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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.
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.
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"
..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.
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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.
"First to file rather than first to invent means that all pesky open source programmers will have to worry"
It's not a problem for open source; if you've released code as open source that means it's been published, and no patent application filed on a later date could be granted covering any supposed invention in that code.
It's not first to file for a particular invention, it's first to file for a particular _previously undisclosed_ invention.
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.
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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.
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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).
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