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Nanomedicine Patent Thickets Threaten Future
cheesedog writes "Over 5000 nanomedicine/nanotech patents have now been granted, and the patent land grab continues unabated. Dr. Raj Bawa says, "Patent thickets are considered to discourage and stifle innovation. Claims in such patent thickets have been characterized as often broad, overlapping and conflicting - a scenario ripe for massive patent litigation battles in the future." According to Bawa, nanomedicine start-ups may soon find themselves in patent disputes with large, established companies, as well as between themselves. In most of the patent battles the larger entity with the deeper pockets will rule the day even if the innovators are on the other side."
The worst thing about Nano Patent Thickets is that they're fractally recursive.
You can hack your way through them, though...if you've got a small enough machete.
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Why of course, the sooner these folks are granted their "over-broad" patents, the sooner they'll expire, leaving the field WIDE-OPEN.....
Perhaps we could see a situation where the first of these patents are expiring before the first real nano-technology is available! By all means guys... get your patents in early, the earlier the better.
I seem to recall there was a catch though....Didn't you need to actually be able to "do" the thing you were going to patent? I seem to recall that was part of the test, that it actually needed to be possible at the time you were patenting something, not just a crack-pipe dream....
This "article" is really a press release from a company that serves as "the missing link between buyers and suppliers of nanomaterials." However, Dr. Bawa seems to be someone who knows a lot about the subject and has been talking about this to anyone who will listen.
My knowledge of nanotech could fill a nanotube, but I pay attention when someone who does seem to be deeply involved in nanotech raises the alarm about this tide of patents.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I think one of the fronts for patent reform will come from outside the US border, when other countries finally wise up and simply make it their national policy to ignore stupid patents (or all patents).
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
What?
Your thesis is that by knowing the human genome, then drug treatments for diseases logically follow. Sorry, but although that may be the promise of genomics, the actual yield of useful therapeutics remains to be seen. You don't automagically understand the molecular pathways of the normal process and the disease just by staring at the DNA sequence. Lots of hard work, luck, time and money have to get done before a pill rolls out of the bottle. Not that I'm trying to apologize for big pharma's incredible waste and inefficiency, not to mention bizzare and shady business practices (some of which have to do with technology, very little have to do with nanotech).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
There was a time when the Internet did not exist. Suddenly it was there, and there was a way of navigating it easily from scratch: by using domain names. The problem was that every domain name had to be unique. Big companies jumped in quickly and reserved .com. A few small companies were also lucky. Then we saw the rise of the domain-name-grabber: suddenly EVERY domain name .com, .net, .org, and . was registered. The domain name grabbers had no use for any of these names, they just wanted to place their big butt in a spot that was desirable, even necessary, to occupy by others, so that they could receive a fat stack of bills to move that butt.
There is not much difference between the domain-name-grab and the patent-grab. It is not that hard to generate patents nowadays. It is no longer required to have an actual implementation of a patent ready, it is enough to formulate an idea. Hell, I could (with the help of a lawyer) write a computer program that generates patent claims and automatically sends them off to the USPTO. Most of the texts will be silly, but a few will have meaning; those will be awarded (maybe I make it sound a bit too easy here, you need to do a prior art search for each patent claim, but I guess I can come up with a program that uses the text of previously awarded patents to generate new patents, and then list those previously awarded patents as prior art). The only snag is that it costs too much money to get all those patent claims verified. But with a little bit of insight, it is pretty easy to write down a patent claim (by hand) for something that does not exist yet, but that someone will probably invent in the coming ten years. Maybe only one in ten of such patent claims will actually come true, but if your pockets are deep enough, no problem: the one that actually comes true will bring in enough dough in the end to make you rich. At the expense of the actual innovator.
But it is worse: even those patent claims that seem to be worthless can be made worthwhile by a lawyer who just starts litigating some successful startup claiming that they violated this worthless patent. The startup might see that the claim is worthless, but cannot afford the costs involved in defending his case, and rather pay off the shark on his back. And make no mistake: the patent troll companies are all filled with lawyers and only lawyers; they make their living by sueing the crap out of people who actually produce something.
So, it is not "the more patents, the worse we are off", but "the more worthless patents without supporting implementation, in the hands of patent trolls, the worse we are off."