Public Patents?

Lettuce asks: "While driving along today, I was mulling over patents. One of the problems with patents, from an open source perspective, is they cost money to acquire. Not only do you have to pay the Patent Office for them, you usually need to obtain the services of some lawyer. Which means you'll usually never see someone patent an idea just so that it can be public domain. What if we lobby our congressmen and senators to wave the charges for patents and even provide patent assistance, for those of us who would patent an idea for the public. With that simple change, couldn't people could flood the patent office with simple ideas and prevent abusers from patenting obvious ideas such as 'delivering e-mail to a wireless device'?"

Comments

Flooding?

[foundme]

Couldn't people flood the patent office with simple ideas

Isn't this the very reason why patent application costs money and time? So that the inventors will think twice before wasting the office's time.

And if we can lobby congressmen to wave the charges, we might as well lobby for no patent at all, this way all patents will be public patent.

Sounds nice, but will actually make it worse

[chriss]

It sounds like a nice solution, unfortunately it is not. It would require two mayor changes:

1. A reverse of the policy of patent offices as profit centers. Almost all western countries have challenged their patent offices to make money. The only way they can make money is by charging for registering as many patents as possibly. This is one of the major problems driving all the trouble we have today. If it wasn't in the interest of the patent office to accept patents, they would check more thoroughly.
2. MUCH MUCH more personnel for the patent office. If it is free thousands of patent applications will flood the patent office, including many that are already covered by other patents. I doubt that those people that do not apply public patents today (which is possible and cheaper than a regular patent) due to the cost will actually start an intensive (and costly) patent research before applying a free patent in the future. Since patent offices are obviously incapable of handling todays workload, this would finally kill them, resulting in even more trivial patents being accepted due to lack of proper checking.

I'm not a friend of patents, but I see that they have their place. Making them free is an attempt to fight a symptom (patenting trivial things) by being faster and patent any possible trivial thing first so no idiot can use a stupid patent to blackmail everybody. But the real problem is the lack of quality in the review process and the dependency of the patent office on the registration fees (see above).

So I suggest to:

• raise the bar for inventions. No software patents, no business patents. You can patent an implementation, but not an idea. In case of doubt, say no. The applicant has to prove that his invention is patent worthy (yes, this will harm small inventors)
• give the patent office more money. And if they fuck up and register something that was covered by prior art or is just current state of the art, fire them. Let them feel the pain and they will learn.

Yup

[sterno]

Yeah the sheer volume of meaningless patents is already huge. What I would suggest is perhaps somewhat along the lines of the original concept but deals well with the volume issues:

1) Provide an open database for public disclosure. This database would be a repository for prior art claims. So what you would do is, if you had a good idea, you'd drop it into the database and it would be kept there. Then when a patent came up, it would be readily searchable and if your idea was relevant and prior to their invention, it'd prevent them from getting the patent.

2) Seriously improve the patent review process. That means upping fees, hiring more patent clerks, and increasing the difficulty of getting a patent in the first place. It's time we stop pretending that patents are the realm of the lone inventor and recognize that they are weapons in corporate IP arsenals. As such make them very expensive to get and maintain and make the vetting process quite vigorous.

Re:Yup

[postsingularity]

The patent process has been gradually becoming more expensive with the latest round of changes greatly increasing the costs to file applications with many claims. Unfortunately, the profits of the patent office, it is one of the few government agencies that actually makes money, are diverted and not used to improve the examination process. Because of this examiners only have a few hours per application to review prior art. This, and the culture of meeting patent quotas needs to change before the U.S. patent system can be improved. Creating a new database would not help the situation as examiners are already limited by time rather than content. Also, any database would need to be coded to match up to one or more patent classes to be searchable which would require considerable extra manpower. Even assuming such a database was used, without tight quality control it would be worthless. Patents generally have very detailed specifications and a set of claims that narrow down to become very detailed as well. Unless the submissions to the database have the same level of detail, there would be gaps that could be used to distinguish the submissions. Also, there is an obligation on the part of the patentee to disclose any relevant prior art that they are aware of. If there are non-patent documents that are prior art the patentee must disclose them or risk losing their patent down the road. Finally, the fact is that patent law is a corporate arena and the players have access to many databases full of prior art articles through Lexis, Dialog, Google etc.

RE: couldn't people could flood the patent office

[KyleUnverferth]

...couldn't people could flood the patent office...

Why yes. Yes, people could. Which is precisely why the US Patent Office doesn't give away free patents.

The fragility of patents

[blibbler]

Everyone knows that prior art defeats patents. If you are the first person to develop an idea, and you publish your work immediately, then you are immune from a subsequent patent. This does not cost anything.

Where open source/Free software runs into trouble is when they are replicating the work of others, such as GIF, MPEG4 etc. To a lesser extent, there are very broad patents, such as some online shopping patents, and UI patents. The broader a patent is, the easier it should be to find prior art. Again, if you publish your work (and CVS, etc would count) then you have nothing to worry about.

Anyway, if you intend to share the patent with the world, there is no need to apply for a patent then "free" it... just make the information available to the public, and it should have the same effect.

Not immune

[bill_mcgonigle]

If you are the first person to develop an idea, and you publish your work immediately, then you are immune from a subsequent patent.

No you're not. You just stand a good chance of winning the court fight, provided you can afford to defend the lawsuit by the patent holder and it doesn't bankrupt you.

How about Public Domain?

[diamondmagic]

Isn't that what Public Domain is? You could just start a website that documents diffrent ideas in patent form. Seeing as you can not patent previous art, no one would be able to patent the idea. This also prevents people from revoking the privlages/rights of the patent.

Problems do have solutions, you know

[billcopc]

One of the problems with patents is they exist.

The system is screwed up, it was never designed for the kind of abuse the technological revolution has brought forth. We either need dramatic reform of the patent system, or just abolish it entirely. Patents are being used as strategic weapons against competition, hindering progress. The recent case vs RIM concerning their email system is a perfect example of bad patents. Its sole use was to slam a competitor by threatening to cripple the entire customer base including some high officials. The company that owns it doesn't even use it. We have patent holding companies whose only purpose is to sit on a patent portfolio until someone pays for a license, or someone's ripe for a lawsuit. They serve no other purpose. They're IP pimps.