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Patent Chief Decries Continued Downward Spiral of Patent Quality
Techdirt is reporting that Jon Dudas, head of the US Patent Office, is lamenting the continuing quality drop in patent submissions. Unfortunately, while this problem is finally getting the attention it deserves, the changes being implemented don't seem to be offering the correct solution. "When you set up a system that rewards people for not actually innovating in the market (but just speculating on paper), then of course, you're going to get more of that activity. When you set up a system that rewards those people to massive levels, well out of proportion with their contribution to any product, then of course you're going to get more of that activity. When you set up a system that gives people a full monopoly right that can be used to set up a toll booth on the natural path of innovation, then of course you're going to get more of that activity. When the cost of getting a patent is so much smaller than the potential payoff of suing others with it, then of course you're going to get more of that activity. The fact that Dudas is just noticing this now, while still pushing for changes that will make the problem worse, is a real problem. Patents were only supposed to be used in special cases. The fact that they've become the norm, rather than the exception, is a problem, and it doesn't seem like anyone is seriously looking into fixing that."
My work here is dung.
At first I accidentally read that as Don Judas. Now that would be an interesting name for the head of the USPTO!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I patented the means of patenting "quality patents".
Well, no, not exactly. It's a complicated case, eldavojohn. Lotta ins. Lotta outs. And a lotta strands to keep in my head, man. Lotta strands in old Duder's--
He wanted compensation for the first rug. He wanted the second one back. The one that held sentimental value for Maude.
-Peter
Not only is innovation stifled, but it serves to further concentrate wealth, and the power over future wealth, into the hands of fewer and bigger corporations. How about we change it so that only an individual can hold the rights to a patent, without allowing the benefits to accrue to the employer of that individual? And that individual must be the actual creator of the patented idea in question?
it doesn't seem like anyone is seriously looking into fixing that
Well, when the benefits of owning dodgy patents can be into the tens of millions, it would be well worth sinking a few million into the right peoples pockets to make sure no change goes unchallanged.
All the while keeping any revision of the system on hold long enough for the rest of the world to overtake the US.
Yeah, there are places in the world where innovate is still a word with a real and exciting meaning, not just a tired and overused technology business buzzword. I do wish this would be realised by the people who are in a position to change this bizarre patent mess.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
This is what you expect in a world where lawyers have more power than engineers. Rethink the system and the problem goes away.
I think that we might want to look at the fees we are charging for registering a patent. Perhaps we could implement a fee structure where small inventors pay less than large corporations that can afford more. Also we might want the fees to be based on how unique and original the idea is. Granted, this would be a rather subjective way to assess fees but this is an area where we might want to consider.
Couldn't this problem be easily solved by telling all the patent examiners
"Memo: Hey, As of this morning we're going to raise the bar a bit as to what counts as 'novel.' So, clerk x, could you please deny the patent on your desk for Claratin E. Thanx, xoxo, your noble leader."
Patent fees have simply not kept pace with the value of IP and innovation. If they put them on a pricing schedule that goes up over time, and start them at $300k today, we'll see a dramatic reduction in frivilous patents.
Even more radical would be to place limits on the collectible licensing fees based on the original filing fee. This would encourage some companies to pay more for their patents, in order to create a greater enforcement cap, but would cause them to do so only because they believed the patents to be defensible.
There are a lot of problems with today's patent system, but there is no single "silver bullet" solution to solve them all. Disbanding the patent system altogether will never happen. It does have a noble purpose when applied properly. However, it has become a cash cow whereby companies patent every single thought of their employees in order to build a "patent portfolio". The first obvious fix is to define business method patents and ban them. They are ridiculous. How that is done, I don't know. Another thought is to develop some sort of Devil's Advocate system, where an examiner is assigned to each patent who sole job is to disprove an applications patentability. A final thought is to somehow tax patents as though they were the valued assets they are represented to be. Taxing patents on transfer is easy enough, and may be done already (although this tax should be upped, if the original inventor isn't using the patent). There are ways to make things better. It just takes some thoughtful debate and a willingness of the politicians and bureaucrats to effect some change. Enough "big corporations" are getting burnt by patents to provide some momentum, I hope.
Patents were only supposed to be used in special cases. The fact that they've become the norm, rather than the exception is a problem[1], and it doesn't seem like anyone is seriously looking into fixing that. [1]Citation Needed.
Huh? No, what the fuck are you... I'm not... We're talking about unchecked aggression here, dude.
It's fine to condemn frivolous patent trolling, but one important part of the reality is that it is often enormously expensive to implement a genuinely innovative idea. Innovation therefore only goes into production when huge sums of money support the organization behind it, and this is profoundly stifling of individual invention and creativity. Individuals with good ideas often cannot realize any rewards for their ideas except through patenting and litigation, since it is notoriously difficult for a individual inventor or innovator to secure a licensing agreement with a producer ahead of the fact. In absence of that option, post-facto licensing in the form of patent lawsuits is the only alternative. It sucks, but that's the way it is. If large companies were more willing to honestly license good ideas rather than attempt to circvumvent them or win wars of attrition against individuals through protracted litigation, there would be far less need of patent trolling.
A-Bomb
If they put them on a pricing schedule that goes up over time, and start them at $300k today, we'll see a dramatic reduction in frivilous patents.
This only screws the little guy over and ensures that bigger corporations will keep patenting. 300k to a Microsoft, IBM or pharmaceutical company is small fries. To a small business owner or full-time dreamer like me, it breaks the bank. It's an artificial barrier to entry that does not address the real problems.
The threshold should not be financial, it should be by virtue of technical merit. Set the bar higher, the terms shorter, etc. Have a maximum duration over which a patent owner must implement said patent, or forfeit it, similar to enforcement of trademarks (see trademark dilution). It's not precisely the same concept, but I think it's a virtuous idea.
You guys realize that this Twofo Live link doesn't take you to Goatse but takes you to some "Warwick filesharing" thing. I'm actually not really sure why it is always posted.
I tried to apply for a patent for a emergency CD ejector, made from a straightened paper clip. They turned me down.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
Calmer than you are.
Ice Cream has no bones.
So long as corporations are using patents as monopoly door-stops then this is probably the only way it will work, unless something changes. A single multinational corporation has more legal brainpower than the patent office, how can the US Patent Office possibly deal with ALL of them at once?
As we have discussed before, there is an equally significant problem with patent applications that are improperly rejected. Since issued patents enable one to obtain funding to bring new technology to market, this is as least as serious a problem for our society as the more well-known "junk patent" problem.
Well, after seeing it once (ok fine, 7x), I'm pretty careful what I click!
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
Well, after seeing it once (ok fine, 7x), I'm pretty careful what I click!
:)
Fool me twice, shame on you.
Fool me thrice, shame on you.
Fool me four times, shame on you.
Fool me five times, shame on you.
Fool me six times, shame on you.
Fool me seven times, shame on you.
But dammit, fool me eight times, and shame on me!
The "IP Industry" is built strong upon the problems with current IP policies and procedures among other problems. Now that the problems have been identified and commercially exploited on an extremely wide scale, entire business operations and business models have been formed to exploit them. So now these extremely profitable activities are paying legislators to keep the laws which enable them in place and to create even more exploitable laws to boost their profits.
Does anyone think that these problems with Copyrights, Trademarks and Patents will be corrected without a fight? Hell no! And it will take an economic meltdown in the U.S. for anyone to be persuaded to make anything change in the future. There had to be Enron before things changed. There had to be the Sub-Prime lending crisis before things were changed. There will have to be some sort of major issue with Patents and other IP before anything is changed, otherwise, politicians are perfectly happy to enable the status quo.
Techdirt is reporting that Jon Dudas, head of the US Patent Office, is lamenting the continuing quality drop in patent submissions.
Here's an idea: reject them. Eventually, people will get the message.
If you keep accepting them, you'll keep getting more.
Actually, they are for "the little guy" and they do create "petty monopolies".
They were designed to create an environment where an inventor could create something and market it for a set number of years with our government providing protection from competition. In exchange for that, the invention would be free to be copied when the patent expired.
Now, patents are used to BLOCK development. Because you can get a broad patent on ANYTHING, just about EVERYTHING is being patented.
So Company-A is working on a new invention. Company-B hears about the work and rushes out to get a patent on a broad "process" that covers (but does not specify) the invention that Company-A is working on.
Now Company-A owes money to Company-B for an invention that Company-B never produced.
Fuck that. Just have the patent office require a WORKING, PHYSICAL model of the invention PRIOR to accepting the patent application. That's how is used to be.
Of course, this would kill all the software "patents" and "practices" patents and so forth. Which I think is a good thing(tm).
As long as the patent office views itself as a revenue generating arm of the United States government, these problems will at best persist, and at worse intensify.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
Who the hell thinks it's really getting the attention it deserves? Not me. When 'what is your position on patent reform?' becomes a more important question than what color toilet paper Obama uses, or who wears a flag pin, or what happened on some reality tv show, THEN it's getting the attention it deserves.
The USPTO is broken. It's a system that worked quite well back when the phonograph was considered an expensive laboratory toy that would never be of use on the commercial market.
If only they would go to some kind of system like a social news aggregation site, whose patrons were engineers, scientists etc. and other professions and titles that exclude anyone selling ID as science. Then as a last step before granting the patent it would get sort of peer reviewed. IMO that would stop BS patents and trolls can be stopped by changing requirements of patent holders to something like radio spectrum licenses. If you don't use it, you lose it. If you sue someone with the patent and cannot show that you have done anything with it yourself: automatic jail time.
Redefine non-obvious to exclude anything that is a natural extension of another technology, and anything that is specifically in the public interest. (thinking of MS's patents on using a computer to connect to emergency services over a phone line)
sigh
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Patent comes from the latin patens, meaning "open" (notice our usage of the adverb, "patently": patently absurd, patently obvious). A patent is supposed to be you "opening" your product up so that other people can understand how it works. In return for increasing the greater good (by not making it difficult to reverse engineer) you got a brief monopoly. Using this metric, if something is obvious upon inspection, it doesn't deserve a patent, regardless of how innovative or original it is.
The key difference is that, today, patents are seen as a carrot to promote innovation. As originally conceived, the system assumed (correctly in my opinion) that innovation will always happen, and that what we really needed was a carrot to promote the "opening" of the technology (in the same sense that opensource is open).
"He guided enactment of major patent, trademark, and copyright policy, including the 1999 American Inventors Protection Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
Most patent attorneys consider him unqualified because he had no previous patent experience prior to becoming head of the USPTO.
One of the problems of the current system is that you don't have to actually have a product either in development or in production to be able to enforce a patent. If patent owners were required to have a working product within 2 years of getting the patent granted, much of this would go away. Additionally, patents by themselves would not be tradeable - they would have to have a product to protect. Also, this would get rid of business methods and things like Amazon's one-click since these don't protect products. After all, that's the whole idea behind a patent: a temporary monopoly to get time to recoup the R&D investment before everyone can copy the product.
"... there is no single "silver bullet" solution..."
There is a fundamental improvement that could be made, however. The U.S. government is as corrupt as 8 years of selling favors to private interests can make it. We could stop the corruption.
Corrupt big companies with little creative ability want to make the patent system as complicated as possible for smaller companies. That's why not enough money is available for the patent office to do its job correctly; the corrupters have been deliberately starving government agencies that prevent corruption. They've been starving the SEC, too.
See Principles for thinking about U.S. government corruption.
More evidence of widespread corruption: It costs more than $1,000,000 of U.S. taxpayer's money to kill each Iraqi, most of whom are very poor. That shows the real purpose of the war is embezzling money from the taxpayer to give it to weapons and war investors.
Notes about the U.S. government-Iraq war: 1) I've liked every Iraqi I've met in the United States. I don't want them killed. (I've never been to Iraq.)
2) There was always violence in Iraq. Supposedly one "justification" for the war was stopping Saddam's violence. Now, however, U.S. taxpayers have caused more violence in a few years than all the violence caused by Saddam Hussein.
3) Notice that prices in the U.S. are rising rapidly. That's because the U.S. government has been printing more money to pay for the theft of taxpayer money that war makes possible.
4) The way to not have enemies is to make relationships. The U.S. government has been doing the opposite of that.
Since before 1953, when the U.S. government overthrew a democratically elected president of Iran, The U.S. government has been killing Muslims and Arabs and destroying their property. For example, the U.S. government has been donating $5 billion each year of taxpayer money to Israelis to be used to buy weapons from U.S. weapons manufacturers. The manufacturers get high profits because Israelis are willing to pay high prices when the money is not theirs.
Never would the ASCII O'Rly Bird have been more appropriate ...
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
"Patents were only supposed to be used in special cases."
Where does this statement come from? Sorry for my ignorance of history.
Patents are a vicious cycle. The more patents your competitors have, the more patents you need.
Why? Because one of the best and cheapest way through the patent thicket is to trade licenses. In other word, "I'll let you use my patents if you let me use yours." Such strategies are explicitly recommended by IP professionals. It allows groups of companies to form cabals, where outsiders are effectively barred from competing because they don't have access to critical licenses.
It's no wonder there are 500,000 patent applications every year.
Any honest person, and yes that is a blanket statement, would agree that the patent system in the U.S. is terrible.
Are there any examples of countries that you (Slashdotters) believe gets it right?
I read a few interesting reform ideas on this thread, but has anyone/any country implemented a system that actually doesn't suck?
Patents are not a BadThing. Patent trolls are. But they will always exist, just as spam will always exist because of the financial benefit. The trick is to get the system to where patent trolls are the exception.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Fast forward. Now a huge asset to a company besides the products they sell is their IP portfolio. Whether or not their patents are making licensing revenue, a large portfolio makes a company more attratcive, especially for financing. If you're looking at a company that has 30 patents, even if only 2 are making money, versus a company that only has 2 patents (both making money), generally there will be more value and confidence in the 30 patent company. Sort of sill I know, but that's human nature.
Until people realize that patents do not automatically equal money, companies will continue to patent everything they can.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
All patent submissions must be accompanied by a physical prototype. The requirement for a physical device has fallen by the wayside, and reintroducing it would probably eliminate 99% of these silly applications.
Increasing patent fees is not the way forward, as this penalizes the real innovators: the little guys working out of their garage.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Okay, if the point of a patent seems to be to enable the inventor of some thing (note, thing, not "process", procedure, or in some cases plots) to be able to make money with his idea while protecting his rights to it...
Let's just limit patents and their ability to be enforced to the lifetime of the original creator. Corporations can be evil, but I don't see them getting away with literal murder. And *MY* great idea should benefit me. If I'm not smart enough to provide for my company or heirs down the road, or otherwise don't WANT my children to live without working at all because of my hard work, then let them dangle.
A patent should protect an idea. For the life of the inventor. It may be corporate controlled, but when that inventor dies, so should the exclusive right.
Me as Walter.
-Peter
"Patents were only supposed to be used in special cases."
That is true of software patents, but not patents in general. Is that what he meant?
The regular patent system in the United States has always been open to the general public, and was intended to be that way. If you don't know that, then you haven't read your history.
But the bar needs to be raised a bit more than "a bit".
I think patents are far too easy to get, for far too little technical contribution in return. Some prerequisites that need to be (re-)introduced:
-Patent must significantly improve the state of the art. Must also be non-obvious (on the latter, the US Supreme court shows some encouraging tendencies - more of that please))
-Patent applications must contain instructions on how to build the item, at a level where an average engineer can do it.
-No patents for things that lack a technical contribution. In particular, no patents on business methods.
Now if Congress fails to fix the above items, I think the USA would be better off completely without a patent system.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Re: Your sig
My dad used to say that all the time. Something about a code phrase he used in the Navy. What is it from?
I patented "Slashdotter making positive comments about patents" since I figured that there was no prior art and that it was specific enough. You know, the sort of thing that some of you guys think a good patent should do. Alas, I haven't found anyone to sue for violating my patent yet ...
Head of USPTO grows some nads and tells his employees to stop approving said applications. After all, he's the head of the USPTO. Isn't it his leadership responsibility to put a stop to this sort of thing?
Be a leader, quit whining and do your job.
Easily could have been a code phrase, its a really really OLLLD line and theres about a bajillion paraphrases i've run into. Personally, i got it from The Tick where it was effectively nonsense =).
Ice Cream has no bones.
Oh, quit bitching about patents. Most of the people whining about this on Slashdot have never solved a significant tough problem that has stumped others.
There are some real problems with the patent system, but they're not the ones most Slashdot readers think of. There's the interaction of standards and patents, where a narrow patent become valuable because it's the standard, but that's really an antitrust problem. There are problems in the pharmaceutical area, where the industry has convinced Congress to give that industry new, weird kinds of intellectual property, like exclusivity rights in clinical testing results. There's the "business method" area, which needs work. There's the excessive time for examination problem. And there are still overly broad "Claim 1" claims that slip through.
But if it weren't for patents, only big companies would innovate.
This guy complaining about the current patent mess is like a skunk asking, "Who farted?"
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I was just daydreaming about how to properly price patents, and the following idea came to mind. What if the return on a patent was limited by a multiplier of how much the patenter is willing to pay for his patent? For example, let's say that patents allow for 1000x multiplier on the application cost. If a patenter is willing to pay $1,000 for the patent, they are not allowed to gain more than $1,000,000 in value from the patent. If they are willing to pay more, they get more protection; pay less, and get less monetary benefit. We might need the right bounds and limits to this, but it seems like simple approach that makes patenters properly pay for their protection based upon their perceived value.
Thoughts, comments? What I like about the idea is that it provides a pricing method for the system (I am a big fan of some sort of market for most things).
Wow, talk about a slow government! We knew this was a problem for, what now, 15 years???? It took him 15 years???
http://www.nolo.com/resource.cfm/catID/00E99E7C-76B3-406F-AE703233C2157E4E/310/101/
Is to divert attention to Twofo[twofo.co.uk] until someone gets it shut down. Just cause as much trouble for twofo as possible. Via trolling, spamming, crapflooding, whatever. Yeah it's not as effective as flooding the hub with "Zeus sucks cock" messages, but since the hub moved to a 100Mbit line, and had flood protection added, I can't do that anymore. Anyway, I hate those fuckers. They deserve to be anally raped to death.
Plus, occasionally, it's a link to goatse not twofo.
I listened to a lecture given by Eben Moglen on the subject of Patents, with emphasis on software. When he came to the subject of undoing the current system, he mentioned what I thought to be an interesting market approach. Professional engineers are currently expected to develop patents on their creations, and are rewarded for their efforts with bonuses, promotions, etc. The suggestion is to ask companies to reward engineers for every patent they overturn in the process of bringing a product to market. With that, there's now equal market incentive to overturn patents as there is to create new ones, and a company is forced to recognize that the patent system that gives them IP is as a whole a barrier to their future.
I'm sure there's holes in that simple proposal, but I'd be interested to see if that idea can be made workable.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Dudas is just a (Republican) political hack, who was given his position as a reward for his work on the Clinton impeachment. He is universally disrespected by most patent lawyers. His proposed "quality" reforms are mostly CYA crap. Most recently, a court overturned many of his proposed rule changes as illegal.
Next in line for his job a a former aid to Rep. Hastert, also someone with zero patent experience (despite a statute saying such experience is required).
The suggestions above to limit patent ownership to employees, rather than companies, would stop virtually all patent applications related to big companies. Would Intel or AMD want to develop the next big thing if the employee/patent holders are each able to license that technology to anyone, including competitors at will? It would be worse than not patenting the work.
The problem is a) which way the incentive is and b) what the standards of patentability are. For a), I can just say that for a patent examiner it is less work to approve than to reject (it's up to him to find prior art, and then he gets an appeal...). And they need to be productive in terms of number of patents processed per month. I won't get into B.. but clearly if using known technique A to solve known problem B is patentable any half-wit can come up with 100 patents in one brainstorming session with his imaginary friend.
Of course it takes more skill to find a patentable idea that will actually make you money, but it has nothing to do with innoviation and all to do with knowing what's up in the market.
So after patenting doing A on the web, then doing A over wireless, then doing it localised with wireless+gps, what's the next software patent fad?
So i asked google patents about it and got several patents by him (in previous companies), and only 1 by this company.
So here comes claim 1 of patent application: "Method and apparatus for image processing" 1. An image processing system adapted to process image frames and comprising:
an image processing engine adapted to perform object-independent processing corresponding to a first layer of the image processing system, said image processing engine further adapted to include a plurality of processors each associated with a different one of pixels of the image frame;
a post processing engine adapted to perform object-dependent processing corresponding to a second processing layer of the image processing system, said post processing engine further adapted to include an N-way symmetric multi-processing system (SMP) having disposed therein N DFT engines and N matrix multiplication engines; wherein N is an integer greater than 1, and
a processing engine adapted to perform object composition, recognition and association corresponding to a third processing layer of the image processing system.
To me this sounds exactly like the kind of over-general claim that a good patent examiner should strike out, even if there is some worth in the patent as a whole.
... As someone who's reasonably well educated and creative I have happened upon at least three or four ideas in my life that are worth a patent. Not silly stuff, I mean solid ideas with practical industrial benefit. Of course I cannot afford the $10,000+ to patent such ideas, I'm in the same boat. and since publishing is no longer a protection against having these ideas misappropriated by persons in the USA I choose to keep them to myself. Really? Since when is publication not a protection of sorts? You mean that someone else can get a patent on your idea? I want names and dates. Those ideas will probably be thought of by someone else soon enough, I am nothing special, My brain is warped, so some of my ideas will likely _not_ be thought of by anybody else anytime soon. (And, by the way, I don't really trust computers with sensitive data, so don't anybody get any ideas about cracking my system (again) to learn my secretsHe took the idea to his grave.
Regards, Non.
There is another theory that states that this has already happened.
Patents were crafted by people who accept capitalism and competition as inviolate principles, and wish to prevent the sort of secret hoarding that defined the guilds of the Mercantile age.
Dude, you obviously don't know, or forgot, what capitalism is about. To educate, or remind you, what capitalism is about I suggest you read Adam Smith's, the Father of Capitalism, "The Wealth of Nations" and "The Theory of Moral Sentiments". He was opposed to monopolies but believed that limited monopolies granted by patents, key word being "limited", could bring benefits. Then Thomas Jefferson at first opposed patents as well but then his friend James Madison convinced him they could benefit society as well.
The point of patents was to force secret societies to reveal their secrets if they wanted the law to continue to validate and enforce their control. If you didn't reveal the secret, you couldn't ask the cops to go shut that guy down, but if you did, you could.
This would be better realized in the modern age by making transparency of process a requirement to enter the market, period.
Add the requirement that a patent application included a working example of the invention, which used to be required but was dropped. Requiring a working product, as you say released to the public, would prevent patent trolls like NTP from suing others like RIM over the Blackberry.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Bill, an engineer at Small Business LLC with 5 employee owners, is having lunch with his buddy Carl, an engineer from Megacorporation and describes a process whereby they are efficiently able to extract hydrogen from a glass of water which then powers a fuel cell. They are in the process of creating a prototype to make sure everything works right before applyig for a patent.
Carl takes some pages of doodles he made during lunch to show his boss, a PHB. PHB goes ahead and files an application for a patent using those pages. So when Small Business LLC files for a patent they find Megacorp already has the patent, and even though they have a prototype they are denied the patent.
FalconShould there be a Law?
To solve your dilemma, we'd only need to allow patents to reach "pending" status via paperwork, then set a reasonable interval of time to deliver a working prototype as condition of approving the patent. If the patent gets approved, some royalties are paid for production during the pending period and regular patent protection is extended afterward. If not, Littleguy, LLC is no worse for their application (relatively minor costs, anyway) than if they had tried and failed to protect their invention as a trade secret, as in your scenario.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
The USPTO approved a patent on teasing a cat with a laser pointer. They have approved patents on long-ago published methods. They have approved patents on "business methods" known and used for 100 years just because someone had the rather obvious "idea" to store the data on a computer instead of just remembering it or using index cards.
Why don't they just save us all some cash and sell patent approved stamps at office supply stores? It's not like the newly approved patents would receive any less thorough evaluation or anything.
They really can't use their patents without money to back them up or by becoming patent trolls with nothing to lose.
With a patent an inventor can go to a manufacturer and try to negotiate to have them manufacture the product without being concerned the company will simply steal it as their own. Or they can go to an angel investor. Maybe they can convince someone to bankroll them. Without the legal protection of a patent it can be much harder to have an invention manufactured.
What's new in patent history is the recent prevalence of patent trolls who impede companies making real products.
I've covered patent trolls twice in my conversation with you, did you miss it or are you ignoring it?
FalconShould there be a Law?