Slashdot Mirror
A Look at the US Patent System
cheesedog writes "The LA Times published an interesting editorial on the current state of our patent system. From the article: 'on many levels, the U.S. patent system is profoundly flawed. Too many patents are issued for 'innovations' that are obvious, vague or already in wide use.' Online reaction has been mixed, with PatentHawk striking out in defense of the patent system, and Right to Create providing some support for the LA Times editorial."
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I Am My Own Worst Enemy
It's nice to see decent media starting to report what most people are thinking and saying.
Patenting is really a boring issue unless your directly involved with its consequences but im happy the issue is starting to come up in mainstream media.
Yeah, but isn't this just preaching to the choir by posting on Slashdot? ;)
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Let's not forget about all of the innovation that has occurred under this "flawed" system.
Yeah but what about the unnecessary complications CREATED BY and the innovations HINDERED BY it?
Like *ahem* EOLAS browser plugin patent, *ahem cough* Amazon's one-click buying *cough cough ahem* Linux patent allegations, *cough cough!* blackberry *COUGH COUGH!* lawsuits against farmers for using patented seeds *COUGH! CHOKE *COUGH* SPIT* (oops, is that blood I'm coughing?) *COUGH* Patents on the human genome *COUGH COUGH! *CHOKE* *DIES*
R.I.P. Technological innovation
I've got about 40 patents in the system right now, some issued, some pending.
My impressions of the process that the patent office uses to evaluate whether an invention is novel is that it is fundamentally and deeply flawed.
1. The patent examiner has extremely little time to evaluate a patent. Practically speaking they have just a few hours to spend on each patent. Many of my disclosures have been 40 pages or more in length. How the hell is somebody supposed to read through 40 pages of technical material on a topic they have little knowledge of in 3 or 4 hours?
2. Patent examiners have totally insufficient background in technical areas to evaluate them. They're not stupid people, not by any means, but we're talking about bachelors and masters degrees in the sciences with no research experience evaluating cutting-edge technology done by research phds. The fundamental problem is that the examiner is not up to date with what constitutes prior knowledge in a field. If you get a masters degree in computer science that's all very well, but it hardly brings you up to speed on the latest research, which is what is being patented.
3. The standard for what is an invention is something non-obvious to someone with "ordinary skill in the art". Well, that's a bad standard, because in many fields all product research and design is done by people with beyond ordinary skill in the art. So what _would_ be obvious to ordinary inventors in a field is completely non-obvious to one with ordinary skill. It's like asking asking a casual jogger to evaluate whether a sprinter is really fast.
4. Given the very little time patent examiners have to evaluate a disclosure, they basically perform keyword search on words from the disclosure against previous patents and the web. If they find some other sentences with about the same words, they issue a preliminary rejection. That lets them quickly reply and meet their hour requirements. So your disclosure says "A method for calculating maximum travel windows for freight" and they cite against you a patent on "A method for calculating the maximum size of windows on freight trains".
5. But despite the patent office's initial rejection of almost everything, if you spend more money, which resets the examiner's clock and lets them spend more hours on you, they're perfectly willing to grant you almost anything in the end. In fact that's their job: the patent examiners job description includes trying to help everybody get a patent.
These aren't insights. Almost everybody who has interacted with the patent office has experienced this. And its not going to change, because the patent office is a profit center for the government and they love the system of letting companies get whatever patents they want so long as they pay a lot of money to the patent office to go through the process.
Completely and utterly revoke all non-physical property laws.
The only people that seem to be calling out for protections are middlemen, not inventors. The human race has been creative since the dawn of time: whether it's music, art, or any one of inventions (like the lil' disk we call a "wheel") that predates all modern inventions, and upon which all modern inventions are based (in some way, shape or form) - - they all have one thing in common: they were made in the complete absence of any protection whatsoever.
Patents 'fixed' something that wasn't broken, and yes, an entire industry was built around it, and yes, if patents are removed some people will lose some money. But the more important issue is that the human race will win, and it will remove the imbalance and inherent problems created when artificial scarcity was created, and your physical property rights were usurped by the notion of intellect as property.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?