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House Passes Patent Overhaul Bill
narramissic writes "ITworld reports that the House of Representatives has passed a bill that promises to overhaul the US patent system. 'The Patent Reform Act, supported by several large tech vendors including Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp., would allow courts to change they way they assess damages in patent infringement cases. Currently, courts generally consider the value of the entire product when a small piece of the product infringes a patent; the bill would allow, but not require, courts to base damages only on the value of the infringing piece."
Sounds like this is just the sweeping overhaul we need to solve the patent system's problems!
ceci n'est pas une
They support it because inevitably their huge products will, at some point, infringe on some ridiculous patent owned by anyone, big or little guy. It's a collective agreement to slowly disarm themselves against themselves. It's a win for everyone -- a step in the right direction. Lawyers will be MUCH more careful to accept infringement lawsuits on a percentage-of-winnings basis.
This is a good start, but it's a band-aid for a gaping head wound.... Passing a law guaranteeing the right to challenge obvious patents out of court would be a much more useful thing. Then, we could have a patent watchdog group (e.g. the EFF) working to significantly reduce the number of junk patents. Passing a law reducing patent terms in technology-related fields to five years would be another great improvement. A patent lasting two decades in computing is like a patent lasting two centuries in most other fields. It really borders on the absurd....
But this... this bill should not pass. It's a very bad bill. With this bill, existing players can still bludgeon the little guy with their often bogus patents and usually nobody will even notice or care. The only way to truly show how broken the patent system is to actually have an impact on big businesses, and those patent trolls are the only thing that can annoy big business enough to have a chance at real reform that would actually increase innovation. Stopping the patent trolls will thus make it harder to get legitimate reform, and in my mind, that's a bad thing.
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Okay, let's say Microsoft decides to sue Linus Torvalds over its FAT filesystem patent. In the present system, the court would assess the damages based on the value of the entire operating system. With this, the court would have to determine what the FAT filesystem is worth. Considering it is no longer the default filesystem for any still-in-production Microsoft product, and it's already been implemented by countless vendors (digital cameras, anybody? Mac OS X? Be OS? OS/2?) and Microsoft hasn't sued any of them, the court would probably find that the FAT filesystem isn't worth much to Microsoft, because it doesn't give them a competitive advantage.
How's that for an example?
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As a small inventor, I hated the idea of First to File because I was worried that corrupt individuals or companies could quickly patent my invention submissions. But that is easily solved by requiring a NDA before showing anyone your invention. Before, when it was First to Invent, there were more problems. For example, I could patent something and someone could claim they invented it first and manufacture fake logs or a fake journal showing they invented it first. Also don't forget, false witnesses who could swear up and down they saw the other guy working on the invention for years. Now I am in favor of the new way. I can protect my ideas easily by just keeping my mouth shut until I fill out a provisional patent application. I think it will be good for the little guy.
No it's not. We just need property tax on this so called intellectual property. We let the "owner" decide it's value. If they claim it is worth a billion dollars, then they pay property taxes on a billion dollars worth of property each year. If they say it is worth $10 to reduce there taxes, then that is what it is worth in the courtroom.
The beauty is it would work with copyright as well.