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Court Blocks Controversial New Patent Rules
An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek is reporting that a court in Virginia has issued an injunction against controversial new patent rules that were supposed to go into effect tomorrow. The court granted a motion filed by GlaxoSmithKline, which is suing the US patent office over the issue.
Among other things, the new rules would limit the extent to which existing patent applications can be modified. The patent office says the new rules would speed up the patent process, but critics say they hurt inventors."
Having submitted several patents through my company, I can attest that they need to be rewritten all the time because patent reviewers are idiots. They take a one sentence claim, pick a two 'big' words out it and do a literature search. If those two words appear in any publication remotely related to the field related to your patent, they mark it as prior art.
All I hear are the cries of patent trolls saying "Won't someone please think of the children^W inventors!"
Name at least one genuine inventor who put in the hard work, personally received at least 10% of license revenues and did not take advantage of other people's work by patenting vaporware and waiting for someone else to build an actual product. Current patent system only benefits large companies by driving startups out of business by requiring prohibitive legal costs to ship any product. Lets cut the crap about benefitting the little guys.
http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2007/10/surprise-pto-co.html
Interesting that there were no amicus briefs for the Patent Office.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
One of the tenets of the capitalist system is clear ownership of property. How can one invest if the ownership can be taken away.
Yet, the current patent system dies exactly this. The abuses that are possible under the current system allow for someone to develop a product and later, through the monopoly granted under the patent system, effectively have that intellectual property taken away.
The problems are many: submarine patents, the fact that the possible award of punitive damages discourages searches for pre-existing patents, the over-broad patents that may or may not apply. Uncertainty kills investment and the current patent system provides plenty of uncertainty.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
so if someone other than them discovers a new application of their drug, who gets the rights to that finding? the company that developed the drug in the first place or the one that made use of it in a compeltely new way?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The patent office says the new rules would speed up the patent process, but critics say they hurt inventors.
Inventors? Or just multi-billion-dollar transnational conglomerates?
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Property, I mean.
From TFA: "The new rules are intended to speed patent reviews by the chronically understaffed (emphasis added) USPTO"
It's easier said than done, but couldn't they just hire more folks since patent issues are among the hottest in the country?
What percentage of patent filers in the last few years were by inventors? 10%? Any intelligent guesses?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
> One of the tenets of the capitalist system is clear ownership of property. How can one invest if the ownership can be taken away.
One might think that a clear definition of "property" (say, one including the words "rivalrous goods" in it somewhere) would also be a part of the capitalist system, such that people might recognize when things, particularly government-granted monopoly rights, but not "property" in any meaningful sense, get deliberately misnamed with intent to cloud certain issues.
...the fraudulent support for software patents, as software is in no way material of patentable character.
Once that is done, the patent office will have more time to spend on patent applications that do have patentable material.
Software is of abstract ideas, natural law and physical phenomenon, and of this a sub set is mathematical algorithms of which all four of these areas are universally considered NON-PATENTABLE!
see Abstraction Physics for the fundamentals.
> The government grants me a monopoly right to my house. If someone else tries to live in it, I can call the police and have them thrown out. I can even shoot them with government permission if they refuse to leave. Does that mean it's not property?
I think you totally misunderstood what a "rivalrous" good is. Rivalrous is what your house is. Think of a shirt: two people can't wear it at the same time and three is right out. That's why it's rivalrous: multiple users interfere with each other.
The monopoly rights are an attempt to make something non-rivalrous into something rivalrous: we can't both have exclusive monopoly rights to an invention. But it's natural state is non-rivalrous: we both CAN make the same invention, and let the better of the two win in the marketplace. These patents prevent one of the two from getting to the market to begin with merely because someone patented it first.
Lastly, calling your house a "monopoly" right is just plain silly. It doesn't keep people from owning other land, nor other people from owning other houses, therefore it cannot rightfully be called a "monopoly."
The sheer amount of confusion you have about what these words mean disturbs me because it means that you're both ignorant and strongly opinionated. I've yet to see a case where that was a good combination. Alas, it does make your username true. You are certainly not a misfit...
As the Constitution clearly enumerates Patents and Copyrights are the exclusive domain of Congress. Ostensibly they can grant patents, take them away, and establish an agency with congressional oversight to regulate the patent process.
If this isn't a judge specificaly appointed by Congress to Adjudicate the Patent process, I have a hard time believing this injunction is going to last.
Why oh Why are the courts involved at all?
Checks and balances again. The courts are involved because Congress, once again, dropped the goddamn ball.
You know, when dogs get rabies, becoming irrational and dangerous to humans, they are taken out and shot. Congress may or may not have rabies (although some its members often act like they do) but they have certainly become irrational and dangerous. What are we going to do about them? Shoot votes at them?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The Patent Office (executive branch) created rules that were contrary to the laws passed by Congress (legislative branch). The laws passed by Congress (the Administrative Procedure Act) state that the remedy in such a situation is to file suit against the agency (Patent Office) in federal court (judicial branch). The problem here is that the Patent Office overstepped the authority granted to it by Congress. Congress could change the law if it wanted to (and it might, see the Patent Reform Act of 2007), but the Patent Office can't change the law on its own.
This injunction will certainly last, the Patent Office clearly violated the law in promulgating these new rules.
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
>the key point is to make sure everything is written as clearly and unambiguously as possible..
No, the key point is to spend a year reading a well rounded universe of recent CAFC patent cases in order to be knowledgeable about issues such as enablement, claim construction (specification and prosecution history effects upon claims), claim construction in general (claim construction 101), best mode, inequitable conduct, obviousness (especially in light of KSR), the list goes on....
I am not saying that it is not possible to obtain this body of knowledge. but, your best bet might be to do the initial work and then get a good patent prosecution attorney to fix things for a somewhat less but still significant amount of $$.
Or, if you are planning to file applications on many new innovations, it might make sense to immerse yourself in patent law and then, if your are intelligent, you can get it 98 % there and then pay minimally to get another set of eyes to reinforce the quality of your efforts.
Its complicated because any attempt to achieve justice as related to the intersection of innovation and law is inherently complicated. Our society would definitely be improved if the individual innovators were empowered with the knowledge to navigate this intersection because we would then be closer to the ideal regarding patent protection that the constitutional framers intended.
BTW, I am not a lawyer but I have been there and back on this subject.
{snippety quip = "An inventor is someone who "invents" an idea (as in writing fiction), and then "invents" that they are the inventor, and then "invents" lawsuits against anything that comes on the market and is fairly similar.
Hard work is out."} Obligatory snipety quip {/snippety quip}
{joke= "Aside from that, I can personally atte... OW! OW! OW! Those laws HURT!"} Obligatory joke {/Joke}
{sig = "
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Isn't GlaxoSmithKline the company that patented Prilosec? And then when the FDA would no longer let them charge inflated prices for Prilosec "to cover their development costs", didn't GlaxoSmithKline then repackage Prilosec in purple capsules and re-patent it as Nexium, for which they could in turn charge inflated prices? Gee, why would GSK be concerned about greater patent scrutiny?