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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."
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.
so basically the argument that is being made is that if company A patents a technology/drug whatever and finds a new use for it they can extend the patent to include that finding? To what end?
Here's the 10 cent version: continuations are used when:
a) your inventor comes up with a new way of extending his invention (continuation in part);
b) you disclosed multiple distinct inventions in the original application, but only filed claims at one of them (continuation);
c) the patent office is being dense, and you have to argue your claims repeatedly (request for continuing examination); or
d) the patent office grants some of your claims, and you want to get an issued patent AND continue to argue about the others (continuation).
I guess my point was that if you refer to common things (to those skilled in the trade) in your claims, you are going to get hit with prior art because the reviewer latches on to those things not understanding what they are. If in your claim you write "for example, pancreatic cancer", they tend to think that is to the focus of the claim when it isn't. The prior art is going to be the thousands of published articles that just happen to mention both those terms.
Either way, you can take decades old technology and discover novel, patentable ways to use it. My example was contrived, sure.
Well, you would be wrong about what I was interested in when I drafted and prosecuted patents, but I don't expect you to take my word for it. I turned away many people who wanted to file patent applications on ridiculously obvious inventions and inventions that were clearly anticipated by other patents. You're basically calling me a charlatan, a rip-off artist who will take anybody's money regardless of the benefit to my customer. I know lawyers are scum and all, but I never wanted to take money from somebody unless I genuinely believed they were getting good value for it.
Back to the point of the article, why these Proposed Rules are a bad thing, from a Patent Attorney perspective and the perspective of anybody who deals with the USPTO, boils down to this: they will not solve the problem they are meant to address, which is relieving the backlog of applications.
In a nutshell, they will basically take some pressure off of the Examining Corps at the USPTO and shift a greater burden onto the Appeals division. It will cost patent applicants more money, take more time, create more uncertainty, and not improve patent quality one bit (which is a goal I support).
> 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...