Patent Reform Act Proposes Sweeping Changes

Geccie writes "CNet is reporting that Senators Patrick Leahy and Orin Hatch have proposed sweeping changes in the patent system in the form of the Patent Reform Act of 2006. Key features are the ability to challenge (postgrant opposition) with the Senate version being somewhat broader and better than the house version." From the article: "Specifically, it would shift to a 'first to file' method of awarding patents, which is already used in most foreign countries, instead of the existing 'first to invent' standard, which has been criticized as complicated to prove. Such a change has already earned backing from Jon Dudas, chief of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office."

Comments

Re:How about eliminating patents

[CosmeticLobotamy]

How about eliminating patents and guaarantee the freedom to innovate so true competition may exist? That way a small inventor won't lose his house when trying to compete with the large companies who buy up all the intellectual real estate on the monopoly board.

No, he'll just go broke when trying to compete with the large companies who wait for him to build something cool and then use their huge existing resources to cheaply mass produce his invention before he has a chance to make a dime off it. Not that either the existing or proposed system is "good", but yours would suck pretty bad, too.

Re:How about eliminating patents

[Kaktrot]

Where are you getting your information? When some big medical company, MegaFeelgoodCorp or something, wants to create a new AIDS treatment, you're saying they go out to BFE and observe how the ancient Buntuchuku tribe handles people with AIDS? Those billions of dollars supposedly spent by the industry on clinical research groups, doctors, lab work, you know medical-type shit goes somewhere.

Is it all just a farce, then? Or perhaps they've just been going about it the wrong way, and we should handle diseases the same way we did when people had the lifespan of a fruitfly in a blender? It wasn't all that long ago.

Re:A prediction...

[hey!]

Basically, they're saying that since the useful solution that is easy to justify (if you believe in patent theory) is too hard to implement (and causes too many problems), then the obvious thing to do is to pick a useless solution that is impossible to justify (through patent theory) because it's easier and will allow the patent office to process new patents quicker (and cause even more problems).

Where it gets interesting when you bring up the theory under which patents are granted is that, at least in my opinion, the situation these different methods are meant to resolve shouldn't exist.

Patents supposedly reward invention, and a key aspect that distinguishes an invention from a mere design is non-obviousness. But what does it mean to be "non-obvious"? It's a subjective measure: what is obvious to an experienced designer is not at all obvious to a novice, or to a lawyer or to a patent examiner. We are basically granting government sanctioned monopolies on ideas based on the subjective opinions of non-qualified people.

What we need is an objective standard. Let me propose one:

If an idea is arrived at independently by two parties working on the same problem, the idea is, ipso facto, an obvious one.

Under that standard, it doesn't matter who "invented" first or who filed first: if two parties came up with the same thing without knowledge of relevant details of each others' work, then the idea is not worthy of a patent.

This would (a) invalidate most patents and (b) greatly increase (according to the law of supply and demand) the value of truly orginal ideas, which now compete with merely patentable ideas. In my view that'd amount to an unquestionably superior patent system.