Slashdot Mirror
US Patent Regime Is Absurd
An anonymous reader writes in with an opinion piece in the Economist
about the the effects
of patent trolling on the US economy. The author argues that the
U.S. patent regime is causing the U.S. essentially to harm itself. Things
have gotten so bad that paying for
protection is par for the course.
The idea of patents being bad for the economy is MY intellectual property.
I'm suing the author, the poster (meaning everyone who has ever posted as anon), and Slashdot.
Anything that is a regime is absurd!
Just make things free and democratic okay? Otherwise it's gonna be regime-change time!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Was my idea but they didn't allow comma characters in the usernames when I made my account. I'm suing you for exactly the amount of money you win from your previous case plus damages.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Human genes can be legally patented, according to a Federal Appeals court.
Now, the difference here is that the genes are isolated from the body as a whole, but it seems like we're not too far from being in breach of patent every time we get it on.
I am officially gone from
Water is wet, the sky is blue, and I didn't RTFA.
The patent process is dumb in the first place. The opinion piece is only bringing up old points. Notify me when major groups take action.
This needs more cowbell!!!
If that were true, the US would be in the toilet, financially-speaking. Oh wait...
The often-wonderful This American Life show covered this topic quite recently. They tried to find out what the deal was with Intellectual Ventures and their ilk, and made some surprising discoveries. (I don't want to give away any spoilers.)
You can listen to a podcast of the show here:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You're missing the point. It's not that the patent system in the US is absurd...almost everyone here will acknowledge that. The story here is that a major publication like the Economist is taking that stance. When it's a bunch of nerds in an online forum whining about it, nothing will ever change. When it hits the mainstream, the politicians have to take notice.
I wonder if they feel the "copyright regime" is absurd too.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The solutions are simple, but not easy, for political reasons. End software and genetic patents, reduce the length of remaining valid patents. It's clear that the vast majority of businesses that have a stake in producing imaginary property wish for nothing to ever enter the public domain ever again--these same corporations are also the most effective lobbyists in the debate and have controlled the message for years, or decades depending on which specific industry you look at.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
The exact extent of how much this can impact an Empire's economy can easily be seen by looking back a little bit into history. A couple of hundred years ago a major world-spanning power had quite restrictive and onerous patent and copyright laws (to the point where certain types of boats could only be constructed in particular home ports), and one of their upstart colonies took advantage of that with much more open and innovation-friendly rules.
The countries in question of course are England and the USA.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
There just isn't any interest among politicians in changing the patent system (or copyright either) until they get nice fat juicy campaign contributions from the people who are screwed by the current "intellectual property" regime.
From the article:
"And we should be denying patents on the vast majority of the most important inventions, since most seem to involve near-simultaneous invention."
How the hell do we do that? How can a patent office ever possibly determine (1) what are the most important inventions and (2) if a simultaneous invention is taking place elsewhere?
A lawyer friend once told me, "Sure, the legal system in the USA sucks, but it's the best we have, and it's probably the best in the world." That applies to the patent system as well.
The Wright brothers may have been the first to build airplanes that could be adequately controlled and sure they patented it. However, the Americans were the only nation who didn't have operational airplanes during WWI because the patent protection basically prevented improvements of the flaws in the Wright brother's patent protected design. They ended up buying French airplanes instead.
The US government plainly does not care whether their policies make sense, or help the people they ostensibly intend to. All that matters is that the right people get kickbacks and that politicians get reelected.
See the War on Drug Users. This has always been an absurd effort. There has never been an honest argument in favor of criminalizing drugs, and every effort to define a rational policy(from LaGuardia in 1939 to the present day) has recommended decriminalization. Still, the US has waged war on its own citizens for decades, refusing to even allow serious discussion on alternative policies.
You can expect to see the same here. There will be a war on patent infringers and a war on copyright infringers. They will be devastating to individual liberties, and they will be a drag on our economy. Still, the US will not consider alternatives, and will even put the full force of the US propaganda machine against those who do.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The linked planet Money story is well worth a listen, though it's a bit long. The This American Life that the Planet Money story is based on is even longer, but again fairly entertaining. I actually drove around for an extra 15 minutes Saturday afternoon to continue listening to the whole thing.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Lawyers, (aka attorneys) as a dear friend of mine puts it, exist to "Protect the Man and Preserve the Status Quo". That is, they produce nothing. Given that how can they be anything but a drag on productivity? The patent system was created so people would share out their ideas for the price of a little protection -- enough to give them first mover advantage in a world of physical production. The root of the problem is the absence of sane decision making concerning computer implementations and "obvious to one of reasonable skill in the art". When the patent system made sane decisions and the courts backed those up, then there was a throttle on the lawyers so their drag on the system was limited. Insanity in the courts has broken the USPTO which has fed back to create an army of lawyers who only have the purpose of using patents that should not have been issued to extract money from companies that could better use it to advance their respective arts.
So how exactly is the US going to fix these problems, given its current political, economical structure and corporate culture? Is there any hope of fixing all the big problems from within the system?
the patent system is good for lawyers, who are disproportionately represented in the pools of elected officials, lobbyists, and political contributors. The current system is extremely good for them, and mildly good for politicians in generals as it helps finance the whole lobbying/contributions rigmarole.
since both parties benefit, and have no balls anyway... things will stay that way.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
It is true that software patents, such as the one mentioned in the article, should never have been allowed in the first place. They have done almost nothing but damage.
But aside from the bad decision of allowing software patents, the big problem has been the apparent incompetence of the Patent Office itself: issuing patents for things it never should have (because of things like prior art for example).
If we want to have rational debate about the matter, we have to distinguish between bad laws (software patents), and bad administration of good laws (just about all the rest).
Other than the software patent ruling, the system per se isn't flawed. It has just been badly administered, and in some cases abused. Those are not the same things.
If you're playing poker, and somebody cheats (or fumbles while dealing the cards), that is not a flaw in the rules of poker. Similarly, the fact that our "patent system" is currently being abused in some cases and badly implemented in others is not a flaw in "the system", per se. It's just failure of the responsible parties to do it properly. There is a rather big difference.
Let's look at two areas of technology: video quality and JavaScript performance.
With video quality, the relevant technologies for modern techniques are patented. This means that competing products are of a poorer quality or are artificially restricted. The companies that hold the patents are less likely to innovate and build on their existing work (except to create more patents), so the state of the art gets held back and is slow to advance.
Now with JavaScript performance, take a look at the competition between Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer. All these products are competing against each other without resorting to patents. The net result is that you end up with faster JavaScript on all products, allowing for more advanced and interactive websites to be used. It also makes the competitors (Firefox and Internet Explorer) to improve and advance as the other products compete for user share. The net result is that the users of all web browsers benefit and the technology advances rapidly.
So which one is better for innovation?
Have you only just noticed?
...eat a bowl of alphabet soup and--actually wait, I couldn't produce a more obvious article than this, nevermind.
And in other news, the rent is too damn high! Story at 11.
The more you know, the more you have to say and the more you should listen.
What are patents supposed to do?
Protect investment in research and development until a profit can be recouped in production.
Simple fix: ... which will maybe cover a quarter of your lawyer's fees.
Require all patent applications to show documented proof of investment.
The more money you spend to develop the idea, the more investment protection you get.
Spend $10 million, you get the monopoly on production until you net $50 million.
If another company wants to make your product tomorrow, they can cut you a check for $50 million.
Spend only $150 and file paperwork to troll, someone could cut you a check for $750 to free your patent
Investors get protection, ideas get created for the public good, courts are not overloaded, patent trolls starve under their bridges ... sounds like everybody wins, except the patent trolls ... but fuck 'em.
As an American software engineer, it's quite clear that I cannot, in my lifetime, become successful with any software I write, without a fairly high chance that some patent troll will take me to the cleaners and bankrupt me for something obvious. You may think the chance is low, but it's growing all the time at an alarming rate. The business plan of patent trolls is solid, they can squeeze the little guy with impunity, and it's perfectly legal to erect these tollbooths around every obvious software concept you can ever dream up.
The only solution I can see is to move out of the country and immigrate somewhere else. That is, all of us, all software engineers who don't work for really large corporations and are thinking of writing something really useful that might become slightly successful enough to be noticed by anyone... With all the trillions of dollars invested in the current patent system, no reform is coming in my lifetime, the big companies will not allow it. Not until we all move out and the USA is way way behind the rest of the world technologically!
A big company or even a ghost company can blow up your proyect because it looks like the application of a concept they patented but never developed. On the other hand, China is allowed to mass produce copies of western products and never face the consequences.
Clearly this is another Slashdot anti-capitalist, anti-lawyer, left-wing socialist diatribe. When will you people realize that money makes the world go round. If you aren't smart enough to profit from other peoples ideas and inventions, then you just call those people who are smart enough to take advantage of the financial instruments of capitalism "Trolls".
I suppose you'd rather have us all living in some idealized world where everybody has access to affordable health care, and banking executives don't receive cash bonuses for convincing congress to have the tax payer in the sub-$200000 income range fund the bail outs (which keep the economy moving by keeping Wall Street executives employed). I don't think Slashdot gets it.
I'm telling you, it's not the programmers that run this country, it's the lawyers, so get used to it.
Remember, you can tell how civilized a country is by the number of patent attorneys it has.
- ULW
between the assumption the court makes that the patent is correct
and the ease with which one can obtain a questionable patent.
Maybe thats the new paradigm, grant a Troll say 20% of future revenue of any patent in exchange for them defending it. Not much different from insurance. Such an arrangement might make someone else think harder before infringing.
And sorry for using the word 'paradigm' in an open forum.
If you subscribe to the notion of "intellectual property", then certainly owning said property is sufficient reason for demanding pay when others want to use it. You can't have it both ways. I'll agree that patent trolls highlight the absurdity of monopolizing ways of doing things, but if your conclusion is to just work towards eliminating patent trolls, then you haven't fully grasped why patent trolling is absurd in the first place.
There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator. The concept is self-contradictory.
Can we "fix" the system from within? Sure, as long as we don't resort to stupid solutions like setting up dictators.
I have four issued software patents myself, all in areas where the existing technology didn't work but mine did.
So your software did ONLY new things, and did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that someone else did before?
You invented a completely new data storage system, display system, input system, processing system, operating system, help system, feedback system, purchasing system, and so on, and you still only managed to get 4 patents?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Is /. so stagnated now that they've resorted to just reporting basic facts!?
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Inventions that are "completely new" are virtually non-existent. Virtually all progress is incremental improvements over what already exists.
Microsoft Office was hardly an "original". Excel took most of its ideas from Lotus 1-2-3 which took its ideas from Visicalc which took its ideas from paper spreadsheets. Other Office products have similar histories. The NCSA web server started as a clone of the CERN http web server.
The patent system operates from a fundamentally improper idea of how invention takes place: that inventions are unique "eureka" type moments. That's not how they actually come into existence.
I tend to come up with more or less original ideas anytime I open a text editor and start coding. If I patented everything I wrote, I'd have lost count long ago. And I don't consider myself to be particularly great (I've met people from MIT. Holy MOLY are they good). Now those are the kinds of people you mostly hear 'whining' about patents.
Spotify, which is yet another streaming music service.
They're being sued the original streaming service, right? The one that had the original idea, original implementation, based on never-before seen algorithms, data structures and math? Right?
Hulu,
See above.
Rovio,
See above.
Come up with something new, and you have far fewer patent problems.
Wrong. Come up with something new, and hope that you have deeper pockets than anyone threatened by your patent.
I have four issued software patents myself, all in areas where the existing technology didn't work but mine did.
Unless you used new math, you copied many, many ideas while creating your software. The only reason no one has sued you over those patents is because they're either not used, not in areas anyone cares about, or no one cares that you have the patents.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
We already know this.
and the other side AKA china is just as bad where any thing can get ripped off with little to no recourse.
Water is that which makes other things wet. Saying "water is wet" is like saying "the paint is painted." It is semantically absurd.
Also, the sky isn't blue. It just looks that way because of how light gets refracted as it passes through stuff in the sky.
But...if you tell me you didn't RTFA, I will believe you.
The author of the linked blog post is Will Wilkinson. That wasn't immediately obvious to me when I clicked through, so I thought I'd share it. Wikipedia describes his approach as libertarian and "a mixture of John Rawls's principles and Friedrich von Hayek's methods".
Interesting guy and a good writer.
One could take your case and argue that if JavaScript "innovation" had been hampered by patents, we might benefit from true innovation rather than a benchmark pissing war that has created a safety net for crappy, derivative web design.
Citation needed that it actually causes significant harm?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The story here is that a major publication like the Economist is taking that stance. When it's a bunch of nerds in an online forum whining about it, nothing will ever change. When it hits the mainstream, the politicians have to take notice.
Interestingly enough, the DOJ is sticking its nose into the patent trolling arena. Some press reports indicate that the DOJ is asking explicitly if the patent portfolios are going to be used to go after Android. Others suggest the DOJ already realizes the arms race in acquiring huge patent arsenals to challenge virtually ANY emerging technology is counter productive to the very reason patents were created in the first place, and may be contemplating anti-trust action.
If true, or even if it appears to be true, this sets a new tone in Washington. The current mess is starting to have significant effect on the economy, and the idea that Apple might be blocked from importing their own iPhones due to (alleged) patent violations is probably the trigger for this. Apple has a lot of friends in the current administration.
The best that could be hoped for in the current mess is that the DOJ will put its weight behind forced licensing (in return for a patent, the patent holder must license at reasonable rates; no more arbitrary blocking). The only way that more-or-less obsolete patent libraries from bankrupt companies like Nortel are worth 4 billion dollars is due to the potential for blocking competitors from producing anything. If the patents had any commercial value, Nortel would't be bankrupt.
However, I doubt forced licensing will happen. There appears little legal foundation to impose that.
Further, no administration is likely to change the patent laws any time soon. It would be all out war to attempt that.
The rantings of the Economist aside, in the short term the most likely outcome is anti-trust action to prevent that construction of yet more huge patent libraries.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
My darlings... the people that have ever greater control over the very atoms of modern life, from our government to our choice of breakfast cereal, have been busy reshaping the world in their own interest. Whatever purpose the patent system might have served when it was created, it now exists to bludgeon the common man into shutting up and doing what corporations tell him to do. IP has been collected and packaged like so many bad home loans, and now the laws are bent to give corporations dominion over what has been created, what will be created, and what can be created.
Endless armies of lawyer exist for no other purpose than to impose the corporate will on all comers and unless you have the bottomless resources of a corporation, you have virtually no hope of winning against them in a legal battle. Even if you do win, history tells us it will come at the cost of decades of abuse, with the likely loss of everything you ever held dear. No wonder most folks quit, or simply don't even try. Until we treat Capitalism as a religious belief and isolate it from the political and legal system the same way we do (or should do) with all other religions, there is no possibility that we will get the world back. When profit is the only motive, there is no such thing as enough. The patent system is just another pawn on the chessboard called life. What is your next mover?
..but losing credibility fast.
How do you expect US "patents" to be respected around the world when you have this criminal patent regime in place?
I see in the future, US patents simply being laughed off in other countries. You won't be able to enforce them there.
You guys need to fix this, like; yesterday.
In other news, sky is blue, water wet. Film at 11.
javascript still sucks.
The Wright brothers may have been the first to build airplanes that could be adequately controlled and sure they patented it. However, the Americans were the only nation who didn't have operational airplanes during WWI because the patent protection basically prevented improvements of the flaws in the Wright brother's patent protected design. They ended up buying French airplanes instead.
This is wrong in almost every way. The Wright brothers had patents in France. And the Americans had operational airplanes during WWI both from the Wright brothers and from the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company. Now, sure, the Americans bought airplanes in France for WWI... because, y'know, the war was in France, and they didn't exactly have transatlantic aircraft carriers or flights then.
If there is not enough information for one of ordinary skill in the art to make or use the invention, then the Examiner should be making an enablement rejection. If the examiner makes a successful rejection, the patent applicant would need to file a continuation in part to disclose the relevant missing information.
Note, in the software world, this doesn't mean you have to include code. There merely has to be enough disclosure that one familiar with the subject matter would know how to write the code corresponding to the patentable subject matter.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Ferdinand Marcos is a good example - major achiever before getting control but ultimately only benevolent to people he liked. Mugabe can be used as a current example for exactly the same reasons, and ultimately all that can be said is he's better than Ghadaffi. I think those two are about as benevolent as dictators get and even then they've spilled a lot of blood of people that other forms of governments would find merely annoying and not a deadly threat.
and you will never hear about the decade-old success story of Portugal's drug decriminalization in corporate media outlets.
This might come up on TV and if it does lawmakers will pretend to do something about it, just like they've always been doing and suddenly everybody will be fine with no change.
Some things will never change.
Maybe one effective way of clearing the courts of the more nefarious "patent troll" activity would be for the courts to develop specific standards (e.g., multi-pronged tests and the like) that will serve effectively to identify the true "bad actors" and define unacceptable behavior. After all, since Congress looks unlikely to do anything about the worst trolls, then we will probably have to rely on the courts to weed out a substantial measure of them.