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Congress to Overhaul Patent Law
karvind writes "According to story at law.com, 'lawmakers in Washington are considering changes to the patent code that would bring U.S. law closer to intellectual property standards in the rest of the industrialized world.' The stated result of Patent Reform Act of 2005, HR 2795 is supposed to make the system work 'more efficiently' and be 'less prone to litigation.'"
So if you can't afford $30,000 in patent and lawyer fees, you bette not bother coming up with any ideas?
And even if you do, your lawyer better handle it faster than the lawyer for a multi-billion dollar multi-national with 100,000 employees and more resources than most nations?
Yeah. This totally seems fair and entirely within the spirit intended by the originators of the system. *cough*
Really, I mean this as an honest-to-goodness suggestion, not as flaimbait. Of course it will never happen, but spend a few minutes thinking about it, for a real SANITY check.
For starters: The patent system was supposed to originally protect the individual inventor. Those days are LONG past!
Anyone who thinks that the lack of a patent system would mean no more viable businesses is simply not applying their imagination. It would truly create an even playing field. YES businesses would need to change, but that does not mean that there would be no more drugs, or software, or whatever your version of "the sky would fall" is. All of these things would continue but the WAY they would continue would be completely different. For me I would like access to practically free prescription drugs.
Unfortunately, most who read this "crazy idea" will not "get it", but I'm putting it out there anyway.
Patents are supposed to encourage innovation, but they are now used mostly in negative ways to block and control innovation.
Wrong. Patents were supposed to encourage disclosure of innovation so that others can build on it. A blanket "encourage innovation" idea has been used to argue that it should provide control for people to make a lot of money which was not the goal.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Whether "first to file" or "first to invent" is better is not exactly the problem as much as it is the wording of the "Prior-Art" section of TFA.
Because of the wording (ex: "the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or otherwise publicly known") you aren't really doing anymore than making bad patents more ironclad.
For example, if I were to invent a new type of object banking (for a distributed system, a decentralized version of something like CORBA... if that makes any sense to you) and then proceed to use it in an application, I would have to have either patented it first or published in some type of journal (ACM, IEEE, etc). Uh... problem there professor! Half of the "software patents" are just on things that the inventor never thought to patent. He may have been first but it seemed like an obvious thing. If you don't think that is the case, then ask yourself "How does Amazon have a patent on one click shopping?" Then some company [cough] Kodak [cough] (read the Sun case here) buys the patent and gets rights to my product (so I have to pay them).
This introduces a sort of stranglehold on innovation because I can't just make something, I have to wade through thousands of patents to see if one matches my idea, and if not, patent it! Due to the flexible nature of software design, software patents hurt innovation and ultimately the United States as a whole. I don't think they need to be abolished (software patents), but if you are going to offer them, you need to be sure that they are worth it! Perhaps that is the flaw of patent law in general, failed engineers who become patent lawyers miss the obvious differences...
Politicans are ruining the U.S: