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Patent Office Head Lays Out Reform Strategy
jeevesbond writes to tell us that Jon Dudas, the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office has laid out a plan for patent reform. "Speaking at the Tech Policy Summit in San Jose, Dudas said that characterizing the patent system as hurting innovation is a 'fundamentally wrong' way to frame the debate. 'I have traveled around the world, and every nation is thinking how it can model [intellectual property governance] after the U.S,' Dudas said. 'It's a proven system, over 200 years old. The Supreme Court, Congress and policy makers are involved [in cases and legal reforms] not because the system is broken. It's not perfect, and we should be having the debate on how to improve.'"
"It's a proven system, over 200 years old."
Using that logic, we should all be using horses as our primary mode of transportation. Just look how proven and older that locomotion model is!
Why don't we use evidence from the world since the Internet was invented, and base our new system upon the modern world?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Gamasutra had a good article on this recently. The thing that caught my eye was that the patent office is supported by fees collected for each patent application. They had a signed framed that read Our Patent Mission: To Help Our Customers Get Patents.
To me, that speaks volumes. Any system with an incentive to do crazy things, tends to do crazy things over time. In this case, the goal is to get as many patents issued as possible, so that more people patent odd things and more money flows into the patent office. Break that incentive and people might start behaving rationally again.
I know a guy who worked as an examiner at the patent office. It's basically like working on a factory assembling line. Everything is based off of how many applications you can process. I think that new examiners are expected to do 2 or 3 patents a week, if you want to stay ahead and get promoted. Don't do your quota, you don't get promoted, and maybe eventually you get fired (but it's a government operation so let's not get too ridiculous here).
But basically, 2 or 3 patents need to cross your desk a week, and either be accepted or sent back. That means you can give each one maybe two days. That's two days to do all the research, and look for all the prior art, and make a judgment call. That's nothing on some of these patents, which can be hugely technical, particularly when the people filing them can take all the time they want to obfuscate their intentions and tweak the language to make them as broad as possible.
And here's the best part: if an examiner rejects a patent and sends it back to the applicant, and then the applicant sends it back in with updates, that updated application doesn't count towards the examiner's quota. So there's an obvious advantage towards accepting applications, because that's the absolutely sure way of getting it off your desk and making sure that it's not going to come back to haunt you later.
Anyone see anything wrong here?
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What clear standard would you suggest they apply to the system to weed out the good from the bad?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. It's really simple. You test for obviousness in a way that avoids false "non-obvious" rulings due to obscurity of the problem. To test for good patents, you send out a description of the patent to a dozen people in the field. If any of them comes up with a solution that is basically comparable to your solution within a reasonable period of time, the patent should be rejected with no possibility for appeal.
In the case of software patents, outside certain complex algorithmic areas like digital signal processing, almost everything is inherently obvious if the problem is stated clearly. The only thing non-obvious is usually the problem itself. A patent should never be granted based solely on spotting the problem first. It should be granted based on finding a unique solution to the problem that isn't obvious. More to the point, there should be at least one other way to solve the problem. If none of the examiners come up with another way to solve the problem, then they are not sufficiently skilled in the subject area to have solved the problem, and thus are not qualified to evaluate the patent. If there truly is only one way to solve a problem, then it should not be patentable.
For example, it's a hundred years ago. The problem is that you don't have an eraser around when you have a pencil. Two possible solutions might come to mind: a pencil box with an eraser area and a pencil with an eraser built in. Your typical person skilled in woodworking and making pencils probably won't think of the second one even if you present them with the problem because the alternative solutions are more obvious, though less desirable. There's a third way. Make the outside of the pencil out of rubber. This avoids the eraser-on-the-end patent. So there is provably another solution. As such, the pencil with eraser on the end should be patentable.
As for patents on algorithmic stuff like DSP, that's really all applied mathematics, and should not be patentable. The law says that algorithms cannot be patented, but these corporations skirt around the law by claiming that it is a "process" for implementing the algorithm rather than an algorithm. Since there is usually only one way to implement the algorithm, however, it becomes effectively a patent on the algorithm. As far as I'm concerned, such blatant abuse of this poorly written law should be abolished outright. The only way to do that is to abolish software patents.
The biggest problem with the patent system, though, is duration. If you do not abolish software patents, the patent should have a very short expiration date because the field of software is a rapidly growing field which is quite clearly being stifled by patents. A two or three year duration is the absolute maximum reasonable time for a software patent. Twenty years is laughable. Outside of obscure specialty software like banking systems, twenty years from now, no piece of software that is currently in use will still be in use in any identifiable way. Twenty years ago, we had Windows 2.0, MS-DOS, Mac OS System 2, the Apple IIgs was popular, Atari made computers, the Commodore 128D, and the Amiga 2000. Out of all of those, only two are in some small way the ancient ancestors of something we still use, and even those share no real code in common and show only the barest hint of UI similarity to their successors.
Even in computer hardware, there may be some advantage to shorter patent durations because of the speed at which the industry is changing. However, at the same time, there is little opportunity for new companies or individuals in fields like microprocessor design anyway due to the huge startup costs. In software, where the cost of development is strictly the time consumed, the constant influx of new blood is what keeps the industry innovating, and when you have people saying, "I'd wrote a free app that d
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Really? I was under the impression that patent law was intended to protect intellectual property. In the same way that real estate law is intended to protect greographical property.
Patent law may be this way or it may not be, however patents themself are meant to encourage progress:
USA Constitution:
Section 8 - Powers of Congress
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Thomas Jefferson was originally against patents but then his friend James Madison convinced him patents could encourage progress. Once convinced Jefferson sat down with an actuary table and calculated a patent term of 14 year with one 14 year extension possible was the optimum length they should last.
FalconShould there be a Law?