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A Simple Plan To Defeat Dumb Patents
Steve Jones writes "With the EU being rumored to look at software patents again I thought I'd have a look at the root of the problem — the US Patent Office — and work out if there is a simple way to defeat dumb patents. The big thing that defeats a patent is prior art. At the Patent Office they have the definition of Prior Art that includes the phrase: 'known or used by others in this country, or was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country.' Now suppose that every time we have an idea that we think is 'obvious' but that hasn't been done before, or something we think would be interesting but don't have the money to create — that we blogged about that idea, tagging it as 'prior art' via Technorati. This would give people an RSS feed of prior art." Read on for more details of Steve's proposal.
My argument is that by doing this we can, rightly, claim that the ideas have been described in the 21st-century version of a printed publication. Even if that is challenged, it is undeniable that by using the RSS feed it can be proven that people in a given country could have "known" about it.
I'm fed up thinking "Bloody hell I did that ten years ago," or "I thought about doing that, its a bit obvious" — when companies with as little intention as I had in developing the idea start putting the squeeze on businesses and developers. What I've always lacked is the visible proof to submit against a claim. This is a simple suggestion about using the power of the Web to create a massive prior art database. IANAL, but could it be this simple?
My argument is that by doing this we can, rightly, claim that the ideas have been described in the 21st-century version of a printed publication. Even if that is challenged, it is undeniable that by using the RSS feed it can be proven that people in a given country could have "known" about it.
I'm fed up thinking "Bloody hell I did that ten years ago," or "I thought about doing that, its a bit obvious" — when companies with as little intention as I had in developing the idea start putting the squeeze on businesses and developers. What I've always lacked is the visible proof to submit against a claim. This is a simple suggestion about using the power of the Web to create a massive prior art database. IANAL, but could it be this simple?
Sure, in RETROSPECT, many of these crazy patents are obvious. But how could you possibly begin to catalog every obvious idea, technique, innovation, or invention?
This is not to mention the practical problems with this website. Who is going to pay for all the lawyers you need after the site becomes embroiled in about 1,000 lawsuits? Who is going to determine WHICH art is truly "prior" when users start fighting over who "did it first"? How are you going to deal with griefers and hucksters who spam the site with stuff like "A technique by which ink is applied to paper using an ink-filled tube" (or, God forbid, try to claim their own patent on obvious stuff by using the site as evidence).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's not about whether prior art exists, it's about whether prior art exists AND it is seen by the patent examiner during the process.
Otherwise, you have prior art that could *potentially* be used to ust a patent, but that involves getting tied up in litigation which very few independent developers can afford.
There are already avenues to have prior art published (called 'technical disclosures'), some have more chances than others of being seen by examiners.
I don't think the issue can be resolved. Either you have patents or you don't. If you do then stupid patents will ALWAYS get through you can't stop it. Some articles say throw man power at it but considering places like the NIH are losing massive amounts of money (and heck they only look for cures to devastating diseases) because of the war, I hardly doubt the patent office will magically prove 100x more important and get all this extra cash.
Also define good/bad/obvious/etc. They are all subjective so what may be good for some is bad to others. Maybe we should what happens if patents can be ignored for a few years and see the outcome on society as whole.
There's one thing you can be certain of. There will be people subscribing to these RSS feeds as a source for ideas to patent.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Ah yes. This sounds a lot like my 'electronic patent-nulling system'. You can license it from me, if you like. Does AU$500/user/year sound reasonable? :)
PENALTY! Naive (and technical) solution, relying on the goodwill of other people (and unfounded ubiquity of proposed system). Ten minutes in the box.
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
Personally, I don't think we can record all the blindingly obvious stuff we think of, mainly because it's blindingly obvious. Or very often, we can think of salient prior art that would probably invalidate any patent claims, so we assume it's not worth mentioning.
I would rather see the patent process made a little more transparent: any patent application has to go through 90 days on a public wiki or discussion board, where we could view applications and immediately reference prior art. This might simplify the job of the patent reviewers, who cannot possibly know the history of entire industries. They could simply check out the claims of prior art (which themselves could be ranked by visitors for validity -- "oh ya, I remember THAT") and immediately see that, duh, one-click purchasing is a really dumb idea.
Why would anyone participate? First, it's in our nature. You might have heard of Slashdot, where people with varying kinds of brain matter make varying kinds of comments about varying kinds of "news." But second and more importantly, it would be protection. If you work in a business that would be affected by a one-click patent, you have incentive to make sure nobody can charge you for it, or sue you for using it, if it isn't really an original idea.
Today's patent process in the U.S. is slightly public, I know, but how about making it totally Web 2.0 and buzzword-compliant?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
A pretty good idea, but will the patent office see it that way?
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
New worst idea ever. Public disclosure of an idea eliminates any possibility of patent rights. If you realize the next day that the idea was huge, you're SOL for world patent rights. And, you only have a year to submit a US patent.
The problem is in what the PTO accepts and finds as prior art. Blog posts, even documented via something like WayBack, aren't good enough.
"I thought about doing that, its a bit obvious" isn't prior art, even if it were spelled correctly.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Over at ArsTechnica there is an article about the BSA offering a large reward for reporting software piracy.
- announces-1-million-award-for-piracy-snitches.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070702-bsa
How about OSS users and companies getting together a reward to encourage employees of proprietary software companies to snitch on patent infringement. Perhaps if proprietary software companies had to pay the full price for their use of software patents, then, they might thinks again about supporting such abominations.
Looks like somebody else has prior art for the idea of using blogs as prior art.
This kinda ruins step 3: profit
Does this mean I have to listen to them now?
:(
I hope not.
From TFA:
> Now to me it seems that a blog post can be classified in this day and age as the modern equivalent of a "printed publication"
Ah, a J.D. in the old "It Seems To Me" School of Legal Theory. Let me know how that works out for you.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
Whenever a patent is classified as "dumb patent" and the jury has decided that you went to the court with a "dumb reason", you will be requested to pay X times the amount requested to the court and the person/company you sued for wasting everybody's time. You would be put also on a probation period during which suing for "dumb reasons" would increase the X for each time you bother the court with invalid/stupid reasons.
... Economics is based on incentive, people react to incentives and the courts are already enough busy to deal with these complaints.
Would work also for RIAA abuse.
Now that would save alot of time and money
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
This system you propose could get a big boost if the people populating the documentation/DB were those working for public universities and libraries. These people read a lot, and have the training to describe in fairly uniform detail what they've read. In fact, even the science fiction fans of the world, working with their libraries organized in "classes" like grad schools and book discussion clubs, could document most of the real prior art for most of the inventions engineers have produced in the past century or more.
Since these institutions are publicly funded, and that prior art puts the inventions in the public domain, the public's interest in running that process is obvious.
Better do it before some quack patents it.
--
make install -not war
Anyone else read that title as "A Simple Plan To Defeat Dumb Parents?" All I could think was "Finally!"
The Peer to Patent project has gone live, and while it has its own problems, it's a simple, elegant solution that doesn't require something ridiculous like a massive database of ideas. Anyone can sign up and suggest prior art on submitted patents before they're approved. It's a good example of community self-policing.
All patents should be available for license at fair market value to anyone who wishes to license them. The royalties would then be paid through the patent agency to the patenter for a period of 10 years.
Determining fair market value of truly novel inventions could be a little tricky, though.
But anything is better than exclusive rights.
This is already done and has been going on for a while.
The company where I work encourages everyone to submit patents whenever possible to the local patent layer. If it's deemed that the idea isn't really worth the effort to pursue a patent you're asked to write an article about it to be posted at a site that's specifically designed for some of the purposes mentioned in this story.
Darn it... I thought of this a while ago, I should have patented it. :-)
Seriously, the patent system in the US is broken and I don't think this would help. It, as was previously mentioned, would end up being abused by the patent trolls.
The problem isn't just the "dumb" patents, but it's the notion of a patent in the first place which is wrong. We should be working to eliminate all patents. No patent has ever spurred innovation; many have severely held it back. Some pharma patents are indirectly responsible for people dying.
The problem with your idea is that it helps the patent examiner, thereby reducing the ratio of dumb:smart patents. This lowers the cost of obtaining a patent. What we need is some sort of hash: if you have an "obvious" idea, you publish in such a way that it cannot be searched for easily until the patent has been granted (i.e. publish, but don't index) - thus the patent can be overthrown easily, but the patent office remains overwhelmed, inefficient, and expensive.
I don't believe this would work for a number of reasons... All I'll say is that this software patent system is sick. The only way to do away with it is to get rid of it. Sure, copyright your specific implementation of whatever you like, but you can't patent a logical construct, which is exactly what is happening here.
BenCurry.net
Weeding out the shakey ones doesn't get us very far. It leaves us still restricted, and it leaves the patent holders in a less shakey position.
Here's how patents work: MS thinks of an arbitrary way to do X, and then they patent 20 techniques related to this arbitrary technology. In this situation, there is rarely any prior art since the technique that MS is using isn't necessarily very smart - they could have chosen it simply because no one else does anything similar/compatible.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
A simple solution would be to require all patents to be made public in full for a period (say 6 months) prior to acceptance, this would allow any interested parties to object to them *before* they are enforceable. Obviously there are a lot of patents applied for on an annual basis, - so to simplify this it may be possible to have patents categorised into areas in which they apply, with penalties for having a patent that does not in fact cover all the areas claimed, but also making clear that if an area is not included in the patent it is not applicable in that area. I cant see anyone who actually innovates and patents new ideas to have a problem with this as it should work quite well, moreover it would be in large companies interests to challenge patents that affect them, thereby helping everyone.
(IANAL so I have no idea if all or any of this is already the case)
>>You might have heard of Slashdot, where people with varying kinds of brain matter make varying kinds of comments about varying kinds of "news."
Where everybody thinks they are legal expert AND a quantum physicist, and where there is a lot of noise to filter out. And where many people think that a fair number of the moderations are wrong (or even absurd) and think the moderation system itself kinda sucks (how 'bout only giving one negative mod point, for example.)
I think the idea does have merit, but various wikis could become trashed, especially if the posters have an agenda. Or if there are enough people totally against patents to begin with, they could repeatedly try to trash the whole system.
Lots of people have pointed out why this "solution" won't work, so I'll point out what the actual problem is.
Like spam, it's a problem of economics. Technical fixes will not work.
The core problem is that patent offices are paid when they issue patents. They are not paid when they deny patents. Therefore, it is in their interest to issue as many stupid patents as they can get away with.
In addition, even if the patent isn't totally stupid, looking for prior art is a cost center. The more time they spend looking for prior art, the less profit they make. So it's not in their interest to spend time checking the Internet for prior art, even if they recognized the Internet as a valid source of information.
Thirdly, people knowledgeable in computer science cost money, so they aren't employed by the patent office. Hence all the "obvious" patents.
Until the law is changed or the way the patent office is funded is changed, we'll be stuck with software patents.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
This fails because it would be overwhelmed by trolls, shills, astroturfers and spammers.
Large companies would camp on the site just to disrupt any patent which might affect their business.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
I had an idea. I (effectively) blogged it. And if someone else comes up with it, and makes a working prototype, no sane person should argue that my blog should keep them from earning a patent.
Every patent is an obvious idea in retrospect. In reverse, it's also true that the idea of most patents was obvious beforehand: there were undoubtedly many people who thought that making an electrical device which produces light would be a great idea before Edison came along. The devil is in the details, and what matters is implementation. The standard of patents is that the process they describe should be sufficiently unique and innovative that an expert of the field would not conceive doing it that way prior to being introduced to the patented process; that's the logic that underlies the decision behind the Seldon patent decision.
Simply jotting down ideas doesn't address this issue at all. Even outlining the method doesn't really help, since the patent applicant could easily argue that while it might have seemed like an obvious approach, there were non-trivial technical issues that would arise in trying to implement that approach that their process addresses; the fact that the blogger would neither have mentioned those issues, nor built a working prototype, could reasonably be seen to support the applicant. The amount of effort that would need to go into each blog to actually make it worthwhile would basically boil down to implenting the idea, and that's far beyond what I suspect either the author wishes to suggest, or what any blogger would be willing to invest.
The problems with the patent process are well-established: an overburdened reviewing agency, combined with a fundamental issue regarding the appropriateness of patents on concepts rather than physical entities. I don't see how creating an unmoderated repository of random ideas solves either problem.
most blogs allow you to back-date things. I could write a LJ post today and have it show as posted for Sept 11, 2001, for instance.
While this is an interesting idea in theory, it would unfortunately have little impact within the current system because patent examiners at the PTO do not have unrestricted internet access. In fact, what they have is extremely limited--they can't, for example, "google" for prior art. I believe the databases they rely most heavily upon are unique to the PTO. So in a system such as you propose, this prior art RSS feed would prove most useful as evidence in patent litigation for a party challenging the patent (I'm assuming, arguendo, that the quality and logistical problems with the concept could be solved). However, it would have little or no impact for examiners at the PTO, meaning no reduction in patents being granted. And once a patent is granted, it carries a presumption of validity...
Thankfully, the USPTO has begun a trial run of a new PEER-TO-PATENT system, as proposed by New York Law School Professor Beth Simone Noveck http://www.nyls.edu/pages/591.asp in Peer to Patent: Collective Intelligence and Intellectual Property Reform, which can be found at 20 Harvard Journal of Law Technology 123 (2006) for those of you who want some interesting reading--especially about how ridiculous each PTO examiner's workload is. The PEER-TO-PATENT Project http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/ between the PTO and NYLS will solve some of the issues with prior art (and obviousness, hopefully), but it'll likely be years before we start seeing any real progress on this front.
For the most egregious software patents, we will still *sigh* have to rely on private litigation for invalidation, but recent Supreme Court decisions (Ebay, MedImmune, Teleflex) may have made that process a little easier as well.
The story is basically describing http://www.halfbakery.com
Warning: One can waste whole hours of one's life at a time on that site.
I'm in the minority thinking something like this might work. More like a search engine who's job it is to find prior art would be better.
But that's not addressing a couple of core issues:
1. The obvious can be patented. This must be abolished for a much narrower definition.
2. Patent Office as a revenue generator. One of the problems with treating government institutions like businesses is that the whatever good service intentions an institution starts out with diminish over time to arrive at a point where the bottom line is income generation. Which is where it is now. The appearance of vetting patents occurs with the *actual* vetting happening in the courts.
Discuss amongst yourselves..
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
We've seen patents on things as trivial as multiply linked lists, downloading videos, adding and removing extra linefeed characters when converting between Unix and MSDOS files, and many more trivial things.
The thing is, these are so trivial and obvious that we wouldn't consider it worth writing down. If we're going to patent everything that obvious, we'd also need to write down ideas like traversing an array backwards, using different numbers of bits for red, green and blue colour components, colour coded GUI elements, and anything else I might have "invented" today.
One to keep / submit to the patent office and the other to be sealed in an envelope and mailed via Registered Mail to myself so that I would have very strong proof of the date of my idea.
That way, if ever contested I could show via the postage mark that my idea came first.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
The idea is just wishful thinking... Sorry, I didn't even bother reading the author's blog. If the law states that the prior art must be in a printed publication, then why would you think laywers and judges would accept prior art that was posted electronically at one time or another on someones blog or RSS feed? In any case, it is more difficult to prove date of publication on a document distributed over a network than a printed publication such as a newspaper, magazine, or journal.
I am sure that someone has prior art over you for "hearing things since they started reading Slashdot"
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Creating a public discussion to establish -- in advance -- is actually an old idea. Even better, tag all of your discussion as GPL'd, and then if anyone uses it, they get infected . . .
Better yet, why not make it mandatory for the party applying for the patent to check it? Since a patent application is supposed to be some sort of legal document ("I certify that we originated this novel idea, and am not aware of prior art..."), then this could be a chance for the applying party to withdraw their patent (admit that there is prior art). If a party doesn't withdraw their patent, and the patent is thereafter rejected on the basis of the prior art evidence from the site, then the applying party must pay a fine (or forfeit a deposit they made, or whatever).
Until we make it financially painful for companies to file bogus patents, they will continue to do so. The system you describe seems like the perfect way to warn a patent applicant that there is prior art. If they pursue their claim despite that knowledge, then they are breaking the law and should, at a minimum, be fined. (A harsher system would might also prevent them from applying for other patents for some time period, or perhaps even bring charges against the persons making the claims, or threaten disbarment for any lawyer who signs off on fraudulent claims.)
We need to encourage the search for prior art, and discourage bogus patent applications. How about a "reward and penalty" system? The first person to discover some prior art that would invalidate a patent gets half the applicant's deposit by way of a bounty. The disgraced patentor must then wait a reasonable period of time (6 weeks?) before submitting any further patent applications.
Also, patent examiners need to be paid at least as much for the applications they reject as for the ones they approve. And while you're overhauling your patent system, mandate that patents be licenced out on an equitable and non-discriminatory basis; every licencee must pay the same amount for their use of a patent and no person or organisation may be prevented from licencing a patent. You could even go down the route of having the patent office stipulate maximum fees.
Finally, if "intellectual property" is really to be treated as though it were property, then patents must be subject to lien and expropriation as any other goods. One should be able to use a patent as collateral for a loan (obviously the lender would have to bear in mind that a patent expires, but there is plenty of precedent where loans have been secured against other sorts of perishable goods); and the courts should have the power to order that a patent be handed over to another party (e.g. in settlement of a debt), or forfeit (to the public domain) in the event that it has been seriously misused.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
is that not enough people are stirred up about this issue and the stakeholders who benefit from the current system are the ones who can afford to play this game. It's primarily in the interest of the "little guy" for a reformed patent system without the stupidity that does what it's intended to do... ie: protect real inventions as opposed to one click checkouts. But all these "little guys" have no money or power compared to the "big guys" like Amazon so the situation will stay the same for the forseeable future. The general population also doesn't care enough to make this an election issue.
But why not out source the process? Pay people for finding prior art with a list of applications online. As long as you charge more for the process than you reward the person that find prior art, it seems like it would work.
Just looking at technical out sourcing sites, it's obvious that some really talented people are willing to do crap like this for a lot less money than their time is actually worth.
Why would anyone participate? First, it's in our nature. You might have heard of Slashdot, where people with varying kinds of brain matter make varying kinds of comments about varying kinds of "news."
Prior Art: :) I posted on this idea back in Feb of 2006: PatentDot - http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177904&cid =14756447
Also, the PTO (later) made a suggestion along these same lines: PTO Seeks Public Input on Patent Applications
Also, ChrisGilliard (913445) Suggested using the new SlashDot tagging system which I think holds promise, too.
How many patents each day are accepted nominally by the USPTO alone? thousands?
Reduce the number of patents that the Patent Office can release and you'll see the best reduction in stupid patents: no company wants to waste their one and only patent this year on something dumb.
Submit it here: halfbakery.com
Money for nothing, pix for free
The major bottleneck that exists in the process of examining patents is the search. There are thousands of potential databases with billions of potential references. The typical examiner only has time to search a fraction of these before they need to move on to the next case. Additionally, Lawyers make the battle to search much harder by using obscure terms which turn into a double edged sword for the patent world because initially it makes it harder to obtain the true meaning of the invention under review. Additionally, when that invention spawns a published public document, (either a Patent or PG-pub) it doesn't pop up in searches because of the obscure terms it uses.
Additionally, there are references for some items (such as the Amazon one-click) just because it is so obvious that nobody wrote it down. A better solution is when a patent goes in condition for allowance, the document is published as a pre-patent for the public. If there is prior art that has been overlooked, the public should be allowed to submit it for a final examination process. This would assure that if there was an oversight, that a stupid patent wouldn't be issued in error.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Seems to me like EMPs want to introduce software patents to please the EU big companies that might be blocked doing business in the States because of patent infringement wherever those patents are valid.
Could software patents be considered as an artificial way to block foreign companies from doing business, a thing that the WTO might frown upon ? Isn't further cross licensing between big US companies a kind of illegal cartel formation ?
Even with prior art, having a patent invalidated doesn't
make economic sense in most situations. For even if
you win, you have to pay your attorneys fees yourself
(often several $100,000). Also, the process can take
several years.
Therefore even patents with solid prior art don't get
invalidated most of the time. If you don't believe me,
look up "Carmacks Reverse". The algorithm was patented
by Creative _after_ John Carmack presented it on a
conferece. Creative even threatened John's company
because they are using the algorithm he had invented.
NO SOFTWARE PATENTS
Please see http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/ for the Peer to Patent Project, a Community Patent Review. It allows you to review currently pending patents and provide prior art references. One of the more significant issues with patents is that the holder (plaintiff) is presumed to be the wronged party in any legal proceeding. The defendant is presumed wrong. A suit can be brought for as little as $350 and to answer the complaint from the plaintiff can cost upwards of $10,000 and that's just the beginning. Think about spending $15,000 to $20,000 per month for at least 12 months in any patent litigation. Now consider having multiple simultaneous litigations regarding different patents. The problem is that the defendants costs are orders of magnitude higher than those of the plaintiff. Most plaintiffs simply cannot afford to fight and therefore settle for some amount of money close to or slightly less than what it would cost to go to trial. Trial cost is about $500,000 and you have no guarantee of winning. If you do win, you have little recourse against the plaintiff unless they were clearly in the wrong. Then, sometimes the plaintiff simply has no money! Patents used to be used by companies to protect themselves from other companies by virtue of Mutually Assured Destruction. Microsoft couldn't really sue Apple and Apple couldn't really sue Microsoft because they both did things that probably infringed on each others patents. Therefore neither side sued, and in fact, they executed a deal to share each others patent portfolios. Today, you have companies like Acacia Research, and more importantly, Intellectual Ventures, who don't have a business other than hording patents and licensing them. There's very little for them to loose when they attack another company with their patents. IV and others will be increasing their use of patents to extort money from just about every company. Just watch and see.
This is already done quite a bit, both on sites like halfbakery and on individual blogs. The reason is more to get the ideas out there than to have a dated record for prior art purposes, but it also serves that purpose well (although the timestamp is somewhat unreliable unless the post date is updated on edits).
the definition of a patent requires that it is something original and unobvious. Unfortunately, the US PTO has a very ignorant view into what is obvious and what isn't. While any industry insider could tell them that the 1-click was obvious, to them it wasn't and so patent granted. The obviousness and originality need to be enforced more strictly, and then prior art won't be an issue.
stuff |
I had a "eureka" moment a few years ago about a method of lossless compression of sound and possibly other data samples. I checked on patenting this, but found out that a patent costs several thousands of dollars at a minimum and can't be done without a lawyer and lasts for twenty years.
Contrast this to the copyright system - copyrights are automatic, free, and can be registered with the government for twenty dollars, and live longer than you will, despite the Constitution's admonishment that they be for "limited times".
The biggest problem with copyright (excluding the DMCA) is that it lasts too long. It should be twenty years, just like patents. The biggest problem with patents (excluding the fact that obvious things can be patented) is the fact that they ate too expensive. There is no reason why patents couldn't be filed without a lawyer and for only twenty bucks, just like copyrights.
Now, here is my method of "compression", which really doesn't compress at all, just a different way of storing the samples. In most likelihood it's already in use by existing lossless compression schemes. But if nobody has indeed thought of this (unlikely), here it is.
It occurres to me that storing the absolute value of a sample is limiting and wasteful. If you decide on sixteen bit samples, as with CDs, you are limited to sixteen bits of resolution. Also, you must store two bytes, even if your sample is zero or one.
Rather than storing the sample, store the difference between the present sample and the previous sample. You will wind up storing only a few bits per sample, and could recreate your 16 bit 44k CD's size to four or eight bits and still have the exact same output as your original CD. Plus, if you increase the sample rate, your sample size will become smaller as there will be less of a difference between samples. You would, of course, need a byte or two at the very beginning of the file to show the number of bits stored. In many cases you could have 24 bit resolution stored two samples per byte!
My two cents worth. Or maybe that's my two thousand dollars worth.
-mcgrew
"how 'bout only giving one negative mod point"
Best idea ever. Moderators would still get 5 mod points, but only 1 could be used for negative moderation. They could still use all five for positive moderation if they wanted (and probably should).
Negative moderation just empowers the cowards, idiots, and griefers. If you disagree so strongly with someone, then REPLY. If you don't get the joke, then move along.
The problem with obvious is that it based on a context.
If something is obvious then many people, when given the same problem, will come up with the obvious solution.
But if nobody is given the problem, then there is no reason for them to come up with the solution.
So, the patent system is a race to find problems to solve. Not a race to find a solution to a known problem.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
This looks like a nice idea, but my feeling is that it would really mean not much more than wasted resources. This is a fight against several powerful lobbies, and most people in these lobbies are lawyers.
I would think that it would be more effective to fight dumb patent legislation where it comes from: legislation. Invest the time and effort to organize yourselves, to put pressure on your MPs, to form groups withing universities and even better, companies that make their official statement heard.
The sad situation at the moment is that nearly nobody who is against software patents comes even close to the people and processes that are relevant. Change *that* and you might improve the system instead of hacking it.
Also, the penalties should consider the wealth and size of the entity being penalized. Charging a startup company $100,000 may bankrupt it, charging a behemoth Microsoft $100,000 is a cost of doing business.
Well, that's already a requirement. As we hear frequently, corporate lawyers do advice on not checking/not checking thourougly so that they can just say they didn't know.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
In many cases, there is never a problem finding prior art. Most software patents would never survive in court. The problem is that no company, working in their rational self-interest, would take the time, expense, and risk of a court case. It's cheaper to either take a settlement or fire back with their own patent warchest (resulting in stalemate).
Not a typewriter
Disclaimer: IANAL
But I have spent years keeping lab notebooks in academia and industry. And the lawyers everywhere I've worked have always walked me through the process of documenting that notebook, dating each page, never deleting anything, only crossing it out, making copies (lab notebooks used to come with a sheet of carbon and every other page was for duplicates), and having pages you were particularly interested in witnessed and notarized. Otherwise you could spend years in court trying to prove that you simply hadn't backdated a notebook or falsified it in some way. Heck, the whole Baltimore fraud case was based on whether the lab notebooks were falsified or not.
So I don't think putting something on a blog is going to meet the legal standard. What's to keep someone from inserting a fake prior entry? How would you prove that they didn't? That's why prior art has to be published. Usually on paper. Not impossible to fake, but much much harder.
There's probably a solution to this, but it isn't as easy as you think. A decent lawyer would tear your RSS blog prior entry claim to bits.
At first I thought it said "A Simple Plan to Defeat Dumb Parents"
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Too much software development over the past 40+ years has occurred behind closed doors, either literally or figuratively behind an NDA or employment contract, and that removes a very large portion of existing software from public consideration (most employers/agencies would not allow their intellectual property to be exposed in any way on a public site).
Because of this, I believe it is impossible for all prior art to be located or described in a publicly-accessible manner, and I suspect most prior art is actually hidden from public view in a large subset of software application areas.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
We already have something like this; it just needs to be better utilized. It's called a defensive publication, and the authors are usually anonymous. The whole point is to document something as prior art.
--Jim (me)
Then all those great ideas, or at least many of them, would never get done at all because nobody could make money out of it? How many of your great thoughts that you can't pursue yourself do you want to see spiked for everyone?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The problem with this is that the vast majority of prior art is so obvious that no one would think of cataloging it beforehand.
People blog about the most mundane things. They post pictures about their dog, and how cute he was when he snuggled up with the cat. Someone blogging about a boring, obvious idea is at least 10 times more interesting than that.
You might not blog about something you considering boring or obvious, and I doubt I would either.. but then I also wouldn't blog about my dog and cat snuggling. The point being that some people just like to talk. I'm sure you'd get the same kind of mundane invention blogging as exists in more general blog posts.
AccountKiller
Ok so I;m a large company and my competitor submits a patent for (the sake of example) a working fusion reactor.
I clearly want to prove that this is an obvious idea so I try and submit prior art for any previous working fusion reactors. Failing to find any, I then try and invalidate the patent in terms of how it is not physically possible. Lets assume i also fail in that.
No matter how much fuss I generate, if i can't find prior art, or demonstrate how it is obvious, or prove it is impossible, then they will get the patent.
So yes the poor patent office clerk will have a ton of spam to wade through, but valid patents will still make it through - I don;t see a problem with this.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
How is making sure that every idea you have, but never intend to build, winds up in the public domain any better than patenting something and lying in wait for the poor sap who actually spends time and treasure building it? In both cases you are denying someone who did the hard work: building it and bringing it to market, the fruits of their labor. Just because your motivation is socialist (give things to me that other people worked for) doesn't make it any better than greed. In its effect on the guy who built it, it's the exact same, and the likely effect on bringing products to market: reducing the incentive to do so, is the exact same.
/. crowd should be careful what we wish for in this arena. Many of us have livelihoods that depend on VCs being willing to fund startups, which depends on larger companies being willing to pay up if those startups become successful. In many cases, the pay up boils down to them not being willing to take the risk of being sued if they build it themselves. After all, once you've built it, you've made all the mistakes along the way, so copying you costs less than it took (capital in from the VC) in the first place. There are only two reasons that you buy the company rather than copying them: 1: Customer base/reach, which is much less common, although it's the one you hear about (MySpace, YouTube) 2: Intellectual property. Otherwise, they can just hire your key employees and/or reverse engineer your code.
In a business that is built entirely on software, if you don't have some protected IP, you will have a very hard time getting capital, because others can just sit on the sidelines, see your idea, and copy it. Frequently these others are large entrenched companies. With Patent protection, the cost of defending the lawsuit, and the probability of losing, gets factored into their build vs buy calculation.
I think that the USPTO current peer review project addresses the real problem of obviousness or prior art. It used to be that patents required that the idea be "reduced to practice", which was generally interpreted as putting it into use in some way. Addressing trolling by requiring that "inventors" actively try to bring the invention to market would round out this reform, and, with audit of the existing patent portfolio using these methods, would solve the bulk of the problem.
The
then call every patent a infringement of this patent
- Singular-value decomposition
- SVD
- Spectral decomposition
- Principal component analysis
- PCA
- Eigen analysis
- eigenimage analysis
- Karhunen-Loeve transform
- KL transform
This is further complicated by the fact that inventors are not always up on the literature and may not know the proper names for things.This isn't an insurmountable problem, but it's a big one even when searching among existing U.S. patents.
Someone takes a small pieces of the USPTO definition, and totally misunderstands it, and comes up with a plan the clearly doesn't help at all.
Did he even understand what the USPTO means by obvious?
Look slick, here is what needs to be done:
1) Remove method patents
2) Remove software patents.
THOSE are the problems.
The patent system is just some arbitrary way of encouraging innovation. The US system is obviously failing, as the costs of maintaining the system outweigh the benefits it imparts on our society.
Other countries have different ways of encouraging innovation, and in the long term, their economies may dwarf ours due to our failing system.
All property rights, be they Intellectual or Physical property, exist to encourage investment. No one "naturally" owns anything, though many people have been brainwashed into thinking that is the case.
I don't know which way is best. It seems the Stalinist system doesn't work well, and the US system has some SERIOUS problems which require periodic correction (trust-busting and such).
My advice: Watch the world economies, and don't be afraid to immigrate if you see one system collapsing and another rising. Of course, you should avoid contributing to economies in countries which deny fundamental human rights (China, Iran, etc.) but don't let nationalism blind you to economic realities.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Simply writing about an idea does not make it prior art. If that were the case science fiction writers would own all the patents.
This seems to be a re-hash of the WhyNot.net concept of sharing ideas.
*shrugs*
- Saj
I keep seeing it as "A Simple Plan To Defeat Dumb Patients" and wondering what's going to happen to all the frustrated inpatients in hospitals and other medical institutions around the world. Even having informed my internal language processor that it is "patents" and not "patients", I still can't help seeing it that way.
I already patented this idea.
The test for obviousness should be that unless someone else has thought of it before, your idea is too obvious!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Corporate lawyers may give this advice, patent lawyers don't. In preparation for drafting a patent not doing a prior art search can be considered malpractice. A company may spend tens of thousands in legal fees and potentially could invest millions in a product that they think will be protected. If that investment turns out to be worthless because of prior art that could have easily been discovered it would be a very bad day for however suggested not to do a search.
What you may be thinking of is the advice to not search for patents when introducing a product to the market so as to avoid willful infringement and treble damages. There may be limited instances when this is sound advice, i.e. non commercial software, low revenue products. Otherwise, patent searches are a standard part of the commercialization process since the cost for the search is much less than the potential investment or risk.
If I'm a small inventor with an idea I want to patent, I would be deterred if my idea is near the subjective line of "dumb"ness.
It is already a risk to have to invest in such an idea and try to sell it. Increasing that risk factor by adding penalties for "dumb" patents will deter small inventors from innovating, or patenting their innovations.
Meanwhile, large patent-whore companies can take the same idea and patent it, with plenty of resources and lawyers to defend their ideas as not being "dumb". Do you really want innovation to be monopolized by large corporations?
A smart inventor will probably have a much lower threshold for thinking an idea "dumb" than a profit-driven corporation with lots of lawyers and a whole patent department.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Even if there was prior art, we're dependent on the overworked Patent clerk investigating and uncovering that. Once the patent is put into effect, it's very difficult to get it undone.
What I would suggest is that before a patent lawsuit can be initiated, the holder of the patent must pay for a more detailed patent review. At the initiation of that review process, they would be required to give notice to any organizations they felt might be infringing on their patent. Those potential infringers would be given an opportunity to submit evidence of why the patent is invalid.
Then, at the conclusion of that process, if the patent is ruled to be valid, they can only sue:
* Companies that were on the initial list
* Companies that have infringed since the review process started
If they want to sue a company that was violating the patent prior to that review process that wasn't on their list, then they could but the following limitations would be imposed:
* There would be no injunctive relief possible
* Damages would be capped
So basically it's like this. If you have a solid patent, you can readily go through this review process and protect yourself, no problem. However, if you don't, this process is very much stacked against you. Also, I believe this would strongly discourage the patent trolls.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Sorry, the idea is as dumb as the patents
it tries to provide prior art for.
If it catches on, it might bring more consenus to the whole idea of
software patents, by filtering out the "bad ones", that are easy
to defeat in court anyway, suggesting that there is such a thing
as a "good software patent". Which is not the case.
And it does not do anything about the far more dangerous complement
of the set.
Software patents must be abolished, in whole, in all legislations.
Amazon's one-click idea was non-obvious by patent standards. Before Amazon did it, nobody was doing it, even though others had the same problem of online ordering being too hard. So others actively working in the field tried and failed. That is considered strong evidence of non-obviousness.
The test for obviousness is prospective, not retrospective. If it's only obvious in hindsight, that's not a bar to patentability.
Quite probably. But you could require that contributors undergo an authenticity check, so that patent examiners (and maybe the world?) would have the real name and contact information of the trolls. It would confirm that the contributor is a real live person, not just an AC, and patent examiners could flag contributors who seem to be nice people versus trolls, etc.
Hey, it's just an idea, and it may be stupid, but it seems to me that a few layers of authenticity checks could make the idea workable. And even a few trolls slipping through the cracks would be an improvement over the current system (in my understanding, albeit limited).
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
This article makes as much sense as proposing new SQL programming techniques on http://chat.lawinfo.com/ .
For once, can't we find and quote an article from a lawyer on reforming the patent system? Or maybe have some lawyers participate in the discussion?
Every Slashdot article on patents or intellectual property starts and ends up with several hundred laymen talking legal theory.
Mod me up or down; you know it's the truth.
Software Patents are acts of fraud. This is because of the nature of software and the universally accepted things that cannot be patented. (i.e. Physical Phenomenon, Abstract Ideas, natural law, etc..) but which all are the essence of software.
So, take something that is not patentable due its nature and allow it to be. What can you expect to manifest in the way of problems and symptoms of such human error, acts against the natural characteristics of human ability to create and use abstraction and to use abstraction from others to build improvements on?
sum total being false limitations on advancements and human thought, but in part.
Its not like software can't be protected with copyright, which actually last longer than patents but copyrights don't prevent the application of an "ABSTRACT IDEA" via a different method or sequence of abstraction.
Software Patents are acts of fraud against human, but done by humans who want it their way even when it cost them the advancements others could make that you and their children would benefit from. (which over generations can amount to far more advancement over a given period of time in comparison to applying false constraints.)
Dumb down the consumers and then lie to them so to extract value from them that they would have otherwise figured out one their own and done a better job.
Even software development methodologies today are way over over complexicated ---> http://threeseas.net/abstraction_physics.html
Just let the FSF do it. They might not even need to have ads. Of course someone will need to filter out all the spam.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Technical_Disclos ure_Bulletin
I'm not a software programmer, so I don't have a good understanding on the mess people keep on complaining about regarding software patents and such.
But WHY the hell do you want to quit patents altogether!?
I bet my left nut that the author of such an idea has no patents in his name.
I'm an inventor, with a very small (under a dozen) patents to my name.
Some applications are still pending.
I'm trying to make a buck here out of my ideas (and trust me, I think about my ideas a lot of time.), and his idea is to make "RSS feeds" of all prior art.
And what the hell am *I* supposed to do?
Subscribe to such RSS?
What's THAT going to be?
3MB per day of TEXT?!
Do you have any idea the amount of research one has to do nowadays to apply for a patent?
And now you want to add this?
I'm against it.
I can see it now::
p3n1z 3nl4rg3me3nt...
v1agra 4 U!
h0t b4b3s h3r3!
For decades now the US patent office does a hell of job. It's just this job has changed quite a bit with the 70s/80s when japanese, korean and european companies got better, faster, more productive and more innovative than many US companies (OK, not all of them, but a lot..). These days the US PTO is about protecting the home turf, not much else. Give the 10 key players in an industry some bogus patents, they can cross-license and those pesky foreigners are out. BTW, the best conspiracies are those were there never was a meeting, a letter, not even a phone call. Someone goes ahead and everyone just sees the effect it has and plays along. Well, everyone but /. nerds...
I won't disclose how long ago I thought of this, but in the many years since I have not ever seen it done anywhere. So either it's a new idea, or it really doesn't work, or I just haven't looked around enough.
My idea is a simple syncronous motor without a controller that will run at double speed (6000 RPM at 50 Hz, 7200 RPM at 60 Hz). The idea is to construct the stator with 3-phase windings just like a normal syncronous motor. However, for the rotor, replace the permanent magnets with 3-phase windings powered by AC current coupled to the rotor through 4 slip rings. Wire the rotor windings so the rotating magnetic field turns in the opposite direction of the intended rotation and the stator field rotation. For proper startup, use 12 distinct windings organized as 6 pairs at opposite sides. Half of the windings will be wired to line-to-neutral power connections and the other half will be wired for 1.732 times the voltage and wired to line-to-line power connections. This should give a reasonably uniform magnetic field.
Now, how do I get this tagged?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I agree Intellectual Property law has big problems. But I think Steve Jones' notion and the commentary merely serves to further illustrate that the problems are deeper than what the proposed solution targets. The system shouldn't even try to define and assign ownership rights to ideas because, unlike material goods, ideas don't have definite boundaries. We shouldn't try to weed out the obvious ideas and prior art and allow patenting of what's left, we shouldn't patent ideas at all! No software patents!
That much potential prior art is hidden behind NDAs, or simply kept secret is another strike against the patent system. The whole point of patents is to encourage the publishing of secrets by providing enough incentive to make revealing them worthwhile. Yet many keep secrets anyway. Obviously they don't believe in the patent system's ability to help them do as well or better than they could if they instead protect their advantages by keeping them secret. When should one try for a patent? The bad reasons are only when one suspects a secret will soon be or already is rediscovered or superceded, or it's doubtful whether any value could be had from putting the secret itself to use but a patent on the secret could be much more valuable than the use of the secret. The good reason (maybe) is when one wants to profit from something of one's own (and not from some poor sucker who wasn't quick enough to file on his own work before someone else stole it) that really is novel (far fewer than wannabe inventors fondly imagine) but which can't be released without protection because it will be easy to reverse engineer. Of course, many businesses don't stop with patent protections, they also grasp for technical protections like CSS. That they try such measures is just more against the patent system. In a "perfect" world (and I put in parentheses because it's doubtful whether a universe in which software patents worked would be good or even logically consistent), patents would be all the protection needed or deserved and there'd be no need for DRM and such.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
If you hope to have publication to a digital medium count as record for prior art, you need to be able to make some assurances that the content and date are published in some archival (i.e. permanent, difficult to alter) form. Posting to a blog is not sufficient. Most blogging software/sites allow easy editing of content.
Consider this scenario. A patent is filed on something a person thought of two years ago. Said person, feeling slighted and thinking "that's obvious; I thought of it 2 years ago" decides to write up their thoughts from two years ago and publish them on a blog back dating them to when they first thought of the idea. How can any patent examiner, without doing forensic computer work, distinguish that from a valid publication of the idea?
With traditional print media, and in particular widely published journals, that kind of forgery is extremely difficult to propogate.
The problem is definitely solvable. For example, you could digitally sign each posted idea along with the date of submission, and then record that digitally signed data to a write-only medium. Even better, you could widely distribute copies of that write-only media to neutral third parties (i.e. libraries) so altering any single copy would be insufficient. It's my understanding that the paid services have worked mechanisms like this that make their records acceptable as prior-art archives.
Unfortunately, most of what I described is not easy to do on a shoestring (i.e. volunteer) budget. If you could come up with a distributed mechanism that allowed a large number of volunteers to contribute it might work.
Larry
I was excited about this topic until I realized it was "patents" and not "parents".
Isn't it about time we started applying open source principles and methodology more broadly to human endeavor? You can't really even have true open source software unless knowledge in general is also open source. And if knowledge is open source, well, where do patents of any flavor fit in?
Patents have never fostered innovation; that's a lie we've endured for far too long. What fosters innovation is free and open exchange of ideas.
USPTO has no accountability for the quality of its patents and is a nice little money-spinner for Uncle Sam. Making it semi-easy to get a patent makes more people apply wich generates more money. Make it harder and less people apply.
The patent lawyers love the current system. Lots of people applying for patents. But the $$BIG$$BUCKS$$ flow when there are disputes. Where's the motivation to reduce the number of patents or disputes? Where's the incentive to improve patent quality?
The only way that patent quality will improve is if the USPTO became accountable for the quality of the patents it issues, and pushing that down their throats will be very difficult.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Your is the fourth post I've seen in this thread (plus TFA itself) that offers the simple, easy way to fix some aspect of the problem, then goes on to describe something that is already in place, and (apparently) does not solve the problem.
You can already get fined for filing frivolous lawsuits.
Another interesting place for logging ideas is something like http://www.shouldexist.org./ Websites like this should be on any patent search's hit list.
Would be to specify the patents you want to defeat. Why build a system an order of magnitude bigger than what it needs to be? If there are problem patents on the record, target those. Sure, it's a big job, but it ain't shit compared to tracking all ideas, everywhere, for all time, to solve a problem with a very specific set of ideas that have legal claims attached to them. After you have identified the enemy, find publications (foreign and otherwise, they all fit the requirements) that contain a prior description of a similar idea. (The one-click buy? For stuff like that, it should be easy.) And then start a public campaign for emailing and/or snailing copies of these descriptions en masse to the Patent Office. (Forget petitions. If you aren't inconveniencing anyone, don't even bother.)
A client consulted me about a contract to provide programming to his customer. The customer's legal department had prepared a contract for services which included an assignment of intellectual property for the contracted work, a nondisclosure clause, etc. Buried in the contract was an agreement to indemnify and defend the customer from all claims of infringement of the intellectual property of any third party.
What a great idea! For the cost of some software you want to have anyway, you can get your contractor to pay for the defense of a software patent lawsuit no matter how ridiculous the patent is. In my client's case the agreed price for the programming was less than $6k. He declined the job when the customer wouldn't modify the indemnity clause.
It lies with patent examiners. Here's the way it works: They research and gather a certain number of references related to the application. The references are judged against the application's claims. If they are judged to represent one of the claims, they are declared "Prior Art". Prior Art is a legal determination. The references are gathered by someone (who?) expert in researching and finding published documents, then compared against the claims, written by patent attorneys who are interested in their claim not matching anything.
We have a bunch of well meaning patent examiners who are expert scholars, determining whether or not software (or fill in the blank) references pertain to claims written by lawyers determined that the claims not match anything. The examiner might have some knowledge in the field, but not to the extent that they can recognize undocumented obviousness. People wonder why experts in the field complain about overly broad patents? It should be almost expected that we have this outcome.
Brian
Why not just blog and let archive.org pick it up? For example, take a look at one of my pages: http://web.archive.org/web/20070705205748/http://s chwehr.org/blog/archives/2005-10.html
Or maybe looking at the URL, is it not archived?
-kurt
Dates are crucial in patents, period. Without a date that can survive judicial scrutiny, a reference is worthless... otherwise, how would the court know whether a reference was "prior" art? Hence, your system must provide a way to authenticate in court that a submission was published on a particular date. Without something like this, your system would be worthless regardless of how many submissions you accumulated..
A good idea would be a site where you can submit any idea and it will be time stamped. There are a few free time stamping services out there, even run by governments. It would be technically quite a challenge to make the time stamping of the idea dubious. This would remove a simple out of jail for free card for IP squaters (is that even an existing term? I quite like it). Or has this idea been patented already?
I clicked on this article, because I thought it said "A Simple Plan To Defeat Dumb Parents."
I was a UK patent examiner from '98 to '04.
... etc.. Basically all patent docs are given a key which defines the field(s) that it falls in, eg G06F 11/00C2 (http://v3.espacenet.com/eclasrch?ECLA=/espacenet/ ecla/g06f/g06f11.htm?q=11-00c2) is fault tolerance by degradation of service within a computer system. There will be 10's of thousands of patent docs in this category and some non-patent disclosures like TDB's or magazine articles may be categorised (EPO used to do this but UK not really). By crossing categories and using abstract and full-text keyword searching one wittles down the docs to look at.
We searched online databases of UK, EPO, WO, US, JP (Japanese, translated abstracts and later JPO provided [machine] translations), DE (German), FR (French) patents as a matter of course. It was down to the examiner to determine the scope of search to perform. We could also search hundreds of databases of technical disclosures (eg IBM's TDB - technical disclosure bulletins). All UK examiners had to be able to translate enough french and german language to be able to decide if a full translation was needed and we had other language translators to hand - JP docs were obviously important in computer fields.
Other databases included Elsevier journal databases and also paper files (go back 100 years or so) of all UK patents (which were phased out during my time there). In some areas we had libraries of other books and journals. Also if you could put a case for getting a particular publication you could get it - New Scientist and Nature were particularly popular!
One of the vital tools for prior art searches was the different "classification keys" - UKC, ECLA, USC
I also did quite a bit of internet searching (too much) using several search engines as well as site searches and a few company databases that we had access too. The problem with internet citations was proving the publication date, vital to show something is prior art.
In G06F (which is roughly G4A in the UKC, http://www.ipo.gov.uk/patent/p-decisionmaking/p-cl ass/p-class-ukc/p-class-ukc-g.htm) one tended to have about 1.5 days to do a search (sometimes it would be half a day, sometimes 5). In other less strenuous fields a lot less. This means possible a few hundred abstracts to read and digest to whittle down to maybe a dozen docs to read in full and then perhaps cite 3 or 4, depending what you find. Sometimes with searches that don't fit keywords well you'd read more abstracts. Sometimes you can find an exact hit in a few minutes and spend the rest of the time finding docs to cite that will preempt what the patent attorney will try to amend the claims to.
There's no lack of places to look for prior art.
Oftentimes you'd search and search because something seemed so obvious but wouldn't find a strong citation. The problem with obviousness objections is always that the patent agent (aka attorney) can comeback and say if it was so obvious why was no one been doing it (or documented it), show me some evidence. This is especially strong in a well worked field - why did so many people overlook this obvious step. Combinations of docs suffer from ex-post facto analysis - one has to try and work from the prior position and see if the notional skilled man in the art would put those docs together?
---
In response to the parent there's a requirement for US applicants to cite known US patents (and I think other prior art) that is particularly pertinent to their applications (I don't know the specific requirement). If they fail to cite something and it's proven they knew about it and it's relevant they can lose their patent (or at least be sued for big bucks). All major WO patent granting offices have to search at least a certain amount of literature - specific ranges of specific fields of patents; the US is such an office.
As an examiner I found US searches to usua
An inventor patents his invention to indirectly get protection for his invention, for which he trades the loss of the secrecy of his invention. While it does spur inovation to some degree, it also spurs production because the risks of cutthroat competition are temporarily reduced.
By patenting, an idea becomes public knowledge that others can build on. Usually, the idea can be licensed, so both the licensor and the licensee win. Civilization advances; ideas that might have been lost forever are preserved.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting bad patents. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) Patent trolls can easily use it to harvest ideas
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop patent trolls for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of patents will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from patent trolls
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many patent users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(x) Patent trolls don't care about prior art
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for prior art
( ) Patent law in foreign countries
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing backlog of bad patents
(x) Susceptibility to attack
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of patents
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with patent trolls
(x) Dishonesty on the part of patent trolls themselves
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(x) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
(x) We should be able to patent Viagra
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
You're forgetting the legal morass that is the current patent system, where there is NO INCENTIVE to look for prior art. In fact, if you do look for prior art, and do something that violates someone else's patent, you are liable for TREBLE DAMAGES. _Willfully Infringing_. Companies DO NOT WANT to know about prior art. They don't care. Submit the patent, the patent writer gets a nice bonus, let the lawyers fight it out.
Your ideas are only workable if you believe for a second that the U.S. Government, bought and paid for by companies at this point, is going to change the system to make it 'financially painful' to themselves.
The problem is that the legal definition of frivolous is very narrow, much more so than the commonly-used vernacular one. The Roy Pearson pants suit, for example, was not legally frivolous.
this?
If I think I've been wronged (via patent violation or otherwise) and I and a (for the sake of argument) honest competent lawyer think I've got perfectly valid case, should I be deterred from suing because I can't afford to take the risk that a judge will see it differently and I'll lose? There are currently penalties available if a judge thinks you didn't (or shouldn't have) really think you could win. It sounds like you would like the standards for declaring a lawsuit frivolous to be loosened, perhaps dramatically, but there are downsides to this also.
KSR Vs. Teleflex changes lots of things, as it tights up what is an 'obvious' patent. Lots of the whining happening in this thread is due to people not realizing the system has begun to change.
It brings up an interesting tangent about 'how long it takes somethign to realize its dead.'
I'm objectionable to a completely abandonmen of IP, as many seem to call for. Information wants to be free, but not orphaned. Those involved in seeing a thing have a responsibility to rearing it, just like with children. 'Commnistically' orphaned knowledge woudl go schizophrenic before it could become Real Wisdom.
Zak
No, what we really need is some sort of system like this, but for Slashdot. Some sort of database that we can organize all the articles with tags through a distributed effort, so when a new story comes along, the editors will be able to find its dupe easily.
Oh, wait...
You are right, but from what I have read there, in the US, a large corporation can get away very easily and can use many appeals to delay the payment of the fine.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
I think the problem can only be solved by giving the owner/author of a patent an incentive exhaustively research prior art. It could be in the form that if an court finds that there is prior art to a patent and the author/owner knew or should have known of it then all proceeds from the patent plus say 50% go to the owner of the prior art IP.
I've got prior art!
I never thought of patenting it myself, too obvious.
One of the problems with software patents is that is relatively easy to come up with patentable ideas. It's easy to present a common construct in a convoluted way such that it looks new and inventive, or to present a trivial combination of prior art in such a way that it looks like a completely new idea. Software, algorithms, are a formalization of an idea, and one idea can be formalized in many ways. Also, algorithms are generic, they can be used for different applications. That's why it's easy to present an idea as new. Perhaps many patent applications actually believe they've come up with something new when in fact they have reinvented the wheel. Also, it's difficult to classify software and algorithms. To recognize prior art, you have to be an expert in computer science, to recognize the algorithm in a different form AND an expert in the field of the application to understand the terminology used.
Maybe, I should just write a trivial parent generator: it combines well known algorithms and describes the result using terminology from some random field of application. I'll use it to generate several million patentable ideas and I'll put them on-line. A software patent reviewer googleing the keywords of the parent application on his desk, might just find one of my documents describing exactly the same invention?
Nah... I can't be bothered.
assignment != equality != identity
I have already patented the idea of creating a patent-busing prior-art blog & rss feed.
The quickest way (that would work, anyway) is actuall the old slow method. When you have an idea. jot it on a piece of paper and snail mail it to yourself, making sure you don't open it when you recieve it back. The post mark will confirm the date. (If you do this lots put some code on the back of the envelope that tells you which idea is inside).
America, Home of the Brave.
I recently commented on another post... "We live in a golden age, but we're surrounded by fools." In this case, it's the clowns who think patenting a "1-click" is worth trying on. If people had a sense of community like they did in the Victorian era (when most "modern" patent systems were established) then we wouldn't need to worry about somebody thinking they could claim they invented 1-Click. And as for those "researchers" who claimed to have "invented" wireless power transmission last month... HOW CAN SOMEBODY WORKING IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING NOT KNOW ABOUT NIKOLA TESLA'S WORK?
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
I've always dreamt of a remote control for everything. By pointing the remote to an appliance you see the different controls on a screen and can influence the appliance. So if you point to a light switch you either see an on/off option, either a dimmer. But pointing it to your music installation it shows you different commands for the cd player, alarm, ...
pointing it to the heathing allows to control the heathing, and so on.
This must be quite easy to implement, with some kind of laser telling when the controller needs to "beam out" it's possibilities and the receptor remote having some presets (so a lightswitch with a dimmer can send a code and the controller doesn't need to recieve the different options).
The remote can also recieve whole new command sets; so it can adapt to new equipment (any brand can add this communication protocol and be reachable by the remote)