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A Survey of the State of IP
An anonymous reader writes "This week's Economist has a number of stories in its survey of the state of IP (link to lead article), written from a balanced, business-oriented perspective. If you do not have a web subscription it is worth picking up a newsstand edition, if only to read a defense of open source from being seen as a 'flaky, radical, pinko strategy not related to the competitive marketplace'." From the article: "In recent years intellectual property has received a lot more attention because ideas and innovations have become the most important resource, replacing land, energy and raw materials. As much as three-quarters of the value of publicly traded companies in America comes from intangible assets, up from around 40% in the early 1980s."
written from a balanced, business-oriented perspective.
Balanced.
Business-oriented.
Is that sort of like a balanced discussion of Wicca or Islam from a 700-Club perspective?
Slashdot, I'm afraid you've lost the right to call yourself "News for Nerds". When "Internet Protocol" becomes anyone's SECOND definition of IP, they're no longer a nerd.
ResidntGeek
"There is a broad recognition in the US that the patent system, if not reformed, will...begin to impede American competitiveness around the world," says Bruce Sewell, general counsel of Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker.
so while USA is busy in court the rest of the world will be busy innovating and actually moving forward
of course i think this has much to do with the "culture of greed" that permeates the US and will ultimately be its downfall, or to put in in biblical terms (as that seems to be a more popular line of reasoning in 14th i mean 21st century America)
the moneylenders will kick themselves out of the temple
Ring-fencing: This is the creation of a ring of patents around the primary thing you're trying to protect, so that even when the original patent expires, competitors won't be able to reproduce the invention without violating your other patents. Often used to protect chemical processes used to manufacture drugs.
The blindingly obvious: RIM's Blackberry troubles stem from patents on the wireless transmission of email. If you're an EE or a CS guy, you'd think "information is information, a channel is a channel, and every combination of information x channel isn't a novel idea waiting to be thought of, it's the obvious thing" but alas, the patent office doesn't see it that way.
And the worst thing is, large companies with large stables of IP become very resistant to change (or, if they want change, it's for more protections for the patent-holders and less quid-pro-quo for everyone else) and, with cash-fueled American politics, things only get worse. Witness the effectively perpetual copyrights that the Mouse buys.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Patents and copyrights are really the anti-christ of free markets. They have nothing to do with freedom, and especially nothing to do with respect of property rights. From the outside, it simply amazes me to see time and time again how people treat them as if they were real property rights. It is almost as if I was living in an 1850's throwback, trying to prove that slavery was anti free market - "what's amater don't you believe in property rights? Don't you believe in the wealth and prosperity of American commerce? They have no incentive without it!" Those are the kind of arguments I get.
from the article:
"Already, businesses are having to negotiate with other firms in order to do basic things such as reading files from different proprietary formats; and the design of new technology products now involves lawyers as well as engineers. The proliferation of patents might prove a serious encumbrance to businesses, just as travellers along the Rhine in medieval Europe were slowed down by having to pay a toll at every castle.
James Boyle, a legal scholar at Duke Law School in North Carolina, claims that the current increase in intellectual-property rights represents nothing less than a second "enclosure movement". In the first enclosures, in 18th- and 19th-century Britain, the commons--open fields used by many, belonging to all, owned by none--were fenced in, and nearly all land became private property. By analogy, the granting of property rights on ideas, to the extent it is happening today, is plundering the intellectual commons of our public domain. "
amen
They're usually more on par with energy problems and it's relation to the global economy. No cheap energy, no economic growth - that's not economic theory, that's PHYSICS.
"In recent years intellectual property has received a lot more attention because ideas and innovations have become the most important resource, replacing land, energy and raw materials"
I bet my entire life savings against that statement last year. Go look at a energy fund index and tell me I was wrong. Everything - land, raw materials, and IP is about energy. The cheap energy is running out, and the people who have it are doing very, very well at the moment.
If IP is the future.. well, I guess I have a couple years to go back and get a law degree. Here's another tip for the economist: Lawyers don't produce capital. They are a legislated tax on a free market.
..don't panic
When establishing my companies, I made sure to separate the IP R&D from the commercialisation processes. Although a lot of the research that is coming out of the R&D company is patentable, the decision whether to patent has been a long and well thought out process.
Ultimately, a lot of the research will be protected under trade secret and standard copyright law. The process of patenting requires disclosure of methods and techniques (even with legalese), and places a small company in a bind when larger companies can infringe at will (when the cost of compliance is less than the profit they will make from infringement). By definition, the patent allows one skilled in the art to recreate the invention, so it puts on public record the specifics to allow a competitor to recreate the result that has come from our significant effort and expenditure.
While we hold nothing against software patents (when issued properly), we do have major concerns about the patent process, and the ability to patent processes instead of inventions. When the next global superpower, and some of the largest companies in the industry, have a history of subverting IP restrictions to suit their own ends, the presence of a patent only stops the honest from ripping off the work we have carried out (and they are getting fewer and fewer in number).
Even in discussion with the patent office, and the Government body established to promote and assist the patent process, they readily admit that the model is broken, but it is the best we have at the moment - so we need to keep supporting it (which is a cop out if I have ever heard one).
Without a warchest of millions to fight legal battles, or huge patent holdings, the little guys are running on hope that no one picks their patent for willful infringement.
Probably the best advice for people involved in IP development - get yourself good legal counsel (even at the start of the research process), and remember that there is more than one way to achieve the same outcome (so if you get sued for an implementation - change it to something else).
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
Sir,
I find the Economist does have interesting and relavent articles and is far less biased than other publications. Your descriptions, however, suggest anything but unbiased articles.
From the title i thought this was the state of IPv4 ... oh how i was disappointed
" "In recent years intellectual property has received a lot more attention because ideas and innovations have become the most important resource, replacing land, energy and raw materials. As much as three-quarters of the value of publicly traded companies in America comes from intangible assets, up from around 40% in the early 1980s.""
Alvin Toffler covered this in his book "The Third Wave". The funny thing is people attitudes towards this "Intellectualizing" of the economy. An economy that no one can own (according to some). An economy were technolgy makes a mockery of controls. And were the only scarcity (people's ability) means little, both in the context of globalization, and a lazze-faire consumer.
Fuck intangible assets! I sold my patents to buy proper things: things I can see and feel, touch and taste. I now have a huge collection of apples, oranges, ladders, screwdrivers and plates, and I've never felt so ALIVE! I advise all you slashdotter computer prisoners to do the same!
1. Free yourselves of the endless tyranny of the Internet! Become one with hundreds of random material objects! Sell them on at profit! Even create your own! Build a farm! Grow a herd of cows! Sell them on at profit!
2. Go and live in the woods! Craft a knife from rocks! Build a shelter and develop a resistance to several diseases! Sell it on at profit!
3. Cut off your arms and legs! Sustain yourself using only the power of your mind! Draw energy from the air around you! Unlock the secret power of being completely motionless!
4. ?
5. PROFIT!
ideas and innovations have become the most important resource, replacing land, energy and raw materials. As much as three-quarters of the value of publicly traded companies in America comes from intangible assets maybe this has less to do with the fact that IP has become more numerous or "important", and more to do with the fact that recent extensions to both the breadth and lenght of copyright has produced an inordinate amount which actually surpresses the production of more tangible goods. Let me explain: if you're afraid of being litigated into the ground due to patent issues, you won't produce. If a system of mining is patented that makes extraction of current natural resources more expensive, and might result in the premature shutdown of a mine which may yet have productive capacity. I'm sure someone more educated than myself on the raw material marketplace could produce more examples, and there are plenty of examples of IP getting in the way of innovations which very well may be physical. I think rolling back IP or perhaps a universal worldwide backlash against more extreme forms of IP may restore some balance. Personally i don't like the idea of the economy being based on "intangible goods". Besides being tantamount to "faith based", it would also mean my nation of origin is surely on the decline, since her educational institutions are among the world's worst, and both R&D workers and spending are diminishing.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
for trademark infringement. They're diluting the value of our IP :-)
"so while USA is busy in court the rest of the world will be busy innovating and actually moving forward"
Roche agrees with you.
The hard part is actually realizing what a big company might try to patent. A lot of ideas that are being patented llately are things that are so ridiculously obvious that it would never occur to anyone other than a parasitic patent lawyer.
Wrong, the reason intellectual property has been recieving a lot more attention is because its the easiest way to milk capital from a technology dependant society without having to actually produce anything. Don't get me wrong, there are some valid legal complaints in the courts but, as most people here have noted over and over again, many of the companies submitting these complaints don't actually produce anything, they simply lay claim to some idea, label it as Intellectual Property, and make plans to profit from the work of others.
This whole Intellectual Property scam has got to go. So keep these concepts in mind in your day to day workings:
Copyrights are not Intellectual Property. Somebody did some significant work to express a story, a concept, an solution, whatever, in a written document, a film, a painting, a song, etc., and once the expression was completed the duplication of that expression is easy and inexpensive due to the technology we have for duplication and distribution. The copyright provides protection to those who expressed the work, however, the expression is NOT INTELLECTUAL! Its a peice of paper, a plastic disk, magnetic media inside a harddrive, its no longer intellectual. Since it is so easy to duplicate the work that has been done a copyright is a nice protection to those who did the work so that they may have some say over the duplication and distribution. If however, somebody comes up with a similar idea or is even influenced by someone elses expression and they go through and do the work over again then they have not infringed on anyones copyright or intellectual property.
Trademarks are not intellectual property. If you concieve a name, an image, whatever, and you express that conception onto paper, in writing, in any way, and you register it as your trademark then you can use the registration to ensure that others do not use your trademark in ways that would confuse others as you or your product. However, again, this physical thing which is an expression is no longer intellectual. The final product, the trademark is not some intangible asset, if it was intangible it would be useless.
Patents are not intellectual property. You come up with an idea and build a prototype or write down a conceptual design and present this for registration at the patent office so you will have the opportunity to profit from the idea by producing an end product. And once again none of the end results are intellectual, they are hard cold physical results. Even software code is physical, the CPU doesn't read your mind to run the code and the RAM and harddrive on which it is stored is not some magical ethereal thing, its a tangible chunk of hardware you use when you do the work of turning the ideas into something.
I think this entire intellectual property circus is just a scam to confuse the masses and make them believe that any thought in their head belongs to some corporation somewhere for whom they should be working. And nobody should be attempting to do any work outside of what they do for the corporation as that would in some way be stealing some "intangible asset" from the company. Well forget it, its just one big smoke and mirrors freak show designed to rape the masses for every penny they have and any penny they may ever have.
I mean really, can you believe this crap, "As much as three-quarters of the value of publicly traded companies in America comes from intangible assets". Does anybody really believe that everyone is paying all this cash to companies in America because some marketing guy, the salesman, and the chair slinging CEO said "I have this great idea, and if you pay me I'll tell you wh
As much as three-quarters of the value of publicly traded companies in America comes from intangible assets, up from around 40% in the early 1980s. Of course the argument that IP is important because intangible assets are so important to business valuations could be seen as a misunderstanding. Maybe the company valuations are 50% too high, and IP is a rationalization of an untenable market?
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
because "Instruction Pointer" is my first!
Everything is about Food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment. More or less in that order. (though you can argue about the order of shelter and clothing)
Energy is a factor in several of them, but not in itself a basic need. You need energy for anything more than subsistence farming. You need energy for heating your shelter. You need energy to create clothing by modern process. (I'm not counting human input as a part of energy for this - though clearly that is a form of energy).
If there is too much rain, crops will die of overwatering, no matter how much energy you have. However if there were crops that could stand this over watering, and you bet your life savings them, you would have the same effect, even though energy was not a significant factor.
Despite your wish to think otherwise, energy is a much smaller part of the economy than previously. Now it was one of the (if not the) fastest growing parts last year, but will that continue? IP is growing too, and could replace energy. All it takes is a breakthrough in ethanol/biodiesel producting and energy will go down, while IP goes up farther (fueled by the breakthrough.
Personally I'm betting on such a breakthrough coming along fast. Though not with all my assets. Ethanol is already energy positive by .34, and shows promise of getting over 1 (that is for every energy input we get 2 out). Biodiesel can reach 3 in the lab. If I'm right, energy will have a short blossom, and then fade again like it has been for years. I've been wrong before though.
Now, of course, the setup has been turned in to a weapon in corporate battles, and almost none of this has anything to do with people doing Really Neat Things in their basements.
So, the question that people should be asking is, what do we want? Do we want to protect profits? Do we want to encourage innovation (whatever that means, but that's not on point)? Do we want a utilitarian maximalization of human happiness?
Honestly, to my mind, only the louder OS advocates can frame a reasonable discussion here, and it is framed on a utilitarian view. I'd love to hear an IP maximalist make a coherent argument other than, "that would cost shareholder's their money". That isn't to say that Lessig, etc. don't have logical flaws - I'm just asserting that they make more sense than anyone else.
I forget what 8 was for.
no you stupid bastard, it's:
DODONGO DISLIKES SMOKE
If you believe in "Intellectual property" and debate policies about IP, you are chasing something that does not exist. Patents, copyright and trademarks are radically different concepts and should never be lumped together. The term IP is designed to confuse the real issues and muddy the publics' concept of what should and should not have state protection. Blather about software cross-licensing is equally foolish and anchored in disproved development models of the early 1980s. Only the largest of incumbent businesses benefit from this kind of confusion. They use it to drive everyone else out of the market and pass the cost of complexity back to you and me.
A balanced business perspective would be closer to the informed opinion found in the vast majority of technical employers. Most people do not work for big dumb companies and have much to lose when patents cover business methods, copyright laws are used to prevent reverse engineering for compatibility, and trade mark laws are used to prevent advertising of compatibility or exchangeability. The median informed opinion is vastly different from the propaganda put out by giants like Microsoft. To present the two views together as equals is more an averaging of noise than it is a balance.
It scares me that so much of the US net worth is wrapped up in excluding others from doing things. I have little faith in the value of such things and see a rude awakening on the horizon when the rest of the world decides to give us the finger.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Thanks for the insult, I'll return the favor.
If it comes from the mouth of a businessman, you can be sure "IP" has nothing to do with protocols. Not understanding that does not make you a nerd, it makes you ignorant.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But note that the richest man in the world got that way by selling 1's and 0's, not by selling hydrocarbons.
Notice further that it's only because of inventions and improvements that the energy is getting from rock formations into gas tanks.
After rain and wild berries there are very few natural resources. Everything else is the result of humans inventing agriculture, irrigation, mining, hunting weapons, and ranching.
The whole patent problem can be reduced to a single point: the patent system, as currently implemented, does not scale, both in registration (filing for patents), and in resolution (resolving disputes). This is the natural result of trying manage a decentralized process (R&D) with a centralized system (patents); we are feeling these effects the most now, because of the drastic increase in the importance of information.
:-)
There have been a number of solutions to this problem proposed, including eliminating patents altogether, or significant patent reform of some kind. Both could resolve the situation.
However, one thing is clear: the problem is one of scaling a centralized system. Each patent that comes in requires decoding from legalese, and comparison with every other patent in the system that was ever recorded for prior art. For you programmers out there, that's an O(n) algorithm. 'n' is very large nowadays. 'n' will continue getting larger. Without managing this complexity in some sort of structured fashion, it will inevitably become unmangeable, just like any poorly chosen algorithm. If this is the best we can hope to do, then we have to scale our efforts at O(n) to keep up with the growth (funding, man power, etc.).
I think they could do better. Heck, hire Google properly index some the patents and come up with an appropriate process for the examiners. Personally, I prefer as little intervention as possible; in other words, a decentralized system, which can scale with decentralized development, or no patent system at all; the patent system imposes significant hidden costs to the economy via litigation and lost time. But a centralized solution can work, as long as it is designed to scale properly.
Now all you smart computer scientists, programmers, hackers, and mathematicians, let's hear some decentralized and/or scalable solutions; that's what we really need if we want to keep patents around.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
the patent system imposes significant hidden costs to the economy via litigation
I should further note that the original reason behind patents, to ensure that knowledge of improvements to science and engineering is not lost but publicly documented, is a fairly moot point today. Employees move from company to company fairly frequently nowadays, and carry their knowledge with them. Without patents, there's really no reason they can't share that knowledge with future employers.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
We've farmed our manufacturing capacity out to countries that do not necessarily share our best interests. Our business economy is no longer based on things we make, but on brain share products.
I'm not an economist but from a common sense perspective that just seems like a really shaky foundation for an economy. Why would the countries that make everything we buy give a rat's fanny about respecting our brain share assets? What are going to do if China starts pirating Disney movies? Or if they get tired of monkey boy and decide to field a chinese version of Windows? Threaten them with economic retaliation? Good luck with that, they own us. We take our money and buy things they produce, many time with machines we shipped over there so they could do it cheaper. Then they take our money and buy tangible things like property, oil, and natural resources.
The feeling I get is their economy is based on things with some intrinsic value while ours is fundamentally based on things with very little intrinsic value.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
FFII promotes patent examination privatisation. Might be a solution.
"firms increasingly rely on innovation to remain competitive. Yet the return on investment in R&D is short-lived because more people innovate at a far faster pace than before. That means margins have shrivelled, explains Ragu Gurumurthy of Adventis, an IT and telecoms consultancy. "How to recoup the cost of innovation? By licensing the technology," he says."
In other words, we don't know how to compete by innovating and marketing, so we're going to stop innovating and use the state to make our money for us.
Typical corporate thinking.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Public domain for years was the true meaning of free software and other IP. ....
... GPL and it's kin
Now we have hordes of people trying to pretend to be open and free, hiding
behind a series of copyright and other tangled legal restrictions
all in the name of Open Source Software and Other IP
You're right. As I've said many times about Lawrence Lessig, he's fighting his battles with both hands tied behind him because he believes in IP as a legitimate basic concept - and it's not.
Given that the situation is NOT going to change, however, I suppose he's doing the best he can. IP is a side issue - the real (political) problem is how the rich and the state conspire to keep everybody else poor and oppressed.
And the real problem underlying all of that is how stupid and fearful the average human monkey is.
And that's not a solvable proposition until you replace humans with Transhumans. Which fortunately IS going to happen within the next fifty years or so.
In other words, my usual bottom line: They're all going to die. We Transhumans won't. Have a nice day.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Then why GPL with copyright rather than be truely open and Public Domain as has been done for a few centuries??
From what I understand, RMS, who created the GPL tried that, but what happened is that someone took the code he put in the public domain, modified it and enhanced it some, re-copyrighted it and locked RMS out from using it.
After that, RMS went to a lawyer and had the GPL written up to make sure noone could re-copyright something he wrote and use it like that ever again.
The GPL is like fighting fire with fire. If copyrights didn't exist, there would be
no need for the GPL to exist either. But since they do, the GPL is a tool in the anti-copyright arsenel.
"Even if they were an incentive, did it ever occur to you that you have no moral right to restrict how other people use discoveries and inventions?"
Hmmm. I thought we dispensed with moral arguments? Else everyone would be paying more attention to that "Thou shall not steal" maxium.
Anyway morally speaking creators shouldn't be made slaves to society (or in this case certain members who wish something for themselves without compensation). If we* create, it's for our reasons, and the OP has no room to expect a handout from us. If we ask for compensation for our efforts? The OP's only course of action are, to live with our terms, or to completely ignore us. That's it! As Linus once said, "he who writes the code, dictates the license". Funny how a movement centered aroud creators (aka developers) rights (GPL), completely ignores the rights of others outside their domain.
*Yes, we. There are people present on this forum who have spent the time and effort to be good at being creative. Yeah! those ungrateful bastards. To paraphrase a Cosby line 'society brought you into the world, we can take you out' Good luck with that. I have a $100 that says we can at the least do McJobs while being creative in the privacy of our homes. While all the whiners (Your discoveries and inventions want to be free) can do is throw mommies pots and pans down the basement stairs every time they want to listen to music.
And to abulafia. Yeah there is abuse and corruption in the world, but I don't find Slashdot one-sidedness and extreamism a better solution, and in fact it's worst. So far no one here has come up with a better system than the present "reciprocal agreement" we already have.
The competence of the author(s) with respect to the software industry must be seriously called into question, as the article says that companies selling open-source company are pro-patent, and then a Novell person is quoted. Novell only derives about 4% of its revenues from open source (the SuSE acquisition is a near-total failure). In contrast, Red Hat, MySQL AB, Mandriva, JBoss and other (real) open-source companies have publicly spoken out against software patents. It wouldn't have taken much research effort, even if only performed by a person with an extremely limited understanding of the software industry, to track down those statements. They're all over the Web, and in case of Red Hat and MySQL AB, they're on the corporate websites (plus those two companies co-sponsored my NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, which is also easy to find out).
I'm also wondering why a publication that calls itself "The Economist" can't give serious consideration to economic studies (such as Bessen/Hunt) that take a much more critical perspective on the implications of today's patent regime. It seems that the Economist was under strong PR influence from Microsoft in this case because there are some typical MSFT points in it, such as this claim that software patents are needed in order to be adequately protected when publicizing information (which MSFT says in reference to governmental demands to disclose source code).
The Economist article is fundamentally flawed, but this has to be attributed to the fact that the pro-patent forces like Microsoft make an incessant effort, day in day out, to pitch journalists with their story of patents and how they serve innovation. From time to time, they find an impressionable or credulous author who serves their purposes (or a journalist whose goodwill is easy to get by just inviting him somewhere for a week or whatever). In contrast, those companies and organizations which are critical of software patents have been relatively inactive since the European Parliament's decision on 6 July. As long as we were making an aggressive and professional PR effort ourselves, we also got better results. Nothing comes from nothing, it's as simple as that.
At least there is one activity going on these days: We're very likely to win the Internet poll for the "EV50 Europeans of the Year", the EU's premier political award. By pushing our candidates through (I'm also running in two categories myself) and preventing pro-patent politicians from winning anything, we can get another publicity opportunity for our cause and demonstrate to politicians that our movement is still to be reckoned with. The "EV" in "EV50" means "European Voice", an EU-focused publication that belongs to the Economist publishing group, and one of the three main sponsors is Microsoft :-)
Richard Stallman, Tim O'Reilly, Alan Cox (Linux kernel maintainer), Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP) and Monty Widenius (MySQL) have made a public statement in which they call on the FOSS community worldwide to participate in that Internet poll:
ag-IP-news: Luminaries Call on Worldwide Community to Vote Against Software Patents
They have specifically endorsed our voting recommendations. Please read those voting recommendations and give serious consideration to supporting our cause that way.
Guess what? If you're calling it Intellectual Property, you're already siding with the people who abuse the copyright and patent systems. Intellectual Property is not a legal term. It was invented by people and organizations that control large bodies of copyrighted work and patented "inventions" who work very hard to resist the public domain.
It's all about controlling language. When you say "tax relief," you're asserting that taxes are a burden. When you say "Intellectual Property," you're asserting that copyrights, patents and trademarks are property (they're not) and that they're all fundamentally the same (again, they're not). That's why copying a CD results in being charged with copyright infingement, rather than theft (as the music industry calls it - another attempt at controlling language).
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
I think the obvious first-cut to the patent problem is to disallow any patents that do not result in a physical object. In other words, all the software patents, the patents on genes, the patents on ideas (like one-click shopping) need to go in the trash. I get the sense that the bulk of today's patents are for IP-related concepts and if you got rid of those, patents would become real again.
There are a lot of people out there who think that "a patent is for a process" and that's one of those ideas that sounds nice, is difficult to disagree with, and also makes NO sense at all.
Every idea in your head can be reduced to a process. That's why a patent has to be for a thing.
If (and I'm not saying it is) the human imagination and therefore power of invention is boundless we are trying to use a quite restrictive system to cover ownership of something boundless.
If your method to make widgets is really novel, it will not be easy to copy, and thus you will be able to milk it for all what is worth.
If you are stating the obvious from a technological point of view, you don't deserve to become rich and any competitor that could quickly copy your "invention" should be able to do so.
No need for patents, truly great inventions would give a real technological advantage to the inventors, any small incremental improvement would give you a very small incremental advantage which would be olbiterated soon.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"A lot of ideas that are being patented llately are things that are so ridiculously obvious that it would never occur to anyone other than a parasitic patent lawyer."
Well then make the "parasitic patent lawyer" a patent examiner. If it's as obvious as everyone claims, then his success rate should be 100% and all these "obvious" patents should disappear.
Articles are never signed. I guess that is their way to say "focus on the message, not the meesanger", which largerly works.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I see several very well argued points about the phony-scheme that "Intellectual Property" is.
If there is a magazine that decision makers read, that is The Economist, if the magazine receives a load of arguments against the current system it will get noticed.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It might be worse than O(n). If n is the number of patents (or ideas), the patent examiner may require O(n) time to search for prior art for each submitted patent. The complexity of the whole system would then be O(n^2).
On the other hand, the examiner might not require linear time (i.e. looking at every previous patent/idea) to examine an application, in which case the total complexity would be O(n*f(n)) for some function f (denoting the complexity of examining one application for prior art) that grows slower than n. It would still be worse than O(n).
Blog Ho
If n is the number of patents (or ideas), the patent examiner may require O(n) time to search for prior art for each submitted patent. The complexity of the whole system would then be O(n^2).
Sorry, I'm not seeing this. The patents are a list which has O(1) insertion time once a patent is approved. Rejection is also O(1). Comparison of two patents takes some fixed value, C. In order to approve or reject a patent, the examiner has to iterate over each element (ie. n times) with overhead C for each element. That makes the complexity of "submit_patent_for_approval(my_patent)" O(C * n) = O(n).
The best you could do is probably O(log n) if every patent is properly and strictly categorized in some sort of graph to reduce the required search space.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Rejection is also O(1)
I should amend that to "Rejection is also O(1) once determined", ie. after search. It's O(n) before the search. Or statistically, perhaps n/2 if we know that it has been rejected (to find the patent that was prior art).
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Then we agree. I thought you were talking of the whole patent system, processing n patents/ideas, each requiring O(n) (or O(f(n))) time. Then the system as a whole would scale worse than linearly as n grows.
Blog Ho
However, at least in the print edition the authors of special surveys are named in small print at the end of the survey. Since this IP survey appears to be one of their bi-weekly special surveys, the author's (or authors') names should be easy to find out.
However, one thing is clear: the problem is one of scaling a centralized system. Each patent that comes in requires decoding from legalese, and comparison with every other patent in the system that was ever recorded for prior art.
Actually you'd need to check against every patent application and expired patent. Even then that is not the only possible source of "prior art".
The other problems are that what is obvious dosn't tend to get written down and that the same thing might be possible to describe in different ways. (The latter is especially a problem with a dishonest applicant who is deliberatly trying to make something commonplace sound like a new idea.)
Actually you'd need to check against every patent application and expired patent. Even then that is not the only possible source of "prior art".
:-)
Right, which is what I said.
The other problems are that what is obvious dosn't tend to get written down and that the same thing might be possible to describe in different ways. (The latter is especially a problem with a dishonest applicant who is deliberatly trying to make something commonplace sound like a new idea.)
That is indeed another issue, since the patent must be "nonobvious to an expert in the field", and also a "useful advancement in the art". So not only does each patent ever recorded need to be consulted, but the patent can only be validated by consulting with other experts in the field, further increasing the difficulty of this process.
Which merely supports my position that patents (and possibly IP in general) are a waste of time and resources overall.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Perhaps if more people had taken a similar view then tech stocks wouldn't have been so overvalued in the dotcom boom.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.