Slashdot Mirror
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."
I predict that any bill that makes things through Congress will only change the system for the worse.
Wow, a bill that solves none of the many real problems with the patent system. Way to go lawmakers! Who votes for these fools?
Philosophy.
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.
Brent O. Hatch is one of SCOs many lawyers. One wonders if any part of the new law would be of any help to SCO grabbing the work on many Linux programmers?
In the current system, a person/company has some fixed amount of time (1 year? 6 months? I don't recall) to file a patent after the invention has been mentioned publicly. Some companies rely on this by shipping the product first, then worrying about filing the patent applications. "First to file" will likely delay many product releases, as the inventor will be required to get the patent application process started before release.
Oh dear God, not Orrin Hatch again! Seriously, this idiot was the man who introduced the DMCA and look how wonderful that piece of legislation was.
As usual, follow the money....
Orrin Hatch received $126,918 from the entertainment industry in this last cycle. Not to be outdone, Leahy received $251,970
By my calculations that means that congressmen can be bought for less than $400K. My, my, my what an insanely great ROI.
America, the best government money can buy®
Sounds like an easy way to steal other people's ideas and patent them without having to do the work yourself. The people with the best lawyers and most money will win all the patents.
First to file rather than first to invent means that all pesky open source programmers will have to worry about patenting random parts of what they do or risk that some large corporation or patent troll patents them out of their invention.
Even people that uterly despise software patents will have no choice in the US.
On the other hand all countries that heavelly invest in public education under the idea that education should not be only for rich kids and insannely smart, but also for smart creative poor or just not so rich kids, should be happy to see anything happen that makes the US less interesting for creative minds.
And helps the ROI stay in the country that made the investment.
I agree that this will bring the patent trolls out of the woodwork. However, this could work both ways. Imagine a big company releasing a product or service and not realizing its possible uses. Joe Schmoe patents that function, idea, whatever and turns around and sues the company that released the widget that gave them the idea for the patent in the first place. It happens today all the time, but its usually the big .Inc's that do it to small developers and inventors. They wait for trade shows where people showcase their stuff for VCs, take pics, notes, etc, and then turn over their notes to their developers who rush to beat the original inventor to market. As a matter of fact, that's how PONG was created.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Of course, this is unconstitutional. The Constitution requires that patents only be granted to an inventor. An inventor is the first person to develop a discovery or technology. The second guy to do so, even if he does so independently, is ultimately just an also-ran. If someone who had been unaware of them spontaneously invented the wheel, why the hell would he deserve anything? Why would it matter whether he did so thousands of years after it was invented by the actual inventor, or a day?
If other countries want to do that, then that's up to them. I'm not going to tell them what to do. But not only is it a bad idea here, it is one that would be entirely unlawful. It's only in here due to a combination of laziness on the part of the PTO, since they could avoid having to run interference proceedings, and greed on the part of large, corporate inventors, since they can act more quickly than smaller inventors.
I haven't had a chance to look at the latest bill, but I doubt there's much good in it, if anything, if this is any indication.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It specifically gives legislative authority to congress only, but this didnt stop the formation of the FCC, or the nixon drug laws (which give some yokle at the fda legislative authority against any pharmaceutical agent).
It also called for limited terms to copyright, but we all know who won in eldred vs ashcroft (so instead of infinity, it's infinity - 1.. which only those educated in calculus or higher know is still infinity)
I learned through my history classes and especially current events not to count on the constitution shooting down unjust laws. I think that's one of the strengths of other developed western nations with less stringent constitutional protections.. the people have to stop it at the source actively because they cant count on the same kind of checks and balances.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
..as two of congress's biggest sock puppets to moneyed interests, so there is no surprise theyre the ones comming up with this, and it's also a slight relief to know this is what some of the worst of the worst are comming up with, because if not this it would be something much much worse.
Anyway, this is designed to "reform" the system by clearing the courts of many cases by simply awarding the sneakiest party. This law would result in the legitimizing of those "patent parasite" firms who snag patents, then ambush companies just as theyre going to market. It would reverse the apple v creative case too. This is definitely at the expense of the inventor, and would also make invalidation of obvious patents much harder, since prior art would no longer apply. In that way it is playing to moneyed interests, but even moneyed interests would incur great expense to these parasites mentioned above.
The hatch/leahy duo are the perfect illustration of how partisan grandstanding only serves as a red herring, and that corruption extends beyond party lines.
In addition to the horizontal axis of left and right, there is a vertical axis nobody in the media or politics wants the public to pay attentin to, moneyed elitists vs populists.
voting one party or the other does not guarantee the politician's position along this vertical axis, and that axis in this nation is the one which is more important.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
There would still be more small inventors making products than there are now; the current patent system stifles the small inventor, who can't afford a huge patent search and who doesn't have a huge patent portfolio to cross-license with competitors.
Even if small inventors were worse off, society as a whole would be better off, which is the point of the patent system to begin with. If an invention really is useful, then it won't be lost.
It mainly affects companies or individuals keeping innovations secret; in first to file, it's the first to file a previously _undisclosed_ invention who gets the patent.
For opensource it's probably slightly better, as it becomes slightly more difficult to submarine patents or futz the invention dates.
However, it doesnt affect the more real issues of overly broad claims, etc. Or the economic validity and usefullness of IP at all.
Patents do work, especially in the medical area. Pharmaceuticals would be prohibitive to develop (without direct state involvement) without patent protection.
BSD: The most efficient way of subsidizing the enemy.
"as they just keep an eye out for what everyone else is doing"
Technically, that shouldn't work. Anything they can keep an eye out for would have to have been published, and would therefore be unpatentable under first-to-file.
"you can't be locked out of the market just because patent troll X decided to file paperwork before you did."
As long as you're publishing everything you do you cant be out-patented and locked out. Only if you're keeping your work secret and someone else files for a patent on the same thing before you do.
In the UK, you file a preliminary patent. This protects you for about a year, in which time you submit a full patent application. Some inventions never get beyond the preliminary patent phase, but if something is really good then it is not hard to persuade someone to pay for the exclusive rights to it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
An interesting tidbit, this was introduced in 2005 as well by Lamar Smith of Texas:
t _reform_p.html
http://patentlaw.typepad.com/patent/2005/06/paten
Not sure what the difference is between the two, because I'm still looking for the bill's number. It's almost as if people like to use the fluffy name and never really look at the bill - only reference it from other articles.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
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.
BSD: The most efficient way of subsidizing the enemy.
If you're really interested in the drug companies and patents, here's a reasonably accurate look at how things work:
Of Pills and Profits
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
The real problem with our patent system is not the first-to-file or first-to-invent rule. The real issue is the bogus patents. No solution will work until we stop funding the patent office based on the number of patents it grants. We have an big incentive for the office to NOT do their job. It would be like paying lawyers only if they lost a case!
Yes, it is true. It cost many millions of dollars to take a product from inception (whether it's a compound created in a laboratory, or a plant natives have been using forever) through all the preclinical and clinical trials that are necessary to obtain regulatory approval. Not only that, it often costs nearly the same, or sometimes even more, for products that get near the end of clinical trials, and present a side effect that all the preclinical trials failed to display (whether it's because the preclinical subjects were unable to tell the researchers about the side effect, such as something severe that only represents itself seldomly but with no visible signs, or because the non-human test subjects simply didn't experience the side effect).
There are litterally hundreds of people who work on a product at any given point in its many testing phases, and all of these people draw salaries. Testing for products can take 10 or more years, and all of this gives no guarantee the product will succeed at the end.
If all of that work and expense could be done by one company, and any other company could snap it up w/o having to invest in that research, then who in their right mind would invest 10's or 100's of millions of dollars into producing a product when that basically means they're giving it to their competetors for free? Sometimes when the product is sufficiently narrow in scope, even with patents, on a successful drug, drug companies fail to recover their investment during the patent's lifetime.
There are many areas that the patent system is abused. It may even be abused to some extent in the pharmaceutical industry (there certainly are products that are less expensive than other products to research and produce, depending on the product's origin, intended use, and how smoothly it runs through trials), but it is absolutely necessary in order that companies like these (which are in the end for-profit companies with a legal obligation to their share holders; feel free to start your own not-for-profit pharmaceutical) can research and produce life saving drugs and treatments while remaining financially salient.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
yes, it does mean that, much more so then it doesn't.
.... what would be in this case, mob money payoff. The US patent office being the criminal organization in this case.
There is always a complication that man can inject. To assume that going with first to file is going to fix the problems of the first to invent is pretending that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.
Software is a big issue in this, as it is actually fraudelent to allow software patents. But to allow it also means that first to file will cause a land grab of patenting all sorts of things that originate in human thought but evolved little past writting it down.
There is a great deal that has been created in software which has never had a patent application filled out and sent in because the creator or writter of the work didn't want it patented. And maybe even if only to assure it stay free in use, they couldn't afford the
With software the issue of fraud is in application, otherwise software would be disallowed patentability. The proof that software is not patentable is only being avoided and by both sides of the software development industry, the proprietary and OSS, each having their own individual motives or incentives or vested interest to blind themselves of the provable facts of the nature of software.
To use an analogy or metaphor, mathmatics was complicated at one time thru the use of the roman numeral system. You could not do advanced math with it. Then came along the hindu arabic decimal system with its zero place holder that after 300 years of resistance and denial by the elite accountants , the general poopulation adopted the easier and more powerful tools of the decimal system, and has since gone on to go way way beyond the limitations of the roman numeral tools, to create whole new industries and economies that the roman numeral system simple was not capable of even conceiving.
Programming is the act of automating complexity, typically made of complexity automations that someone else did earlier. The human characteristic that set us above all other known creatures, which makes it our natural right to do, to build upon the works of those before us. The purpose of programming to to simplify the use of a complexity, to make it have an easier to use interface. and thru the use of easier to use interfaces more of use can put things together for ourselves.
But enters the fraud of software patents and the incentive to say "No you cannot use" (which is really all they patents are intended to be).
Add to this the first to file and what you have is a growing man made constraint as to your ability to apply your natural rights to create and improve you own ability and productivity which in turn contributes to an improved environment for us all. For even if you came up with something to help your dfaily tasks then someone else copuld file it and prevent you from using it via man made laws. Laws where all things are now no longer possible.
Abstraction Physics proves software is not patentable. But in a corrupt world, who wants to acknowledge that?
People have been saying this a lot in the thread so far. "First to file" doe NOT eliminate prior art. What first to file means is that if two otherwise valid patent applicaitons come in to the patent office, the office gives precedence to the first one filed at the office (instead of the one that claims to have invented it first). Note that these are otherwise valid applications. If there is prior art before you file your patent application, then it isn't valid. Not only that, but the postgrant opposition part of the bill should be good for making sure that prior art doesn't get ignored (as it often does now).
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over