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US Patent Office Seeks Aid To Spot Bogus Patent Claims
First time accepted submitter startling writes "Members of the public are being asked by the US Patent Office to help weed out bogus patent applications. It wants the public to contribute to a website that will spot applications for patents on technologies that have already been invented. The website, called Ask Patents, will be run by US firm Stack Exchange that has a track record of operating Q&A websites."
Here's first such patent registered by Google: Patent #8,271,894
As noted on Slashdot, it's a patent for using anonymity online much like you can already. The problem here is that since Google has been awarded this patent, then other companies like Facebook or any other website CANNOT offer anonymity! This is a perfect example of a very dangerous patent and who else patented it than Google, the champion for losing anonymity on the internet.
Alert! Alert! Alert! Warning! Danger! Launch all lobbyists!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Rectangular with rounded corners is pretty bogus. How about all design patents and all software patents.
-- QED
Some patent troll claims to have invented a process to crowd source finding invalid patents. They want patent office to agree to license this technology from them for a hefty fee. Though prior art exists for using a large number of people searching documents to find examples of prior art and invalid claims, the troll claims innovative new original work in using the "internet" to do the search. As everyone knows, even if people have been doing something for ages, if you stick in the phrase, "using internet" it suddenly becomes new, original and innovative.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
MPEG LA claims to manage 346 patents (in the USA alone) which are necessary for anyone who wants to write a video player that can play this very widely used format.
Eliminating 5%, or even 95% of these patents will change nothing. Software developers will still have to ask MPEG LA for permission, and MPEG LA will continue to prohibit free software implementations.
Why bother with these complicated, time-consuming ideas? The way to fix the problem (and unblock the patent office), is to make software simply non-eligible.
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/MPEG_LA
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Raising_examination_standards_wouldn't_fix_much
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Do you mean, like, READING them? You know, BEFORE they break out that rubber stamp?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I found a virus on my computer which was taking random terms and filing USPTO claims, debiting $ filing fees from my bank account. Oddly, USPTO granted more patent claims than people clicked on the links selling viagra ten years ago.
Gently reply
Software is not of patent-able subject matter.
Of the things that universally agreed cannot be patented:
Abstract ideas,
Physical Phenomenon.
Natural Law.
Because they cannot be enforced
and out of these comes mathematical algorithms as a forth.
All these together describe software and there is more
see http://abstractionphysics.net/
Dear United States Patents and Trademarks Office,
It has come to my attention that your organisation has resorted to begging for free work from the Public in finding and reporting on prior art to already-issued patents. I have an issue with this action, since as an inventor myself I have invested thousands of Dollars in patenting actual technology that has no discovered prior art and in fact has potential to change the lives of everyone who uses it. The issue boils down to the amount of money I have paid to your organisation in fees with my patent applications, on the understanding that you yourselves employ staff to perform patent searches and research into prior art on patent applications; indeed, a small proportion of my applications have been rejected due to prior art that I either did not consider relevant or I missed and you informed me that it did in fact exist. That is a system which works.
And now you're asking the public to carry out this work for nothing? Is this overflow for the sheer number of patents that are disputed in courts up and down the country? Or are you laying off staff and diverting that workload that you should be paying staff to do in order for your executive board to pocket the fees in massive bonuses and now granting every application that hits your inbox? Frankly I think you should be watching patent cases and automatically invalidating those which are found to be without merit in such disputes.
Sincerely,
Disgruntled inventors everywhere.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
If it contains the words, "using a computer," or some such derivative, it is almost certainly a bogus patent application.
Dear Patent Office, I am happy to help you figure out which patents are valid.. I assure you that all of the patents of my competitors are not, and will mark them accordingly. Love, Business taking advantage of the stupidity of the patent office.
Am I lying when I tell you that im telling the truth? Or am I telling the truth when I say that Im lying?
a) any patent extending or similar to existing patents, application price is x2 for research .....
b) any patent where similar work is easily found by the patent office but was not referred, costs x5 to continue application once the similar work is found
c) any patent where terms are obfuscated by not using the most common industry standard terminology and reference terms x2 for research
d) any patent where once obfuscated terms are cleared up similar work is easily found, costs x10 to continue application
e) idea registery separate from patent. not subject to exploding fees as above. the idea is open and can be used by anyone. Is a sort of defensive patent. Means anyone can use the idea and it cannot be patented and held proprietary by anyone.
f) different costs for patents in different areas due to research needed
lots of ways to provide support
"Our hope is that Ask Patents will reduce the number of patents mistakenly granted for obvious, unoriginal non-inventions, especially around software," said Stack Exchange boss Joel Spolsky in a blogpost about the site ... Mr Spolsky said that although US patent clerks worked hard they typically had less than 22.5 hours so spend on each application.
I can understand the USPTO having difficulty finding all prior art with limited resources, but why do they need help determining that something is obvious? It seems they could save a lot of time hunting for prior art if they just took the "non-obvious" part of the patent requirement seriously and dismissed all of the "do X obvious thing with a computer" patents right off the bat.
The problem here is that since Google has been awarded this patent, then other companies like Facebook or any other website CANNOT offer anonymity!
That's absolutely false. One of the primary purposes of the patent systems is to identify areas of "innovation" very precisely so that people can license these ideas. There is the 'carrot' way of doing this whereby you would approach Google and ask them how much they want for you to license a patent and, since there's nothing forcing Google to license those ideas, the alternative is "stick licensing." So if Facebook wanted to use anonymity in this specific way, the courts would need to determine how much damage this did to Google. I really can't see anyone in their right mind claiming much in damages in that situation. At that point both companies should agree on some form of licensing based on what damages the court found.
... however I also don't like what software patents are doing today and I feel like we need to find a better approach to this complicated problem.
Anonymity itself cannot be patented since the concept is very very old. So Facebook would be free to invent an alternative way to offer its users anonymity than the very specific way presented by Google. Your jump from Google's patent to generic anonymity shows that you do not understand then intense and rigorous legalese that patents must follow. That demonstration is another issue entirely (and the biggest blocker to Stack Exchange's proposal).
If you read the above as a defense of patents, you're wrong. I'm trying to help you understand that patents are bad but hyperbole doesn't help anyone when they're trying to make the system better. I don't want a world where we have no intellectual property laws and ideas are stolen wholesale
My work here is dung.
1. If it was good enough for Einstein, it's good enough for you. Spend a little time reading patents. Maybe you'll change the world
2. Congratulations to Spolsky and Atwood, because damn
Because patent maximalists made the patent GRANTED by default, not the patent REFUSED by default.
So they put the patent examiner in the position of proving why the patent SHOULDN'T be granted, with limited access to the inventions, the best ones of which are trade secrets, or exist in some lab somewhere waiting to be turned in commercial products.
The "with a computer" is an example of this, the interpretation of the patent office is that "on a phone" makes it a new invention. Yet for some patents Apple is claiming the iPhone is covered by a patent that says "on a computer". If an iPhone is a computer for one patent claim, why is it something unique and special for another??? It makes no sense, yet that's the way it is.
Patents should be for actual physical devices.
I hear this a lot, and I'm not against it at all, but I'd like to understand more about how you'd like that to work.
Suppose, for example, we take something like the FM demodulator in a radio. When Edwin Armstrong invented it, back in the stone age of the 1930s, I think we can all agree that (a) it was an "actual physical device," and (b) that it met all the other criteria (novelty, non-obviousness, etc.) needed for a patent. It was implemented with the technology available at the time -- stone knives, bear skins, and vacuum tubes (valves).
Skipping over details like the invention of ratio detectors, etc., the next change in implementation of FM detectors came when the tubes were replaced with discrete transistors. This required some change in bias methods, impedance levels, etc., but no major redesign. It did save cost, size, and power, though.
The next change was integration. At first, the transformer was still needed for the demodulator, and so it was pinned out of the ICs, which were still analog. This saved cost, size, and power still further.
Later, schemes were found to integrate the function of the transformer, fully integrating the (still analog) demodulator. This saved cost and size still further.
Still later, improvements in integration processes enabled the function of the FM demodulator to be performed digitally, using an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a bunch of hard-wired logic gates, emulating the mathematical function performed by the analog demodulator. This saved cost, size, and power still further.
After that, demodulator designs were moved into hardware register-transfer languages, like Verilog, providing portability from chip to chip, and enabling one to program the hardware in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to become, when preceded by the ADC, an FM demodulator. This saved cost.
Demodulator designs were next ported into programmable hardware dedicated to signal-processing applications (digital signal processors); this required the ADC, plus the Verilog algorithm to be converted to the DSP's assembly language. This saved cost and size.
Finally, technology improved to the point that the FM demodulator could be made by an ADC followed by a microcomputer, programmed with software in a high-level language as part of a much larger system. This saved cost.
At what point in this development do we draw the line and say, "Below this, it's not patentable?"