Inventors Protest Patent Reform Bill

narramissic writes "A group of inventors and U.S. company execs, among them Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway and the AutoSyringe, and Steve Perlman, inventor of WebTV and lead developer of Apple Inc.'s QuickTime, paid a visit to Washington to encourage Congress to defeat the Patent Reform Act. The inventors say the Act will weaken the patent system, devalue patents, and encourage infringement. A version of the act, which passed the House of Representatives earlier this month, is supported by several large tech vendors including Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco. The big companies hope it will make it harder for patent holders to sue and collect huge damage awards when only a small piece of a tech product is found to infringe."

Comments

Re:"Incumbent Patent Holders", not "Inventors"

[marcello_dl]

> I really don't understand what effects this proposed tweak to the patent system will have.

Favoring the big corps against small companies. Never mind if the small company is a patent troll or not.

Let's say a guy finds a killer algorithm to speed up data mining. Big corp selling data mining software can gobble it up. Guy can't sell any data mining competing software because I'm infringing 800 silly patents (double linked lists and stuff).

Only cure for the patent system: no silly patents. Difficult to find a metric for silliness but we are not remotely trying. What about "whatever patent a team of students can find a similar solution for in 3 months (summer-of-code style) can't be used to prevent deployment and improvement of the newfound alternative solution"?. If the solution is identical to the patent, patent is revoked, if not they can use copyright to defend the patent especially if it performs better, yet they don't prevent other people to do their silly things.

The bar for getting a patent should be very high

[kcbrown]

These days, the USPTO hands out patents like candy. That obviously must stop.

The only meaningful patent reform bill is one which makes it much harder to get a patent. A patent is a monopoly on an invention. Today, the term "invention" is used so loosely that it's almost devoid of meaning -- you can get a patent on pretty much anything these days.

But the nature of a patent is such that it should be hard to get. So what should be required to accomplish that?

I think the most important requirement should be that the patent itself be publicly peer-reviewed. Some will argue that the downside is that if the patent isn't granted, then suddenly the invention will be made known to the world -- the inventor won't have the opportunity to keep it secret. To that, I say good! If you want the monopoly that getting a patent gives you, you should be forced to risk the possibility of losing control over your invention. This alone would eliminate most of the patent applications, and rightly so.

Additionally, the patent itself must be a technical document, not a legal document as it is now. It must provide the average practitioner in the field in question with all the information he needs to implement the invention. The patent can be rejected by the peer reviewers on this basis alone.

Right now, neither of those is required, and the results are predictable: nonsensical and/or trivial "inventions" are routinely granted patent status, and we're all worse off for it.

Re:"Incumbent Patent Holders", not "Inventors"

[Doc Ruby]

On basics, I tend to think any patent "reform" from the current political system (populated by its heavily bribed players) can favor only the big companies.

I think patents should require a working model of a physical device. Anything that doesn't cover should be copyrighted, or just admitted that it's "just a good idea".

When registering a patent, the inventor should register their auditable invested costs. When either 14 years (the original term the first Congress set) pass, or 10x the registered investment is taken as income (corroborated with the IRS), then the patent expires. No renewals.

Those two reforms should constitute practically all the entire system. And clean practically all of it up. Anything left to fix we can get to next. Because, as you say, we're so far from a working system that anything that works should be welcome, even just serious negotiations around it in Congress.