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The Real Problem With the US Patent System
Pachooka-san writes "An article in the Washington Post touches on the 'real' patent problem — the quotas that Patent Examiners must meet. They have no effective quality standards, only production standards, so many applications get only cursory review just so the PE can keep up the grueling pace. The USPTO is the only government agency that can and does lay you off if your productivity drops below 85% of the standard for your civil service grade. A Primary PE has to process 5 new and 5 old applications every 2 weeks (that's 8 hours each, folks). The best part — that 28-box application mentioned in the article? — it gets the PE the same credit as the smallest application. How many of those 28 boxes do you think even got opened?"
TFA states: "In the global economy, innovation, technological progress and the protection of intellectual property rights are keys to U.S. competitiveness. Keeping up with the demand for patents is critical to the nation's health."
Yeah, but like so many things that are critical to the nation's health, it's not a hot button issue with the majority of voters, so it gets a little lip service, and wallows in mediocrity, getting enough funding and attention to avoid a near-term embarrassing implosion of the department, but not enough to solve its problems.
No matter. Another decade or two of bad patents being approved and we won't have to worry about the department imploding. Our economy will.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
The main problem with the (US) patent system is that it is a classed, stratified scam. One designed to serve large and/or monied entities, lawyers and their various barnacles.
Without large sums of money, it is difficult to determine if you have a patentable device. Without large sums of money, it is impossible to defend any court action that involves your patent, regardless of if it is brought against you, or by you. So even if, by dint of careful study and diligent application to the system, you manage to get a patent without spending a lot of money, you can't defend it anyway - unless you are well funded.
All this quite aside from the fact that the patent system has mutated enormously from what the founders envisioned; Software patents. Method patents. Patents on the blatantly obvious. Of course, so has most of the rest of our legal system mutated. You know why our system has so mutated? Because our political system, which drives the legal system, is a classed, stratified scam.
And strangely enough, the legal system, which lies between the political system and the patent system, is also a classed, stratified scam. Money talks; justice is the last thing on anyone's list; the question of constitutionality rarely comes up, and when it does, it is likely to be abused and misused right up to and including the supreme court.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If they'd just approve my patent for flipping a light switch, I'd stop complaining. Simple as that.
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
Isn't the solution obvious? Invert the quotas. Pay examiners per application denied. Then only the most nonobvious and innovative stuff will get through the process. The public is best served by preventing as many monopolies on ideas as possible while still rewarding true innovation.
I'm going to patent a a quota system for government offices to use to lay off employees. The details of which will be somewhere in box 8 of 13.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
I am surely not alone in thinking that the text of every patent seems to be deliberately obfuscated. Each patent seems to have been translated several times before being turned back into a form that is almost (but not quite) entirely unlike English. Surely it would help matters enormously if patents had to be written in English rather than impenetrable legalese? This would help the patent examiners, and it would also help anyone who wanted to reimplement an invention described by an expired patent - which is, after all, part of the deal! The nature of the invention is supposed to be patently obvious so that others can reuse it after it expires. Why isn't this a requirement?
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Does this really surprise anyone?
(caps lock is cruise control to awesomeness)
Nothing scares me more than 75 year old people approving software patents.
FTA:
Patent officials are looking at hiring back retirees to work on the patent backlog and at revising "duty station" requirements so the agency can expand into a nationwide workforce.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
I've got two patents already past the examiners' 18 month time limit. One is a continuation, so this has been going on for over three years now. If they want to send those two through unexamined, that's fine by me.
This seems to fall into the trap of signaling one problem as the source of a larger, more complex problem, when in fact there is a composite of multiple problems to deal with. One may also see this in pointing to video games as the problem in school shootings.
Patent examiner quotas may be a big problem and I'm glad it's being pointed out, but companies stocking up on patents as a strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction is a separate problem.
Not a typewriter
"In the global economy, innovation, technological progress and the protection of intellectual property rights are keys to U.S. competitiveness. Keeping up with the demand for patents is critical to the nation's health."
... and they've stopped publishing the money supply figures...
Really?
Is that why the dollar is in free fall, there's 48 trillion of debt, vast amounts of production shipped off to competing countries, the housing market in meltdown about to take the rest of the world with it
Basically... Bullshit.
LOL. Patents are damned near irrelevant and have fuck all to do with the nations health.
Deleted
What they really need is the TLDR rule for automatically rejecting patent applications.
The quotas are per patent examined and denied/accepted. So, there is no polarity. In fact, if anything, it is a lot easier to say "X anticipates Y, go away" than to approve a patent.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Actually 8hours is just long enough to pretend that you care, they can play tic tac toe for the 8hours, it absolutelly does not matter.
The only goal is to scam off money from people that like to have the permission to make other peoples live miserable.
Patents should be forbidden in all field, they are not useful anymore.
This is exactly right. Here in the Bay Area, there is currently a feeding frenzy going on, with one IP firm after another popping up to represent one tech company after another in one arcane patent dispute after another.
This is costing ALL OF US a LOT of money. It is making the legal system a LOT of money.
I've been inside a few of these law firms; they hire a phalanx of paralegals to pour through tens-of-thousands of documents, looking for keywords that might have bearing on a case; they create aggressive deposition schedules; they engage in ultra-expensive eDiscovery activities, and so on.
They bring in the best, catered food, day in and day out. They have overnight sleeping rooms, so that paralegals can stop work and not have to take time to commute the next morning. Money flows in, unencumbered by any thought about what it is costingi yuo and me, the American consumer, as all these costs are eventually borne by us in the way of higher prices, or constrained innovation.
The lawyers are walkingi away with big smiles on their faces; it's really sickening to consider the near-fact tthat there is probably more revenue being generated in Silicon Valley via IP litigation than there is from the deployment of new innovation.
Do you think the "legal profession's ethics" (an oxymoron, if I ever heard one) will do anything to stop this money-making juggernaut? Answer: no.
In fact, we are being held hostage by greedy IP law firms, who have a production-line attitude to litigating patent and copyright protection issues.
With new eDiscovery laws coming into place, now we're having to do legal diligence to the 'nth' email. Imagine the wide-eyed, greedy hand-wringing going on with that one.
Recently the ABA created a new "degree", for paralegals. It's called the "Paralegal Certificate". It's a two-year program, with the ABA (American Bar Assn.) mandating that ABA-approved paralegal programs CANNOT be held online. Imagine that. one has to trek off to night school after a long day at work, to listen to someone read notes from a Civil Litigation textbook that you could be reading and being tested for online.
Why this certificate? It permits these IPP (and other) law firms to bill more for paralegals. Now that "paralegal" is an "official" sub-category, law firms can take a $30 per hour paralegal and bill out $120-200 for their time (depending on discipline, and experience). More legal hands in our economy's cookie jar.
I don't know how we're going to change a copyright and patent system that feeds these parasitical attorneys so generously. Think about it; most of the laws are made by people who have been attorneys, and have staffs full of young attorneys. They will legislate in their self-interest.
Government either subsidizes something or bans it. And when you subsidize it, you get more of it - and here productivity is based on completely the wrong thing.
I wonder what his views on the patent problem is. Or a libertarian's views in general - Private "Property" vs. Free Market.
Money is in politics because politics is in money. The patent system makes decisions that affect money, so it is only to be expected that money will do what it can.
I wanted call that a scam, but a natural outworking of interests.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
One of the things they should worry about cutting down the time it takes a patent examiner to become fully proficient. 4-6 six years is too long... at the rate people are leaving it will never get better.
Why is not being able to keep up with the backlog a problem? In fact if their productivity continued to slip all the way to zero (as in 0% of the applications ever made it through review), I'd say all the problems with patents would finally be fixed! And instead of hiring more examiners, I say they should reduce the number until there are no more left at all.
I've already seen several people leave because they can't handle the stress they're put under here either. The standards haven't changed since the 70s even though the pool of prior art is growing exponentially.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
The best part -- that 28-box application mentioned in the article? -- it gets the PE the same credit as the smallest application.
This is the other problem. Why are they allowed to submit this much? When I submit a grant application I have limited amount of space to justify my grant. That way I have to condense things down so only the most important and relevant information is transmitted. Why is there not a similar restriction on patents? It is far simpler to request additional details for the patents that need them rather than sift through thousands of pages.
How many of those 28 boxes do you think even got opened?
The question you should be asking is how many needed to get opened.
Under the current system, the easiest way for examiners to get quota points is to reject applications, which is exactly what they do. Over 95% of patent applications are initially rejected, which is why the patent process is so expensive. See SSRN for a published study that addresses the quota issue in detail.
You'd never pay a surveyor by the sheer number of lines he draws. You pay him to draw accurate lines. That's what a patent examiner is: a surveyor of property boundaries of a most complex nature. Trouble is, incentivizing correct boundary-line drawing is rather hard.; you'd have to predicate it on lack of future litigation.
The concept of exclusivity over thoughts and ideas. The real REASON it exists? To protect and advanced the well being of entrenched interests, for only they have the resources to work the system that was created by them. Don't believe the spin.
What?
... that which is not of patentable nature.
http://abstractionphysics.net/pmwiki/index.php
Removing the foolishness of software patents would go a long way at reducing the patent system over running workload.
The law requires it. The Federal Courts have invented a doctrine known as "inequitable conduct" that requires a patent applicant and its attorney to submit every document they have access to that could potentially be relevant to the application. So, if you are a corporation with a resource library that relates to your products, you have to submit the entire resource library or risk committing inequitable conduct. In every patent infringement trial, the infringer accuses the patent owner of hiding information from the patent office, no matter how much information is submitted. So the natural recourse is to submit everything.
We have, largely at public expense, mapped the human genome. Many drugs are patented that were developed at public expense and licensed to drug companies to be sold for whatever they can get. Scientists are not going to stop being interested in biochemistry because they are less likely to become billionaires.
Too many software patents are trivial. Every now and then somebody comes up with an algorithm that is groundbreaking. IBM, as a joke, patented an algorithm for assigning access to restrooms on a train. Don't even get me started on "business method" patents.
The lawyers are walkingi away with big smiles on their faces; it's really sickening to consider the near-fact tthat there is probably more revenue being generated in Silicon Valley via IP litigation than there is from the deployment of new innovation. Based on the typos in that section (and absent from elsewhere in your post), I'm guessing that you are rather passionate about that particular bit...
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
They have a bunch of regular patent examiners doing their thing as usual. But then there's a second line of examiners who audit approvals at random. This second line of examiners can delve into it more deeply and find the obvious patents, etc. that the first line didn't get.
They are paid by the patent denied - patents are generally rejected the first time through, if nothing else to generate more revenue. But it's much easier to just let it slide than to keep searching for good prior art that stops a patent. It's not enough to know it's been done before, you have to cite the prior art, which may be buried in some obscure journal on a different topic. Patents tend to get worded by lawyers, who try hard to obfuscate and make the examiner's job difficult, so they'll give up and allow the patent.
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. --Thomas Jefferson
The Article is wrong:
"The USPTO is the only government agency that can and does lay you off if your productivity drops below 85% of the standard for your civil service grade."
The actual minimum productivity is 95% of production. Below this you get a verbal warning, then a written warning and then you are gone. So it takes a total of 3/4 of a year to get canned. (3 quarters of poor performance.)
You just violated my patent on using sentence fragments to communicate an idea, so now you owe me money. Simple as that.
(IANAL, but I do own a law firm)
In fact, we are being held hostage by greedy IP law firms
I understand your anger, but you are certainly not being held hostage by a law firm, but by their clients. Or, in other words, lawyers don't sue people, people sue people.
Now that "paralegal" is an "official" sub-category, law firms can take a $30 per hour paralegal and bill out $120-200 for their time (depending on discipline, and experience).
LOL, they've been doing that a long time, they just made it legit, is all. But hey, if you don't like your lawyer's prices, go get another one. It's called "shopping around". Try it sometime.
More legal hands in our economy's cookie jar.
And this is where you fail miserably. Again, a lawyer is an instrument, not some magical black hole for money. Clients instruct them, lawyer performs actions, lawyer gets paid, all of this within whatever legal guidelines apply. So, if you don't like it, change the guidelines and quit yer bitching.
And yes, I realize there are bad lawyers out there. Ideally, a lawyer is both a counselor and mediator, but there a plenty out there who resort to bully tactics, cronyism and other shortcuts to get what they want. But again, I say to you, any system that lets someone like that flourish is the problem.
Don't fight the symptoms, fight the system.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Shakespeare had it right:
"The first thing we'll do - we'll kill all the lawyers", Cade
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That is not what is wrong with the US Patent System. That's only a SYMPTOM of what is wrong. The real wrong is that the patent system is completely and totally disoriented away from it's original mission, which is to encourage the kinds of innovative inventions that we would not otherwise have without patents.
Patents actually take away rights. Two inventors inventing the same thing in isolation from each other will end up with one of them the loser, losing all his rights to what he created, just because the other one files the patent application first. In theory, this is not what we want to be doing. In practice, such things have to happen in a process that is going to grant exclusive rights for some term. We justify this taking away of rights for the greater good of all not just in getting the benefits of that invention the two inventors made (we'd get that benefit anyway, even if they had to share the rights), but also the benefit of the process itself to encourage the innovation.
Where the problem lies is that so many patents issued these days are for things that would have been invented, either just as soon, or at least by the time it is really needed, anyway. Thus we end up taking rights away from parallel inventors for something for which there is no gain (we'd have that invention without any patent system).
We need to do a better job of evaluating an invention to determine if it is something that is truly innovative, and that such a thing would not have been invented just in time for a need without a patent system. If the invention itself does not justify a patent system, then a patent should not be issued for it.
I believe fewer than 1% of patents issued these days justify the patent system.
There are also a lot of other things wrong, such as those overly broad claims. What is there to discourage such claims? Nothing. There needs to be a penalty for overly broad claims. Maybe invalidation of the whole patent might do.
The abuses of the patent system today are actually harming innovation and the economy. The nature of technology today is that almost all new ideas build upon other ideas. But why even try if there is a risk that what you could do could be taken away from you because something else is similar, or even just builds on the same thing your idea did.
We still do need a patent system for things that take a lot of time and money to come up with. And nearly divine inspiration needs to be rewarded as well. Almost all patents these days do not fit those descriptions.
And this has nothing to do with the matter of software patents. It's just that software patents, far more than others, tend to fall into the "there's no real innovation here that someone else would not have done when it's needed" category.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
"they hire a phalanx of paralegals to pour through tens-of-thousands of documents,"
PORE, not pour.
But, you do bring up interesting points. Mod parent UP!
they are not useful anymore.
Patents are a means of ensuring that the rich stay rich. By preventing independent innovators from entering their market space (even if the guy gets a patent, the big guns can sue him to oblivion based on their pre-existing patent war chest), they ensure that their company will continue to be the dominant player (or a member of the dominant cartel).
So patents are still very useful, as a tool of oppression.
That is why the problem will not be fixed any time soon.
The combination of businessmen and lawyers would be the more appropriate target for scorn. Don't forget, half the challenge of litigation is convincing these people they have grounds to sue.
It's not about the truth, it's about what you can prove, or at least convince someone of.
The previous post is questioning why the patent system is "critical to the nation's health." I think it's a fair question, not flamebait. As with many things the answer is not a clear yes or no. Here at Slashdot there are frequent observations about how parts of the current patent system stifle innovation and progress. Of course with no patent system at all the R&D budgets would vanish in almost every field. But what percentage of patents are actual "innovation [and] technological progress"? Is a "Method of creating an anti-gravity illusion" (patent #5255452) really innovation or just a neat trick? Is it critical to our nation's health? How about patent 4773863, an "Amusement Device for a Toilet Bowl"? Critical or superfluous? What about those extra vague idea patents? Perhaps there should be an additional pre-filter for the patent system where things are quickly reviewed and voted as either an important innovation, or a non-critical neat idea. Non-critical neat ideas (for which even something as big as the iPod would qualify) may well be deserving of some short term protection, but the long term protection of every mildly original thought has lead us to a patent logjam that hurts our nation's economic health.
We are all just people.
Patents are a nice little money spinner for Uncle Sam: get paid for a patent application. If it is a bad one, get paid for a reexamination. A few hours of a patent clerk's time get charged as thousands.
They work fine for patent lawyers too. Lots of money to set up a patent application, but the real pay comes when a bad patent gets contested.
The system does not reward high quality work, so how is it going to come about? The USPTO and lawyers are very happy where thay are right now and will actively resist any efforts to change the status quo.
The only way to improve patent quality is to improve the feedback by linking it to dollars. Make the USPTO accountable for damages due to bad patents. But there's not much chance of that happening.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The main problem with the (US) patent system is that it is a classed, stratified scam. One designed to serve large and/or monied entities, lawyers and their various barnacles...our political system, which drives the legal system, is a classed, stratified scam...the legal system [...] is a classed, stratified scam.
Give me a break. REALITY is a scam. REALITY favors the most powerful. The government, courts, and USPTO are all protections against the unbridled exercise of power. The government is easily voted out, courts are determined by *juries* (which is predicated on an educated populous, so we really have ourselves to blame there), and the USPTO doesn't write patents on its own.
Now I'm not saying that the process is flawless, but I *am* saying that any process without rigid guidelines (and most of those with rigid guidelines) will be open to some amount of abuse and/or gaming by those with more resources to better play the system. The alternative is a society without powerful entities outside of the government, which is pretty much the goal of communism.
Clearly the process itself needs tweaking, but that's a far cry from the conspiratorial claims of a scam that "the man" is using to keep us all down. Perhaps with less of a reward for patents, such as shorter terms of, say, 5-10 years, there would be less incentive for companies to file every patent imaginable. Nonetheless, you're blatantly disregarding two extremely relevant facts:
1) Patents are not diamonds. That is, they're not forever. The more ideas that are patented today, the more that will be freely available n years from now. If you want to ensure the more open use of patentable ideas tomorrow, patent them today. If you can't afford it, establish a thinktank, collect donations, and do it that way, then freely license them if you want. A lack of motivation on your part is not a flaw in the process, or the opposition; rather it is indicative of your own true level of concern.
2) No amount of patent trolling or shotgun patenting will ever supplant or prohibit a truly novel idea, and individuals with new ideas have just as much opportunity to patent those ideas as ever. If it's already covered by an existing patent, then it's not new, and we've lost nothing. If it *is* new, and that person profits from their idea, then that's a fairly strong indication that the "classed, stratified scam" is really not.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I hate a troll. How is this at all insightful?
Don't worry though, Pharma is busy developing better drugs to treat male erectile insecurity.
The obvious thing to do would be to patent the solution :)
.
I don't know how we're going to change a copyright and patent system that feeds these parasitical attorneys so generously.
There's only one possible way: ban all patent protectionism by a Constitutional Amendment. Once the US passes it, the rest of the world's IP protectionism would quickly fall like dominos.
It is utterly out of control. People with law degrees are getting 140k per year their first year out of law school. Are we going to pretend lawyers have talent? That they do something else besides reading comprehension and creative used care salesmen persuasion before juries? The number of lawyers that graduate each year must be much higher than the number of medical doctors that graduate each year by now. It's probably higher than the number of engineers and the number of MBAs too. All of this is pure parasitical WASTE that is robbing everyone's pockets in the form of higher prices and lower quality products.
IP is not only proved to do the opposite of promote the arts and sciences, but it is being used to massively ABUSE free market competition. Lawyers are getting massive paychecks for sitting on the asses doing completely non-productive mafioso activity. The prisoner who escaped in the courthouse shooting his way out has racked up over 1.4 MILLION in *public defender* attorney fees. It's outrageous. Everybody now wants to sue everybody for everything.
The USPTO is literally selling away the freedom of Americans to the highest bidder in exactly the same way Ted Kennedy wanted to sell away the paychecks of Americans for illegal immigrant votes.
Ban the IRS. Ban the Federal Reserve. Ban the the USPTO. Fire all their asses, and take away their ill gotten pensions too! All these people are disgusting corrupt pigs. Mutual fund managers are nailed in multi-billion dollar class action law suits for charging 3-4% management fees. But school education administrators rack up 65-70% management fees. Ban the department of education.
This is what happens when socialism runs rampant. There's always tons more corporate welfare and military welfare. It needs to all be CUT. It's nothing but treasonous tyranny to the Constitution. The RIAA is just the tip of the iceberg. All these mother fuckers must go DOWN! Companies like Microsoft are filing for four to five THOUSAND patents PER YEAR! All of the patent grants are criminal. We badly need criminal congressional hearings on the negligence of the USPTO. These patent examiners and their management need to be fired and put in jail, their personal assets seized on the exact same grounds that Enron's management had their personal assets seized. 95% of Microsoft's net worth emanated from the USPTO monopoly patent grants. We are talking a scandal the size of ten thousand Enrons, trillions of dollars of ill gotten gains that might only be exceeded by the Federal Reserve monetary policy inflationary debasement tax. The absolute CORRUPTION throughout the US government is sickening.
If you want to get rid of the corruption, you deny government the means to ABUSE. Cutting back the time period of monopoly grants won't work. They will BRIBE politicians. How do you think the periods of intellectual protectionism were extended from 14 years? You want health care reform? You take away patent protectionism and the price of pharmaceutical drugs will drop 99% (you'll be able to personally pay for the AIDS medication of 100 Africans with aids for the price of a cup of coffee per day), the price of medical equipment will plummet, the price of health care examinations will rapidly decline. You take away copyright protectionism and the price of college education will also massively drop. All of these criminals are profiting by creating artificial scarcity by eliminating legitimate copycat competition, and there is no check on prices.
These people are targeting public domain DNA. They are patenting the genetic make up of FOOD. And they are getting super rich at the expense of the rest of the population for sitting on their asses
The real problem with the US patent system is that it allows for attempting to patent Software and Bussiness Models.
This is what creates an avalanche of patent applications for the most stupid things on the planet and its a very "unique" system in that almost NOBODY else accepts patent on this issues.
The system would STILL be broken even if you had large brainy, phd endowed Octopuses handling them. Software and BP patents are the biggest most stupid idea ever to touch the U.S. legal system.
NO SIG
I think I speak for all of us when I say: Fuck you!
Or, in other words, lawyers don't sue people, people sue people.
Total, unmitigated bullshit. The responsibility is joint and several and lawyers washing their hands of their responsibility is a large part of the problem. Or to put it another way "I was only following orders" went out as an excuse a very long time ago.
Lawyers are the experts in the domain of law and their clients generally follow their advice, including whether or not to sue and whether or not to get patents.
The current bullshit IP rush is driven almost entirely by and for lawyers, aided and abetted by the lawyers in congress who create the self-serving IP laws in the first place. A not very surprising consequence of the amorality of many lawyers and the quantity of lawyers in this country. A gigantic and extremely harmful game of real life nomic.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Sure, I'll give you a break. Political systems and social systems are designed to buffer reality so that life for the relatively defenseless becomes easier, sometimes even possible. When systems stumble out of control (or are intentionally driven out of control for any reason) they have failed society and they should be adjusted or replaced. We have tried - mind you, just tried - to make this country a haven for everyone, not just the most powerful. Insofar as it is a haven for the most powerful and both encompasses and nurtures a stratified environment that gives the powerful advantages that the common person does not have other than the simple purchase of goods, services and property, the system is failing.
It isn't just in need of tweaking. It's broken. Joe Average Inventor is absolutely locked out of the system in favor of BigCo, Inc. and Rich Guy, Esq. No amount of protest to the contrary that you might feel like indulging in can change this; that's one of the symptoms that should serve to wake you up.
This series of actions supports the system in place. I don't support it. Therefore, I wouldn't pursue this series of actions, nor would I recommend it to anyone. You're simply suggesting the perpetration of the current money and litigation centric system here, not offering solutions.
These are fine sounding words, but they are strictly fantasy. All it takes to destroy a truly novel idea - or steal it - is to tie someone up in court who cannot afford it. Not one thing more. This is because the system is broken at both the court and the legislative levels.
Do some ideas get through? Sure. The system isn't 100% efficient at destroying little people. But it's really, really good at it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
How about the USPTO is held culpable every time a law suit finds prior art and expect them to reimburse the legal fee. After all, they did not do the job and the outcome was predictable. That should make them less enthusiastic about dishing them out for profit.
I have no idea why patents (as currently defined/interpreted by law) exist. I really don't. For years I have tried to understand why info that is not comprised of trade secrets or other documentation that is legally bound by secrecy - why that info, when released to the world, becomes taboo for anyone else to use or benefit from without permission. Where is the logic in this?
I agree that if you contribute something to human civilization, you should be recognized for it, and others trying to take credit for it should be penalized(for falsity - they are lying). So if you innovate an engineering method or make a scientific contribution, the world owes you recognition when using your addition to human knowledge, but the world *does not* owe you a royalty fee. You do not own information or rent it out. Not if you publish it for everyone to see. While it is still secret your privacy rights protect it, but the moment you go ahead and release it, the entire world, including commercial entities, have no logical obligation of obtaining any permission from you to deploy that information in any manner.
So much time wasted over nothing. Human greed is infuriating.
I applied for a patent in 1999. It was awarded this year. The delay involved a dispute with the patent examiner. He finally saw the light, but it took years. After reading this article, maybe the problem was that he didn't have time to understand it.
My university will pay for the lawyer fees to file the patent, and collect that first if any money is generated -- sounds reasonable. My first patent was sold for about $25K, but I got nothing -- the lawyers got it all.
By the way, both were nanoscale devices -- not software patents.
That doesn't sound like much time. Yet I am reminded of all the stupid things that have been approved for patent, that are then posted as stories on Slashdot, and then a bunch of people post prior art they found after 10 minutes of Google searching.
Here's how I see it. Take this with a huge grain of salt.
Prior to mid 20th century the research community was very small. Very few PhDs were given out and most research was funded by private interests. These private citizens were taking large financial risks to invent something new which could benefit everybody. The government decided this was a good thing and provided a patenting service to protect innovation.
WWI and especially WWII really changed people's view of science. Suddenly science was important because it could win wars. This led to tremendous government investment in research. Today our society is producing lots of graduate students. They go on to do innovative work in national research labs and universities. Their funding mostly and increasingly comes from the government.
Please excuse this cliche, but it really makes sense here.
1. Work at a national research lab.
2. Invent something risky and innovative. But, do not patent it yet!
3. Commercialize the technology in a startup company. Note, that the big risky part was paid for by the government.
4. Now you patent as a private company.
5. Use your monopoly to profit!
There are lots of variations on this general theme. In short: a private company can reap the benefits of the patent system while avoiding most of the financial risks.
It seems like the government is getting ripped off so why don't they put a stop to it? The answer is because the government isn't a for-profit business. Innovation occurs and the economy benefits. Mission accomplished, right?
It's actually the uneducated taxpayers that are getting ripped off. Basically they work and pay taxes so that a selected few can go to top ten schools and profit off the system. BTW, it's not just the people that are directly funded that benefit. It's also all the other graduates and alumnus that go to work in industry. They indirectly benefit because the government has massively subsidized their top notch education in the form of grants to the professors at top universities.
I painted it black and white, but the real world is shades of gray. There is a lot of great research being done in the private sector. And there are private companies which fund the risky development part. They certainly deserve a patent to protect their investment. I just don't see how we can reliably identify which inventions were privately funded and which were government funded. It seems that we need to either shut down the military-industrial complex and go back to privately funded, patent-protected innovation, or open the floodgates of government funding and get rid of the patent system.
That's all for now, thanks for reading. I have to get back to work on step 3. :)
I for one, welcome our new brainy, PHD and endowed Octopi Patent overlords.
And who, exactly, would decide what is important and what is non-critical? I would suspect that most inventions that turn out to be Important are not appreciated as such at first, even by their own inventor (post-it notes, scotch guard, and rubber come to mind). You want me to believe that a government worker looking at hundreds of patents a month will be qualified to decide which of the patents will be important? What happens when a patent is marked as "non-critical" and turns out to be important? Will they be reclassified for long-term protection?
"What happens when a patent is marked as "non-critical" and turns out to be important? Will they be reclassified for long-term protection?"
Yes, there should be a rarely used process which allows a non-critical idea to be reclassified. Post-it Notes and ScotchGard wouldn't even come close to making it. One year of short term protection is plenty for them.
As for the process of classifying the ideas:
The Patent Office seems to be dealing with about 5,500 patents a day according to article. So if you have 330 new employees classifying 50 applications per day, then every application can be classified by three people. Eight minutes per classification isn't much, but I'm sure many would take about 30 seconds to classify, allowing more time for the more interesting patents. And of course this is only an initial filtering, the patent examiner could ask for something to be reclassified if they feel that something is mis-classified.
Total, unmitigated bullshit. The responsibility is joint and several and lawyers washing their hands of their responsibility is a large part of the problem. Or to put it another way "I was only following orders" went out as an excuse a very long time ago.
/. these days. Not to mention reading my fucking post where I broke it down for you, numbnuts. Of course Lawyers have certain duties and responsibilities, and you have fucking remedies for that. Once again, for the stupid: the system is broken, fix the system. Ranting at lawyers isn't going to get shit done for you.
The shit that gets modded insightful on
The current bullshit IP rush is driven almost entirely by and for lawyers,
And you know why? Because the lawyers looked at the case, ran the numbers, and saw that it was viable. One last time: if it's a viable case, then the problem is the laws on the books that allows that viability in the first place.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
As much as I want to laugh at that jape, I cannot. I have a fundamental dislike of treating anyone as a category. People are people. The moment you start putting people in categories, you become part of the problem. The only way that direction can go is to treat the category as "the problem" and pretty soon you're treating people as things and looking for ultimate solutions. Stop it, please.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I left the European Patent Office 10 years ago (blablabla) ... ... and in those days we had around 2 days per application.
.. blablabla .. it was not dismissal that threatened us. It was the other end: promotion depended on high production. Quality was almost no concern. Though, honestly, our quality then (at least) was one class above the USPTO. No, not because I happened to be one of the 2000 examiners, rather to the contrary.
It would be good to compare with the current required production numbers of the Japanese, Korean etc. offices before drawing conclusions.
Anyone in here ? EPO anyone ? (I recently read the EPO was similarly down to around 1 day ?)
In those days
Not sure I agree, it depends on what you pour through the documents, and whether or not it's flammable as well as inflammatory. The syntax would be correct if you were talking about a few litres of petrol.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Is curl. It's use is well documented and pre-dates their limitation of access to "standard browsers".
And rampaging barbarian management has nothing to do with it? Personally I think this is another symptom of failure that way just like Enron etc. Or for another example it was Darl McBride and not his lawyers that started off the SCO stupidity that we've read a lot about here.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
It would take more than just a smart person, but one with actual prescience to determine that an invention is important.
In fact, many IP lawyers have been scamming their way to big bucks for the last decade. There are some attorneys who do good, no doubt - but when we see the ENABLEMENT by lawyers of the 'people' who sue, in ways that inflame the litigation, one has to wonder.
Bottom line: IP law needs *serious* overhall, and IP lawyers need serious price competition. This is beginning to happen, somewhat, as here in the Bay Area the rash of new firms is causing a surplus, with some firms starting to market aggressively for business - business that used to fall into their laps. I can't wait to see most of these sharks fade from the scene, as companies start to reralize that these "instruments" (what a crock!) are walking away with all the revenue.
Have any of you ever been in a divorce proceeding, where one attorney (or both) practically drool at the prospect of one of their letters to the opponent causing an angry outburst?
Look, lawyers are really not much more than specialized legal screed geeks, whose screed is kept obscure by - you guessed it - more lawyers...the ones in Washington and elsewhere who keep the legislative halls busy with new legal code, to keep their law firm friends happy.
Interesting fact: America has 1 attorney for every 500 citizens; Japan one attorney for every 10,000 citizens.
The law is PROFITABLE, in a way that COSTS our culture in a BIG WAY.
Fight the system? Ha! This is what most attorneys say, as they walk away with their big fees - fees that cost YOU and ME a LOT of money (these costs get passed on to consumers).
Why don't Captain Spendid and his buddies "fight the system"? They won't, because the system is *created* by lawyers. It *serves* the lawyers. (and here Splendid will say "we're a land of laws", of some other drivel that continues to serve him)
Regarding IP, there is a group of lawyers (Larry Lessig, for example), who are trying to change things, but their efforts are being fought every step of the way, by - guess who? - lawyers.
mod (#21033439) UP!!
A first action allowance is exceedingly rare (what you are implying by rubber stamp), and to be honest unwanted by attorneys, per discussion I had attended with the head of former Bell Lab's IP dept.
Think about it for a second, it means that perhaps your patent claims weren't broad enough and you are in fact entitled to more coverage, hence why reissue's are around. On the otherhand, it can also help establish the metes and bounds of what is out there.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
I have more than 35 issued US patents, with at least 15 applications presently on file with the USPTO -- no software or business-method patents, thank you very much! -- and the biggest problem I experience is the opposite from that most frequently mentioned here. While examiners do allow worthless patent applications (hopefully none of mine qualify...), my biggest headache is that they also reject patent applications for technically incorrect reasons, usually based on an incomplete understanding of either the present application or the prior art.
The root cause of this, however, is the same -- lack of time available to read the relevant material in depth. Not only can the present examiner not read my application carefully, but the fact that his predecessor had the same problem led him to quit, so the reviewer of my application today has less experience than he might otherwise -- a two-fold impact. The fact that I have to respond to the incorrect rejection, often to the point of entering the formal patent appeals process, only adds workload to an already-overworked system.
My point is that the examination process is a decision point and that rushed, inexperienced examiners can err in both directions. Yes, they can allow applications that should be rejected, but they can also reject applications that should be allowed. And while the former gets a lot of press (we've all seen the patent for the child's swing), the latter is just as bad for innovation: If a patent troll can take an inadvisedly-issued patent and take down an industry, an improperly-rejected patent can delay or deny funding to the startup trying to build an industry in the first place.
lawyers don't sue people, people sue people.
Yeah, but it looks to me like most of the money goes to corruption in the civil trials where patent trials are tried. Most money goes to discovery and deposition.
Litigants are usually required by to court must spend large amounts of produce large amounts of evidence in response to discovery and deposition orders. At no time is any evidence of malfeasance required for these orders to be issued, and these phases are allowed to last years and years.
Isn't it slavery to require unpaid labor from litigants who haven't been found guilty? Almost as bad, because there's no time limit, civil trials often last well until after products are obolete (e.g., the Microsoft case). There is no constraint to keep big companies from milking cases to drive small, innovative companies out of business. In short, it's as corrupt as the original slavery.
I've read a defense that deposition and discovery can bring out facts of bad behavior we otherwise wouldn't see. But I'm at a loss to see how that's good when the trial ends a decade later. None of this helped Netscape. And it certainly does bring slavery and corruption.
Why do judges and lawyers let this happen? This would seem to be major moral failing of theirs. Certainly, they do make vastly more money.
Tie patents to natural persons. Make them non-transferable, only licensable. All licensing agreements have to be esablished direktly between the inventor and the license taker.
See? No more IP-only companies and patent-portfolios any more...
First: The patent system is so complicated that you can be sure there is more than one problem ...
... But even these have a good probability of getting through. And someday they are published, the world thinks: Holy shit, WTF is that? But the patent is there, stays there and may make someone a lot of money.
But now to the article and the patent system:
Problem i) The patent officers are overwhelmed by patent applications. So the review is not as good as it should be.
Problem ii) If a patent is granted, it's extremly complicated, expensive and costs a lot of money to invalidate it (just look at the One-Click patent from Amazon if you need an example).
A possible solution would be a sunrise period (e.g. 6 months) for new patents in which they can be openly discussed. The community of patent reviewers may find prior art etc. Only and only if the community does not find any major objections the patent will be granted.
Now the patent office is flooded with patent applications. Many of them are not worth the paper the are printed on
The idea is not mine, IIRC I have read it here on Slashdot.
Bye egghat
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
With BILLIONS of dollars on the line, you would think that they could hire more people. I think alot of very large companies would be willing to pay alot of money to make sure the patent system was correct. Enough to hire a few hundred more employees at least.
if you don't want me to see your laundry, don't hang it out on the line.
You poor, bitter man. If you didn't waste so much time making wild assumptions, your life would be a lot more peaceful.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
To be fair, I'm not American. and some of the peculiarities of the American system baffle the shit out of me. Another reason I keep saying to fight the system: America's is pretty fucked up right now compared to some.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
he's paid 60K or so. He's 65yrs old and has spent a lifetime as a EE in semiconductor manufacturing and automated test technology. He sleeps under his desk 3 nights a week just so he can TRY to keep up with his workload. And he's been there all of 6 months. The sheer stupidity of some of the filings is breathtaking and even I can see that and I'm 1/2 his age and have no EE/semi-con industry experience at all. He can tell you story after story about patent lawyers wasting his precious time arguing over their own failures to file stuff right.
I used to live/work nearby as well and I have to agree with the article: most of the examiners are kids, barely out of school. They have no industry experience, and no knowledge except some book learnin. It's a disgrace, really.
Shareholders do have a diluted responsibility. As I said the responsibility is joint and several.
Lawyers, primary responsibility. Company management, once removed. Shareholders, twice removed.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Both Darl McBride and his lawyers were necessary pre-requisites for the SCO stupidity. Like I said the responsibility is joint and several. Lawyers are free agents and they can't wash their hands of their responsibility by pretending it was only Darl.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
You're a narcissist fraud; thanks for giving yourself away. The only thing you get done before three in the morning is unloading your unnatural bolus of shit.
Of course, so has most of the rest of our legal system mutated. You know why our system has so mutated? Because our political system, which drives the legal system, is a classed, stratified scam.
An over representation of lawyers in the political system is probably also a big part of the problem.