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Legislation To Overhaul US Patent System
FutureDomain sends us to a PC World report on the filing yesterday of legislation to overhaul the US patent system completely. The US has the only system worldwide that tries to ascertain who first invented a thing — everywhere else the criterion is who filed first, and the new legislation would bring the US into line. Identical bills were introduced in both the House and the Senate by, in each case, bipartisan sponsors. The corporate roster of backers includes Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, and nearly everyone else. From the article: "The provisions of the Patent Reform Act would... restrict damages that patent holders can receive for infringement lawsuits, create a new procedure to challenge the validity of a patent after it has been granted, and boost resources for the US Patent and Trademark Office."
This only magnifies the problem with the existing system where only the big guys can AFFORD to file patents and actually enforce them.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Judging from the article this does nothing to limit the "Doing something that everybody has been doing for years ... over the Internet"; "Doing something that everybody has been doing for years ... wirelessly" kind of patents.
Or the "Get a bunch of specialists in a room and ask them 'How would you solve problem X' and then patent the solutions" approach to "innovation".
Not to mention that the change from a "Prior-art has precedence" system to a "First to patent wins" one means the anybody that has loads of ideas but no money to patent them will loose against "Big corp with loadsa money for whom the costs of filling a patent are short change".
Couple this with the ability to patent business methods (whether encoded as a software/hardware mix or not) and you'll see things like "selling ice-cream on a beach" being patented.
The real revolution would be dropping patents for business methods (software encoded or not) altogether.
The fact that BSA is for it (read: the big boys in the software world), should be ringing alarm bells in everybodies minds.
True, so here's a solution: tie patents to individuals rather than corporations. Make them non-transferable, and make corporations ineligible for owning patents (and throw out the rest of the archaic, railroad-boss-purchased "corporate personhood" bullshit while we're at it).
Then perhaps the patent system can return to the way it was when it was designed.