RIAA which really just wants to scare people away from downloading and has the money to fund scare-suits)
I've worked at the patent office and this has been happening for years. We've always been swamped with a huge backlog of patents, but its not the reason why examiners are leaving. They're leaving because you can get a lot more money from the private sector dealing with IP than with the government.
Oh, and it's casual dress everyday btw, not just casual friday.
"After the first year of training, examiners are on a production quota system in which, depending on grade level and complexity of the technology examined, they are given a certain amount of time to do an average application."
sum.zero
Examiners are on a quota system.
Maybe they should have quotas on their patent rejection rate too, not just on the number of applications rubberstamped per second.
Or maybe society should decide how many monopolies it is reasonable to grant per year worldwide. 100 sounds right (that's a lot more than Nobel prizes). But of course that would put a cap on the rate of innovation, right ?
"The auditors concluded that USPTO's workforce problems arise from the lack of an effective management strategy for communicating and collaborating with examiners, outdated assumptions about production quotas that managers use to reward examiners and a lack of mandatory continued technical training for patent examiners."
sum.zero
By definition, everybody wants to own everything.
IP makes it possible, unlike REAL property. IP is merely an attempt to extend contract behavior and law over basic property principles and law and do it using government coercion instead of contracts or the market.
IP is an oxymoron and ultimately unworkable.
Dump all IP laws and the economy will adjust to the new situation within a few years (although undoubtedly the lawyers will make a killing on ridiculous nuisance lawsuits for a while). There will NO impact on the rate of new inventions or anything else, supposedly the justification for this nonsense. And a lot of wasted money (both in legal fights and pointless "inventions" that can't survive in the marketplace) will get re-invested, hopefully in something more useful.
Studies have show that the cost of government regulation far exceeds the benefits - to the point where, if regulations didn't exist, everything in the US would cost ten percent of what the item costs with it. Undoubtedly, an economic study of the costs of IP laws will show they far outweigh the supposed benefits, or at the very least, skew those benefits to the few instead of the many.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
As a former employee in the examining office, I have some background I thought I could share..
The USPTO actually makes money by charging a substantial fee for every interface with it, and strictly monitoring the time spent on each task. I'm told that a USPTO examiner only has time to look at a patent for 8 hours during its entire examination, including prior art searches and the response to the patentee
The funds raised by the USPTO are used for things that have nothing to do with the USPTO, thus the poor results. This makes most of the IP community fairly angry, as pseudo-companies are getting patents on ridiculous things, which then waste real-companys' time fighting ridiculous lawsuits from "trolls".
I am used to the general uninformed ranting that goes on Slashdot regarding the patent system. i.e. "IM GOING TO PATENT TEH NUMBER "0"!!!! I OWNZZ J00 F007!!!!". But I'm surprised that this statement got onto the front page.
Don't get me wrong there are a lot of problems with the USPTO, but most could be solved by a simply allowing the USPTO to use the money it makes to do its job, rather then allowing congress to put that money into its coffers. If you are going to bitch, at least make it informed, or else you run the risk of misleading your audience and don't actually solve the problem.
Lord High Crapflooder The Right Honourable Vlad Craig Esther McDavenpherson III
Destroyer of Mercatur.Net
outlaw this bullshit NOW damnit or we're going to drown ourselves in red tape and bull shit lawsuits as far as the eye can see. This WILL destroy the American economy.
What's the difference between your hypothetical and a guy who designs a new engine on paper, proposes a new synthesis on paper, or sketches a new circuit on paper, and posts it on the web, whereupon some third party company picks it up and mass produces it
This is fiction, and OSS is nonfiction. That's the difference. It captures the difference between invention and "IP" perfectly: no one in his right mind would put his new engine or drug plans online, and insofar as trivial modifications and implementations exist in tangible products, they aren't winning exclusivity grants left and right. Or if they are, it's small potatoes; the twist-off beer cap isn't strangling honest competition in the most explosive market ever.
That said, our protagonist should have GPL'd. If the main point is he couldn't afford to patent, it's implied the entire patent system should go. I don't think that's the conclusion you were after. The argument could use a more appropriate case study, IMO.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
Rewards for accepting or denying an application are bad. It give you a situation where one outcome is preferred, then erroneous judgements will be made in favour of that outcome. It's like getting a speeding ticket a 2km/h over the limit because *somebody* is meeting a quota... not a good way of doing things.
I want to patent patents in general, this way everyone else who uses patents will be infringing mine!
http://badgerbadgerbadger.com/
Just doing my Civic duty... no need to thank me.
I've had a bit a look over the application process for patent examiner. For one thing, they're a bit too strict on some of their requirements, but more importantly, you need H&R Block to help you fill out the paperwork.
I'm highly technically skilled. I have an extensive technical background, and I even have a bit of a clue about the law. But I wouldn't look forward to spending several days filling out forms. And being the government, they'd probably find a comma missing in some field somewhere (but not notice all the other missing commas everywhere else) and reject the forms on that basis, making you do them over, and BTW, they'd neglect to tell you which comma they found missing.
The idea is that all patent applications go online, and users on the internet can post comments. Other users can moderate those comments, etc, and then a real patent examiner will looks to see if anyone's discovered any good prior art (or anything else that qualifies or disqualifies it) in the highest-rated comments.
The incredible surge of patent applications, especially in the software and internet business method arena, is just crushing them
Hire me, I'll singlehandedly be able to do fifty times the workload that any current examiner does in the software and internet businuess division.
DENIED!
DENIED!
DENIED!
DENIED!
DENIED!
I can stamp 'Denided' on patent requests faster than lawyers can write them up. I might even bother to read one or two before I reject it, just for laughs...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Older developers can keep their hand in the game and play to their strengths, so its a win for them.
And it will reduce the number of moronic, innovation crushing patents, so its a win for the software industry.
Slam-f'in-dunk.
"First you get the Linux, then you get the power, THEN you get the women"
1. Put more of the onous on lawyers and applicants. Make them determine what class/subclass the patent should reside. Fine them for imcomplete prior art searches they submit. Have examiners rate lawyers and keep publically available statistics on the lawyers so applicants can choose ones who do not try to abuse the system and are more likely to have patents stand up to legal challenges.
2. Make the system pay per claim. Not just volume ahs increased, the number of things claimed per patent has dramatically increased.
3. Start a program of research funds (maybe to universities) to develop advanced searching methods to cut examining time. More analysis time less time searching, but they are still very connected activities.
4. Do away with the government structure. Make each art group a business unit like the post office. They set the rates with governement approval and then manage themselves and are free from gov. funding cycles. Get rid of the rules set in the 70s where certain cases get X hours and other cases get Y hours to examine. Let managers manage, rewarding those who work hard and discipline those who don't instead of it being a pure numbers game.
Well those are my thoughts. The PTOs new offices also have clock in and out cards, making these professionals feel like prisoners. It used to be finish your quota and you could leave early, but now, its lock down.
Despite the deluge of software-based patents, you still can't be a patent lawyer unless you have a degree in one of the "hard" sciences. That does not include the ones relevant to software development and design. Major flaw and I'm sure the criteria for patent examiners are equally off the mark if not more restrictive.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
but they just said that people would become eligible for full retirement and would be leaving for that reason.
...
Is it really an exodus over the flood of silly patents - an obvious and inexerable problem - or is it just that people would rather be in Europe where they can have fun in the sun and not worry about having their business processes patented every time they think out loud? OK, that plus the hot babes
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
How about using some of the profit they make to hire more or give better pay. You know why they wont change anything at the uspto? It is because they make so much money on the fees for granting and maintaining patents and it all goes to the gov for anything they want to use the money for.
Too late, I already did that when I trademarked All Of The Above (TM).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Tell you what. You guys (US Gov't) offer me a six-figure salary, and I'll process patents all day.
And I agree with his words totally.
What's really sad is most of these idiots in the patent office probably have never programmed a damned thing in their lives. If everyone used C/C++ for programming, someone's bound to repeat one line of code, out of pure necessity for a certain command that most any other program relies upon (some obscure function call, library reference, etc.)
Based on that alone, software, no matter what type, (Operating System, Database, etc.) should never be allowed to be proprietary or patented.
But I do have one question to anyone reading this. Are there programming languages that are fairly different but still might retain the same ways of programmign a certain thing? (In other words, are there two different programming languages that might incidentally have the same command to do the same thing?)
If that's the case, software patents should be totally ruled out.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I sure hope we get another physics shattering formula(e.g. e=mc2) from one of these guys
You just saved me from having to go to jury duty... I wish I had mod points to mod you up! I shit you not, I *JUST* got the call for it. I mentioned FIJA and boom, I got disconnected!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
2) Forcing people to find workarounds for X because there is a patent on X is a cost not a benefit to the people concerned. It is not necessarily of net benefit to society, for example, where the costs of finding workarounds exceed the licensing cost of the patent on X or otherwise where the massive legal costs of being sued even unsuccessfully anyway precisely because one has dared to try avoiding the need to licence the patent on X by working around it.
More importantly, there may not be any workaround because if software is allowed to be patentable, it automatically means that potentially any examples of deductive reasoning, classes of algorithms, and even general mathematical principles, are coverable by patents.
3) As a trainee patent lawyer, you should already know that software patents may not be explicitly approved as such in Germany and most other countries but they are trivially obtainable via the sneaky lawyer's ruse of expressing the patent in terms of a "circuit" which is mathematically identical to the software and which is then used to threaten software developers as if the patent were a software patent.
4) If software patents were strictly not valid (including the ruse of claiming a "circuit"), then by definition there would be no problems with the use of software patents.
5) As a trainee patent lawyer, you should already know the absurd reality is that software which exists as published code on websites is never searched by any patent offices when looking for prior art and deciding whether to grant a software patent. Once a software patent is granted, it is usually economically impossible for any unfunded open-source developer to fight any legal threats against his/her software, and although pro bono representation for IPR cases may be available in theory, it is extremely hard to get in practice.
Please have a read through the third thread of Anonymous Coward comments which is from the other link I posted and which covers many of the points in more detail.
Against IP[PDF] by Stephan Kinsella is a great paper about the theory of IP and why it is flawed...essential reading for those who think there are problems with the current system
When anything under the sun is patentable, it puts an unbelievable amount of pressure on the patent office.
I think the solution suggests itself here.
Make fewer things patentable?
The patent office decided on its own accord to begin granting patents to software methods. There was no bill passed by Congress, or signed by the President. There were two fairly significant cases that led to this - one was a case in the early 80's that included software as a means of regulating another process. However, people began to interpret this to mean that software could now be patented.
Later, there was the Compton's case, where the producers of Compton's electronic encyclopedia claimed ownership of the entire concept of multimedia. This patent was thrown out, but may have served as catalyst to further escalate the patent madness.
One of the key problems is that because there are so many patents being filed, and so much revenue being generated in the way of patent fees, this has created an entrenched interest - those in the government who value the money more than they care about the havoc that it is causing. Congress could have easily put an end to this...but true to form (or is that lack of form - you can't have form without a spine) they ignored it, and continue to do so.
If anything, this exodus should be a wakeup call for legislators to do something constructive for once, by crafting a law that makes the patenting of software methods illegal.
Actually, as you might have noticed if you had followed the link I posted to the previous discussion, slashdot is frequented by many patent lawyers. It is a waste of time dealing with the patent offices because they have never accepted any fundamental criticisms of the principle of software patents.
- "Flamebait -- Flamebait refers to comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage. If someone is not-so-subtly picking a fight (racial insults are a dead giveaway), it's Flamebait."
Please would a passing meta-moderator, rate that "Flamebait" as Unfair.The only thing worse than they get educated and leave would be they do not get educated and stay.
The incident in the early eighties that is said to have spurred the growth of software patents was a Supreme Court decision in 1981 that that granted James Diehr, an engineer, a patent that was intially denied by the patent office. The Patent office claimed that since software is not patentable, one cannot combine software with a conventional process to make it patentable.
However, since the ruling applied to a physical process controlled by a computer program, this still left the question as to whether or not a computer program, by iself, was patentable. In 1994, a Federal Appeals court ruled that standalone software programs can be patented (In re Alappat). Oddly, the decision doesn't provide for the protection of software per se, but views the computer as a new machine once the software has been loaded.
Even more interesting, is that the claim itself applies to the method used to smooth the waveforms rendered by oscilliscopes so that they appear as continuous, non-jagged waveforms. The description sounds remarkably close to what we know as anti-aliasing- a process that is very common in many different graphics-related applications. It begs the question - if loading this process (a mathematical algorithm) into a computer (or a piece of hardware) makes the machine patentable, where does that leave patents that exist solely on the software itself? If the method of antialiasing had been patented, we'd all be paying royalties to someone, or simply living with rasterized images that contain visual discontinuities(jaggies).
In light of all of this, it seems to me that there is still some room for legal intervention/clarification.
Morale at the USPTO has been so low for several years that the common way to pursue a petty gripe against a co-worker is to make an anonymous complaint to the Inspector General.
I propose that there is really no point in examining a SIR, since its only purpose is to be used as prior art to reject a later application. We should simply register SIRs, and charge no fee or a very minimal fee. Then, the EFF could have volunteers submit SIRs on lots of different ideas, and we could use them to reject patents applications.
I think this is more a matter of legal precedant than a matter of how the law reads. The law says that something is not patentable if it is obvious, but precedent says, roughly, that "obvious" means that part A is known, and part B is known, and someone has suggested combining part A with part B.
I say, let people patent algorithms. They're doing that anyway, and those patents are being upheld. Some algorithms are non-obvious, such as RSA, which accomplishes something most cryptologists previously believed was impossible.
An invention would be held to violate a law-of-nature patent if understanding the law of nature were held to be a requirement for making the invention. In the cases I just mentioned, QM and relativity, this would be an easy judgement to make.
how about an elimination of corporate patents? only private people can apply for patents.
The average cost of filing and maintaining a patent is $40K _per patent_, and they can't hire more patent examiners?
Forget it, I've already got a patent on that.
You'll be hearing from my lawyers.
Naked laywers.
See - if you believe that there are unjust laws, then it is your duty to enforce that belief, and to educate those around you about that belief, and what FIJA is. You have done that here, bravo. But it might have been better to do so "in the courtroom" (actually, in the jury deliberation room).
When I get called for jury duty, I always take part. The one time that I have went in (for juror selection), I answered everything as truthful as possible. This meant that since they never asked about FIJA, I said nothing about it. Had I been selected, and the case continued to trial, and there was a law that I didn't feel was just that was going to possibly incarcerate what I felt was a victim of an unjust law, I would then have the chance to "hang" the jury - or whatever was needed to keep the individual from being prosecuted -on my watch- under an unjust law.
Want to really shake things up? Hang the jury - but in the deliberation room, tell the other jurors in a logical and reasoned manner, that you are against the law being applied because you think it is unjust, and why you think it is unjust. Educate them on the reasons why the law is unjust, and question their own beliefs about the law. Then let them know about FIJA, and what it means and stands for. Let them know how their own government is duping them (although, I seriously wonder at this point, with everything that is going on that anyone with a set of eyeballs and a couple of brain cells to rub together - whether anyone really cares anymore - Rome is burning, and no one cares). Eventually it will reach the court, and the whole jury panel will be thrown out.
Ours is a corrupt land with corrupt leaders, corrupt government, corruption from top to bottom - with few good apples in between. We are losing our asses left and right to all of this corruption, and no one seems to care. It is depressing to witness, and nothing I nor anyone else seems to do seems to help a bit. We are all called crackpots, loonies, conspiracy theorists - even though it is all out in the open for anyone to see. We are yelled at by the outside world for us to "WAKE UP! DO SOMETHING!", yet we continue on, hands over our eyes and ears. Our skilled jobs are leaving, we are using more energy than all the rest, we pollute like a bad ass, we patent and copyright everything and sue everyone else.
Gah - I am just going to end it here, I just hope all the oblivious fuckers out there enjoy it when it finally burns to shit.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
According to these two laws, the public can indeed "review" patents that have issued, provided they can raise a question to the patentability of a patent through prior art they found
35 U.S.C. 301 Citation of prior art.
Any person at any time may cite to the Office in writing prior art consisting of patents or printed publications which that person believes to have a bearing on the patentability of any claim of a particular patent. If the person explains in writing the pertinency and manner of applying such prior art to at least one claim of the patent, the citation of such prior art and the explanation thereof will become a part of the official file of the patent. At the written request of the person citing the prior art, his or her identity will be excluded from the patent file and kept confidential.
35 U.S.C. 302 Request for reexamination.
Any person at any time may file a request for reexamination by the Office of any claim of a patent on the basis of any prior art cited under the provisions of section 301 of this title. The request must be in writing and must be accompanied by payment of a reexamination fee established by the Director pursuant to the provisions of section 41 of this title. The request must set forth the pertinency and manner of applying cited prior art to every claim for which reexamination is requested. Unless the requesting person is the owner of the patent, the Director promptly will send a copy of the request to the owner of record of the patent.
Stupid Question: What the heck has a law background got to do with examining and approving patents?
A patent is not legislation. A patent is an engineering document, written by an engineer describing to other engineers how to re-create their work. Law shouldn't enter into it (unless you're patenting new legal processes).
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Soaring numbers of patent applications for software and business processes is not only leading to the ludicrous patents for the likes of Amazon and Microsoft.
I got a solution, get rid of Software Patents. Problem solved.
Second, the net benefit to society is workarounds. If this guy can't do X because someone has a patent on it, then he has to come up with another way of doing X.
Workarounds aren't very beneficial, though. And the harm caused by forcing them is immense.
If our budding inventor can't trivially come up with workaround X, he has to scrap the entire project, because he has enough pressure trying to make his invention profitable, without frittering away all his investors' money on re-inventing wheels all the time.
And if he can trivially come up with workaround X, then he's either a genius who is being forced waste his talents on re-inventing things for which the public already has a proper solution, or, more likely, the original patent was obvious, and should never have been granted.
Either way, innovation suffers. Patents just plain get in the way: without patents, people are free to try things.
With all these patents (and copyrights, and trademarks), you just can't do anything cool anymore.
Want to make a machine that reads books, and produces book reports? Sorry, but the minute you scan the image from the text into RAM you've violated copyright. Ditto any machine that tries to read in soundwaves from the radio and determines what music humans like. Ditto any attempt to combine a map and a phone book to find goods for sale nearby. A.I. is dead: and copyright killed it.
If you ever read the patent database, you'll be guilty of deliberate infringement when you do something by accident, so never read any patents, or you'll pay triple in court once they decide you might have done it on purpose.
Never use materials with any brand names on them, because otherwise the company will be able to sue you for making their product look bad, under their "moral rights". And then try to find cheap materials around the house without any branding...
Creativity is all about recombining old elements in unique and interesting ways, in order to make something new. IP laws stiffle creativity as often as they reward it, by frequently blocking off avenues of discovery, so that little or no incremental progress is made. Sure, they reward the first claimant, but they block progress by anyone else: and applying the "gold rush" model of "first come, first served" to our rights to be creative sounds like a terrible idea to me.
Patent officer: I just got that huge pile off my desk, boss.
Boss: But you issued a patent for air, water, and my first born... all to Microsoft... just today!!
PO: Yeah, I had other things on my mind. Hey, do think it's possible for someone on a vessel traveling at the speed of light to walk to the front of the ship, or can he just walk toward the back?
B: THAT'S what you were thinking about! I'm holding an ADM patent for FIRE, and your thinking about THAT. Nice move Einstien!
PO: I can't take this any more. You accidently allow ONE patent for gravity to slip by and suddenly the sky is falling. I'm leaving! This won't be the last time you hear the name Albert Einstien!
B: Yeah, and the engery I use to kick you butt will be a function of the size of my foot and the speed of light. You're sooo fired.
PO, thinking: E=mc. Sounds about right. I'm gonna have to look into that...
My guess is that you probably didn't see Fahrenheit 9/11. Michael Moore is not a skilled filmmaker, but everything in the movie was taken from other sources.
For example, do you doubt that George W. Bush really holds hands with the Saudi leaders to which Osama bin Laden objects? It's in the movie, and was taken from TV network footage.
There is something scary about your dismissal of what I've said. Basically, you say that a little frustration or a little imperfection is enough for you to stop investigating. It's just not that easy. If you want to be informed about the activities of the U.S. government, it is necessary to read many books, and decide for yourself. In a democracy, that's the responsibility of every adult.
Even Saudis who are wealthy agree that the leadership of Saudi Arabia needs change. I'm completely against violence. However, Osama bin Laden's main complaints are justified. The U.S. really does interfere with Saudi politics.
Second, the net benefit to society is workarounds. If this guy can't do X because someone has a patent on it, then he has to come up with another way of doing X. Maybe he does it a different way, maybe he adds or changes a step, whatever. The net effect is that he increases the possible ways of solving a problem because he has to design around their patent.
So you'd consider it a benefit if, at this very moment, it became illegal to do anything the way it's currently done, because this would cause people to try to find different ways to do things?
Here's a thought. Quit issuing business process and software patents. They're all bogus anyway. That would reduce the flood.
Could you please justify by reply in moderate detail the supposed net benefit to society...
I'm not a patent lawyer.
The idea is that patents provide a mechanism to provide incentive to do research. It may or may not be worthwhile; it may or may not be worthwhile in this particular case. The hope is that, after factoring in all the advantages and drawbacks, that the increased funding to corporate research offsets the damage caused by the monopolies granted.
There's no way to say, based on a single case, whether or not software patents are worthwhile.
I tend to feel that software patents have some major issues:
* First, unlike some guy making, say, shovels, a software designer is frequently designing new systems. The per-unit production cost of software is almost zero, so almost all work is on design. The patent system was tuned for a system in which design work is a small chunk of cost. Since the patent system is being applied to software, suddenly almost *all* work done is patentable, instead of just a small chunk of it, so patents start flying off the shelf. The patent system simply is not adapted for a production environment in which almost all cost goes into design and none into per-unit production.
* Second, the patent system was originally oriented more towards mechanical improvements. Inventions here might take a good deal of expensive and time-consuming trial and error to come up with, but once a machine is built, it will continue to be built for some time (a new plow design might be manufactured for decades to come). In addition, anyone can take a look at it and produce another -- the reverse-engineering cost was very low. For software patents, this is not the case. The product lifetime is relatively short, and reverse engineering is far more expensive than any other environment. So, if I write a piece of software, I don't need a patent as much, because even with no patent law whatsoever, simply due to the time to reverse-engineer my software, I am going to have a monopoly for some time, and that time will probably be a significant chunk of the lifetime of my product.
* Third, because the per-unit cost of software is so low, there are a number of people doing it for fun, and releasing their work to the public. You can't design a shovel and give the shovel away for free because of the per-unit costs, but you can afford to distribute copies of the software. Unfortunately, these people cannot afford to hire a patent lawyer to work with them, so in their case any threat of patent litigation shuts them down. This is fairly unique -- in most other industries that mainly produce IP (music, writing, etc) copyrights are more important than patents.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
There is in fact a clear distinction between software and hardware, and one that is very important to the patent debate. Specifically, copyright is applicable to software, but not to hardware. And history has shown that the software industry can easily survive, prosper, and innovate with 'mere' copyright protection.
The cynic in me thinks it's very unlikely that any patent lawyer who reads Slashdot would change his opinion on software patents, and thus his career choice, on the strength of any post, however well worded, on this site.
I think the more people including patent lawyers who can be persuaded to join a rational and completely public debate on the harmful and beneficial effects on society of allowing software to be patentable, the better. Getting more people to debate this under-discussed subject, on slashdot and elsewhere, will only lead to a wider understanding and more balanced appraisal of the policy issues.
You say, "false information like the whisking of the saudi's out of the country which even the left's security darling (can't remember his name and i'm on my phone) said DIDN'T HAPPEN..."
Those Saudis are very, very rich, and have their own Boeing 747s and 727s. They were given special clearance to fly within the U.S. to collect their friends and relatives. Perhaps 72 hours later they were given clearance to fly out of the United States.
From one perspective, this made sense. The government would not want the Saudis to be the target of anti-Muslim violence, especially since one of them, who calls himself "Prince Bandar", is so close to the Bush family that he is known to the family as "Bandar Bush".
The Bush family and the friends and extended family of the Saudis shared some of the same oil investments. George H.W. Bush (Bush senior, George W. Bush's father) attended an investment meeting with some of these Saudis on the day before the 9/11 bombing. One of the Saudis who attended the meeting was one of Osama bin Laden's many brothers.
From another perspective, this was government corruption due to conflict of interest. It might have been extremely valuable to talk to the Saudis who were on those planes. However, at that time it was not known that 15 of the 18 terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center were Saudis, that Osama bin Laden planned the destruction, and that some of the Saudis on the plane knew Osama bin Laden.
There is no evidence that any of the Saudis who were allowed to fly out of the country had recent contact with Osama bin Laden. Most of those rich Saudis observe the culture of rich people. They spend a lot of time with other rich people shopping and spending money. They have little interest in politics, except that they expect always to have political control.
Osama bin Laden chose to live in a cave part of the time in a poor country. Osama and the rich Saudis don't travel in the same social circles. Osama bin Laden opposes the control of the rich Saudis, and thinks that the Saudi government needs re-organization. The idea that the Saudi government needs re-organization is a common idea among Saudis, even among rich Saudis, but the rich Saudis don't want to do anything to disturb their privileges, so they block real change.
Many people at several levels of government were involved in arranging the visits of the rich Saudis to the Bush family. They had been arranging those visits for many years, even before George H.W. Bush (Senior) was elected president. It's easy to understand that no one of them wanted to come forward and say, "I arranged the flights for Saudis after 9/11." That person didn't do it alone, and would probably have been fired needlessly for something that was a commonly understood way of operating. The pilots for the rich Saudis always file flight plans that you and I would consider special.
You say, "do I think wahabbism is the root of most muslim extremism? yes."
That statement indicates that you are not well-informed. The problem is not Wahhabism. The extremism is partly a symptom. The U.S. government, not secretly but unknown to most Americans, has been killing Arabs and Muslims and interfering with Muslim governments since before 1980.
For example, the CIA trained Arabs to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1980. Osama bin Laden was there, and participating in the organizing of the fighting, although there is no public record of any CIA agent meeting him. At that time, Osama bin Laden was considered an ally of the U.S. government.
When the Soviets left Afghanistan, the fighting forces trained and supported by the secret agencies of the U.S. government had no comparable way to make a living. Afghanistan is a very poor country. If is not surprising that some of those who were trained in violence turned to other violence.
If your government chooses killing as policy, expect others to choose
>GOD: *sigh* Never should have given those monkeys sentience... messed it all up to Hell.
*shrug* Heck, ask any religious person and they'll admit that free will is one of the greatest barriers to Heaven possible. We're given free reign to sin to our heart's content and all God will do is plead for us to return to the fold. It's both the greatest asset and the greatest flaw that humanity has. Interestingly enough, the concept of "free will" is a fairly modern one, within the last few centuries.
But I digress. I agree that most people cannot take proper care of themselves. If we collapsed civilization back into roving bands of foragers, we wouldn't need government, but one of the prices of advanced civilization is that it becomes something greater than any one human can handle. *wry grin* And quite honestly, I think people have gotten so used to the general high standard of living owed to civilization that they start to assume that with things so good, they don't really need their fellow man, or at least not so much of him.
^_^ And that said, I'm starting to consider this whole patent business. Heck, we need some people who know what they're talking about regarding computers in there refusing the silly patents, right?
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.