U.S. Bans Some Cellphones For Patent Reasons

runner_one writes "According to the New York Times, A federal agency has banned imports of new cellphones made with Qualcomm semiconductors because the chips violate a patent held by Broadcom. The International Trade Commission said today that the import ban would not apply to mobile phone models that were imported on or before June 7." Update: 06/08 13:05 GMT by KD : Glenn Fleishman notes that Apple's iPhone will be allowed into the country, since it doesn't use any 3G chips. He adds that Apple "might have the most advanced smartphone on the market unless President Bush or his trade representative overturn the ruling (which they have the power to do)."

Comments

ITC press release

[Takichi]

You can get a better idea of what happened if you read the International Trade Commission's press release. At the bottom of the page is a little background information to get a sense of what happened prior to their decision.

It says that it found a violation on U.S. Patent No. 6,714,983. Here's the link to the patent.

One thing to note is that the ITC investigates and makes recommendations to congress and the president. It's not actually a court of law or policy making body. So I think this from the article:

A federal agency has banned imports of new cellphones made with Qualcomm semiconductors

isn't really true. Especially when later in the article it states that the government has 60 days to approve or overturn the order made by the ITC.

Re:US Patent office should pay compensation

[general_re]

Every time they issue a patent that's later invalidated, they should pay compensation for issuing the patent.

The problem here, has and always will be the over willingness of the patent office to issue patents when the invention preexists but is not documented publicly, or where it's a minor increment of an existing variation. It's in the law that they have to test for obviousness and prior art, but they so narrowly define those terms as to remove the tests.

The free market will fix it, make them pay for their mistakes just like every other professional body. I don't know what's more disturbing - the fact that you're this amazingly naive, or the fact that at least one other person out there found this tripe anything but naive. The "free market" will dissuade the USPTO from granting bad patents, will it? And how, pray tell, will it do that when the Patent Office has a legal monopoly on the granting of patents? It's not like there's any competition for them to fear, where you can go to some other agency to get a patent when you're unhappy with the way they grant patents.

And then, even better, "we" are supposed to punish "them" when "they" fuck up, by fining them. Except that, as a government agency, the USPTO always has access to the biggest ATM in the universe, the American taxpayer. So what you're really proposing is that *I* pay a fine every time the Patent Office fucks up - "we" get to punish ourselves for bad patents. Which is a proposal where I expect most people's reaction will be "are you out of your fucking mind?"

The only possible solution is to change the laws governing the USPTO if you're unhappy with the way things are currently going. I'm as laissez-faire as the next guy, but there is no "free market" solution to the problem of overbroad or poorly thought-out patents, unless you scrap the whole system. And the odds of that are basically nil, so you're back to changing the laws in order to bring about different outcomes.

Re:US Patent office should pay compensation

[mr3038]

How exactly does the free market go about fixing limited duration government granted monopolies (a.k.a. patents)?

Alternative methods to accomplish the same goal have been used as patent work-arounds from the earliest days. If not for someone working-around the Wright Brother's patents, jets would be using "wing warping" instead of "flaps."

Yes, that is a work-around. Notice, however, that the whole patent system was originally created to help sharing of information, namely inventions. If you made an invention and made it publicly available, in return the government granted you a limited monopoly.

Nowadays, this has twisted into reality where government grants you a monopoly and you absolute do not share your "invention". Instead, you use your monopoly to prevent related innovation by others. The government grants you (limited) monopoly and in return you share a piece of document that, more often than not, shares zero information about the real invention you possibly did. In case of software, the only thing that really could describe your invention correctly would be the source code. However, that is not required to get a software patent. That's where the problem is - you can get a patent to protect your invention without disclosing that very same invention.