New Patent Reform Proposal Focuses on Education

CNet is reporting that a new proposal before Congress is attempting to increase the number of federal judges who specialize in patent litigation. From the article: "The proposal prescribes $5 million each year in federal funding over the next decade for "educational and professional development" programs for designated judges and to pay the salaries of new, specially appointed clerks with patent expertise. Under the bill, patent cases would continue to be randomly assigned to judges, but with a notable exception. Any judge who practices within a court district offering the pilot program but who chooses not to sign up for the extra training would have the option of transferring patent cases to a program participant." Techdirt also has a short writeup on why this specialization might not necessarily be a good thing.

Comments

Worrisome

[LiftOp]

It's federally-funded, but it'll likely be industry that does the education. I see lots of ways some careful "teaching" could skew the courts.

Re:Worrisome

[Znork]

The only way to create a non-skewed system would be to introduce fiscal responsibility, like for any other state-run welfare system.

The implementing agency for the patent system (PTO plus courts) should get a limit; patents are only allowed to exact a tax of 5% of the economy as a whole. Once it surpasses that they either have to stop granting patents at all, or each patent holder would get lower royalties.

With the current situation, none of the involved parties have an interest in keeping any form of limit, and those paying for it dont even see the costs (as they're largely distributed and hidden and are only hinted at in sector problems like runaway medical costs).

Nice...

[suv4x4]

Don't just make patents lighter (like 2-3 years validity) or reduce the effect of patent trolls or make areform to reduce bad patents which are obvious and have lots of prior art. No. Don't even think about it.

Instead train more judges to handle all the cases, you may even throw in an education program to turn honest inventors and workers into patent trolls, libel case extortionists and DMCA abusers.

It'll make a for a whole lot better world!

PS: Why the hell are we training patent judges who can't tell a "cold fusion reactor with a working model" patent from a "1 click buy button" patent, and not train judges who have a clue of computer technology (the place where most of the patent trolls grow)?

Re:Nice...

[Original Replica]

Why make the responsiblity of the Governemnt lighter by makeing an efficient patent system? That would result in less Government control, which is never going to be voted for by professional politicians. This is the messy end of Roosevelt's New Deal, the role of governemnt grows and grows, it now exists mainly to feed itself.

the government strategy

[free space]

1- Let some problem annoy too many people until everyone ask them to intervene.

2- Introduce a solution that is worse than the problem, and only helps gov & friends.

3- when people complain, say "Hey, didn't you ask for it?"

That happened with CAN-SPAM, and now apparently will happen to patents.
I wonder how the government proposed "Copyright reform" would look like.

Re:the government strategy

[iCEBaLM]

I wonder how the government proposed "Copyright reform" would look like.

Wonder no longer, it was the DMCA.

Who is paying for all this?

[NevarMore]

If you do buisness with any American company, YOU ARE.

I don't just mean the $5 million a year (a drop of piss in the bucket of American government spending), but the entire patent issue at large.

For 'targeted' products, like the iPod, eBay, or Amazon, you're paying some money up front that the producer is setting aside to pay for lawsuits. After a ruling, the cost of that payout is being passed on to the consumer.

I'm not speaking against it, thats how capitalism works and I love it. It just seems that so often people cheer on a lawsuit without realizing what it does to all of us. There is a time and a place for severe financial punishment, but it is abused and I'm certain it affects all of us.

Re:Who is paying for all this?

[Anonymous Coward]

If lawyers hadn't made the law so impossible to understand in first place anyone could defend himself in court.

Re:Who is paying for all this?

[cpt kangarooski]

And if programmers hadn't made it difficult to write operating systems, anyone could just immediately fix anything that made their machine crash.

Some things are complicated. A legal system doesn't have to be, but if you want it to be just, then you're stuck with it, just as an OS that does anything useful is going to be complex as well.

It's not deliberate.

$5M Global Tuition

[Doc Ruby]

Useful technology people make at least $100K annual salary, and cost at least twice as much to support in infrastructure, benefits, management, etc. Even if the government has economies of scale that means people cost $150K. $5M pays for 33 people. If the program suffers from typical government inverted economies of scale waste, it could pay for less than a couple of dozen.

Meanwhile, the patent system protects $TRILLIONS in annual income for American (and global) corporations. They've got less than half a percent of the take to fix it?

Sounds like they're spending $5M on "educating" the public with propaganda that they're fixing the debased system, rather than actually making it reflect how intellectual property works in the modern world.

Educate The PTO

[frankenheinz]

Heck, by the time a judge sees a bogus patent, a lot of damage is already done. Why not just spend the money to educate (or better staff) the PTO's examiners to help keep a lot of these junk patents applications from ever seeing the light of day? (Besides, 'educating' a judge is largely the job description of an attorney.)