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Why There Are Too Many Patents In America
whitroth writes "The judge who just dismissed the lawsuit between Apple and Motorola writes a column explaining what he considers to be reasonable uses of patents, and unreasonable ones. One of his thoughts would be to require a patent holder to produce the patented item within a certain time, to cut out patent trolls."
who worked for a company that got sued by a patent troll for some really insane email to fax patent from the 1990s that would NEVER have been a commercial product, I concur.
Make it, sell it, or the patent is tossed. Give them 3 years.
Ironically, I once worked for a company, developing cutting edge network technology and internet applications. I dropped the suggestion to a VP that what we were doing was all new terrain and we could patent some of the complex processes and end products we were developing. The VP simply stated, we're a development company, not an intellectual property company, so no patents were going to be considered, even defensively.
That's the way the world was for some people back 12 years ago.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What's with the term "Big Pharma"? Is there some sort of mom-and-pop pharmaceutical company that is the alternative to Glaxo-Smith-Kline? Aren't they all big? Isn't there just "Pharma"?
There are a lot of researchers who don't work for those companies. Trying to do things like develop a cure for cancer, HIV, diabetes... things Big Pharma won't do because the cocktails of medications to treat the aforementioned diseases bring in a lot of money. And that money would go away if there was a way to cure those people, instead of just treat them. I can show you stacks of internal memos and documentation showing that the major pharmaceutical companies purposefully stall and delay research into cures, and there have been several cases where they've sued to prevent universities and private researchers from pursuing testing of certain chemical compounds because they infringed on a patent -- after research showed dramatic and sustained improvements in a patient's health that reduced or eliminated their dependancy on already-existing drugs.
It's called Big Pharma because they're not about making sick people better, they're about making money off of sick people -- as long as they stay sick, Big Pharma stays profitable. None of this nonsense about making lightbulbs that last a hundred years... we all know what happened to the company that solved the problem too well.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The reason there wasn't the tit or tat fighting back then is because the USPTO had spent decades fighting against software and business process patents. While they frequently lost in court, the battle itself was enough to dissuade many companies from filing ridiculous patent applications. This all ended in 1994, when Clinton appointed Bruce Lehman, a former IP lobbyist, to run the patent office. Lehman changed the course of the USPTO to simply become the rubber stamp it is today. It takes time for such changes to be felt though. It took many years for companies to figure out how to game the new system and for the frivolous patents to reach critical mass.
People have always been conniving, greedy, and underhanded, the difference is that patents were not as potent of a weapon as they are now, so people didn't employ them as often.
I can show you stacks of internal memos and documentation showing that the major pharmaceutical companies purposefully stall and delay research into cures
Please do. The biggest known case was the use of antibiotics to treat ulcers. But that was about 50 years ago.