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UK Launches 'Peer To Patent' Pilot Project
An anonymous reader writes "Inspired by a proposal by Beth Noveck, professor of law at New York Law School, the Minister for Intellectual Property, Baroness Wilcox, launched a UK 'Peer To Patent' pilot project to identify prior art in patent applications by harnessing the wider community of experts and engaged citizens." We could use something like that, too. Perhaps Noveck could get together with Carl Malamud to hash out a system that encourages participation.
Sorry, we Brits have prior art on that.
They have a Minister of Intellectual Property? Does he work in the same building as the Ministry of Silly Walks?
Wait, this is for real?
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
Surely this is a tacit admission that the patent office is not capable of doing it's job? How much do I get paid as an external consultant for doing the examiners jobs for them?
I know this is kind of unrelated to TFA, but let me say something I enjoy thinking of: Decentralization is on the way.
More and more, governments and corps realize that a single entity to enforce law is nowhere near as efficient as it used to be.
Having a police or a cyberpolice to track crimes and enforce whatever you thought was right used to be quite efficient. But the ease at which people communicate and exchange informations or objects now makes it nearly impossible (if not totally) to monitor what every single one does. Sure they could cross that fated line and start walking into people's privacy for no appearant reason, but they should prepare for a mob of "mah freedon of spech!!!11!".
Point is, it's now much safer to rely on people themselves (the educated kind, of course (whatever the fuck that means)) to regulate the rest. But it's putting the very existence of a government, and more generally, of a single law enforcing entity, in question. Slowly. Everytime.
Feels good to believe in Anarchy.
..although I think looking for prior art in already-issued patents is shutting the gate after the horse has bolted. While I don't think we should slow down the examination of patents- certainly, the authorities have enough of a backlog to deal with as is- perhaps a disincentive should exist for requesting a patent before doing a proper examination, say, a billion dollar fine if prior art kills your patent. There's certainly this impression that, especially in the software realm (I know software patents don't exist in the EU but bear with me,) the big players tend to request a lot of patents without making sure that each one is a novel invention that hasn't been done before.
This may help or slightly harm the situation.
We have a problem with thickets of patents, like the 900+ patents in the MPEG LA portfolio. Weeding out a few here and there will not help.
In the 90s, there were problems with single patents (public key crypto, LZW, etc.), but corporations nowadays don't gamble their monopolies on single patents. They use thickets.
The USA have been trying peer-to-patent, but there's no visible change in the patent problem there. What we need, for software, is abolition.
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patent_review_by_the_public
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Raising_examination_standards_wouldn't_fix_much
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
US version: http://peertopatent.org/
The problem is that this approach is the world upside down. The correct approach would be that the polluter pays: make patent applicants put a certain amount of money into escrow (more and more general claims = larger amount of money), and if prior art is found then this money goes to the person/institution that dug it up (either the patent office or a third party).
This way you compensate people for spending their time on rooting out bad patents/claims, rather than more or less forcing them to do it for free because otherwise they may be badly affected by the granted patents.
Donate free food here
And it's: ERASE the IP Rights. If we, as HUMANITY, want to evolute, we must ERRADICATE what it's a scourge to the society and what impossibilitate new creations.
So, as said, no IP in no-way (knowledge is not a "property"), just the "right to authority recognition" (who are the author and need recognition). Every right else, to the trashbin. So, no need for lawyers, no need for ministers, no need for any unusefulness.
Now, it's the moment. Now, it's our chance.
Sincerely,
Franz
Beth Noveck, Carl Malamud, and Baroness Wilcox, the minister for intellectual property, on their epic journey to Mars!
First off, this is awesome! Secondly, now that the US is "first to file" we could adopt this very system too -- There's no good reason to keep any part of the patent application secret (as similar projects have in the previous US & AU pilots). I mean... Why not give the public a few leads to go on when searching for prior art? We are doing their jobs for them, the PTO might as well give us the tools/information we need to work with (otherwise: Hamstring much?).
The secrecy needs to be barred outright: If a patent is valid, who cares if someone uses your idea sooner; This just means you can make money on it sooner. If the patent is invalid, well, that's the risk you take when you seek a legal monopoly over an idea... Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Since the purported purpose of patents is to get the ideas to the public (for the betterment of society) then this is a win on both accounts.
I used to believe that the US patent system was fundamentally flawed because they have no test for obviousness (hint: just because no one already patented it doesn't mean it's not obvious), and that they are trying to filter an entire world's prior art via a relatively small number of examiners in a relatively short period of time (the odds of that working out for the benefit of society are inconceivable!).
However, with some of the ridiculous, and outright wrong patents (swinging on swings, duplicate patents, "on-the fly" hash table modifications, etc.) It's apparent that the applications aren't even being read (esp. not by anyone who's even remotely "skilled in the arts").
I seriously hope this pilot project becomes permanent, and that the World adopts a similar public standard test (though 90 days is a bit short, esp. when granting monopolies that could destroy entire markets). Then, we could be sure that the patent filings will actually have a chance of being read by people other than those who have a vested interest in granting more patents...
P.S. If this practice were made permanent it would cause me to release more of my code as FLOSS just to provide more proof of prior art (another win for the claimed mission patents serve) -- currently I've been close sourcing a few things because my code being open makes it too easy for patent trolls...
blah blah blah the system is broken blah blah blah
The patent system isn't actually that bad in the UK. We don't have software patents, which are a ridiculously stupid idea, for instance. Thus this doesn't really solve pretty much the biggest problem in patent law anywhere in the world - US software patents.
If I were to write an iPhone app, and it gets sold on the US iPhone app store, some moron can try to sue me because I used anti-aliases fonts, or whatever, even if in my own country that's a meaningless and invalid patent. That will probably get my app revoked, provide me with huge negative publicity and cost a bomb to defend.
Sadly, most of the big online sites and services are US-based. Steam, iTunes, Amazon Kindle Store, etc. It saddens me that a percentage of the money I spend goes on fighting people who basically claim to have an exclusive right to "1+1=2" (or applying technique X to technical device Y where the two weren't married before but where the connection is blatantly and blindingly obvious to anyone who knows about X at all) under a law that doesn't exist in my own country or even the majority of countries in the world.
"Real" patents aren't much of a problem. They really aren't and haven't been for centuries. It's just this stupid "intellectual property" definition, and stupid patent checking, that somehow manages to incriminate people using an OK button in a piece of software, or whatever other insanities have passed through the US patent system where other countries would exclude the entire category, question the originality and obviousness, and do a half-decent search for prior art before granting anything.
i do not think education means what you think it means, and that you are probably educated beyond your intelligence.
education is, for one centralization, look up information theory... simple example? ivy league schools and the balance of power in most western countries.
please define educated kind, lols and the uneducated kind(s) in your book...
I recently met a patent lawyer socially here in the UK, who seemed surprised when I mentioned to him that software developers thought that software patents were a problem. I tried to tell him about the impracticality of avoiding infringement by finding matches between a large code base, and a large collection of current and pending patents to find potential conflicts - though my argument lacked force as I have never attempted, and do not know anyone who has ever attempted such a thing. I wonder if anyone had really tried to do this, or made a realistic estimate of the cost of doing so?
Most of the whining I read about patents is from people who don't do much original work.
The MPEG issue isn't a patent validity issue, anyway. It's an antitrust issue. Narrow patents are easy to get but only useful in areas where there's a de-facto standard. Classics in this area were the Hayes modem escape sequence patent (wait, send "+++", wait), the GIF compression patent, and the DOS file system long name patent. Each was quite narrow, and there were other ways to do something equivalent. But because the dominant company in the industry was able to establish a de-facto standard in that area, with which others had to be compatible, it was hard to work around the patents.
Note the phrase "dominant company in the industry". That's a phrase from antitrust law. Only a company with a monopoly, or a trust (which MPEG-LA is) can exploit a narrow patent in that way. If the US DOJ had an antitrust operation that was as aggressive as it was from 1940 to 1970, we wouldn't have this problem.
Patents are fundamentally theft. Party A works for X years on idea G. Party B works for X years on idea G. Both achieve success (in patent terms, a working implementation.) The patent system will arbitrarily completely zero out the worth of time and investment of the last party in the door at the patent office. This is theft, pure and simple. There's no way to sugar coat it.
The only fair thing to do is let both these innovations be brought to market without prejudice towards either one. But the system isn't designed to be fair (again, like the rest of the legal system.) It's designed to favor moneyed interests, who can apply $$$ to a process to make it go faster.
Another example: It is entirely possible that Joe Inventor, working in his garage in his spare time, has put in less hours on the same idea as BigCorpInc, but because Joe Inventor has to split his time with a Real Job, his idea actually makes it to the patent office later, given that they both start at the same time. Joe was faster by any sane measuring system, he's clearly the better inventor, but the system rewards the *moneyed* inventor and utterly screws Joe. It's bloody well completely broken.
What we need here is a truly free market. No more patents. No more lawsuits. What we're going to get is screwed.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Now we gotta do the job of the Patent Offices!
I'd prefer they get stuffed. Once and for ever.
The European Patent Office head first, granting software patents hand over fist in spite of the Parliament's decision and the constituent's will.
Criminals.
Article One Partners is doing something similar but to validate the quality of already granted patents. They're doing a study on the MacroSolve software patents now. Get involved and help demolish these patents.
You like this http://tinyurl.com/4yn3fuq