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The Mark Cuban Chair To Eliminate Stupid Patents
l2718 writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced today a large donation by Mark Cuban and Markus 'Notch' Persson to the EFF Patent Project. Notably, part of Cuban's donation is for the creation of the 'Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents' (the first holder is current staff attorney Julie Samuels). Time will tell if the new title will help her advocacy work. Cuban said, 'The current state of patents and patent litigation in this country is shameful," said Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks. "Silly patent lawsuits force prices to go up while competition and innovation suffer. That's bad for consumers and bad for business. It's time to fix our broken system, and EFF can help.' Notch added, 'New games and other technological tools come from improving on old things and making them better – an iterative process that the current patent environment could shut down entirely. '"
...I totally read "Parents" at first, and was confused as to why the EFF cared.
that half million would have gone farther last year as political donations
I read the headline to say "The Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid People" and began to worry about my future.
$500,000? Doesn't IBM spend more on patent applications in a single month than that?
Mark Cuban is a self made billionaire.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Never was a fan of Mr. Cuban; now I am a huge fan. Thanks.
One of the qualifications of a patent is that it is non-obvious to a professional in that industry. That is pretty well ignored when most patents that I see litigated are 100% obvious to people well outside that area. Keyboards on a cell phone for texting. Wow that must have take a room full of geniuses working since Edison to work out that combo. Sweeping gestures on a touch surface; I bet only one person in history would have ever come up with that one. Backup sensors, never would have thought about people wondering if they would crash into something while backing up; that one is nearly as ingenious as putting rear view mirrors into cars.
Then you get the best ones where everybody on both sides agree the patent is total shit, but do you want to risk a jury not agreeing, so let's settle. RIM settled for a zillion dollars on a patent that then got thrown out.
So if I were to modify the patent system I would suggest, No software patents, you build software or you don't, only two people can hold a patent, the inventor or a company that actually builds significant quantities of the patented product. No patent holding companies. Change the patent lawsuit process. First is you name a company in a claim. Then the company has 1 year to to get your patent tossed. The patent people must complete a full review within that year and if they don't the patent is tossed. An appeal of the patent itself can be brought before a jury but in this case a jury of peers must be at least half people in that industry. Patent awards must be severely tempered by actual gains. And lastly patents need to have way shorter lives. This life must be partially based upon active product sales. So a patent would give you say 5 years to get to market. But once sales start you have another 5 years of protection. Then its out. So if apple comes up with a cool new antenna and immediately puts it into their phones they can't deny the consumer that innovation in other products until 2032 just 2017.
But if I could have any two rule changes it would be that only inventors and genuine producers can hold patents and no software patents.
There was a time, long ago, when usury was punishable by death.
In layman's terms usury = making profit by charging interest on a loan of property, including land, tools, money, etc. while the owner sits on their Fat Ass.
Sometime in the 13th or 14th century, European 'business men' convinced a Pope to remove that punishment from the religious 'judicial system' so they could 'legitimately' start the banking system we have today.
And here we are, 21st century, with the 1% owning or restricting practically every aspect of the 99%'s lives through interest and patents.
She blinded me with science, she tricked me with technology. ~ Thomas Dolby
How does the chair eliminate stupid patents?
Also, a chair that eliminates stupid patents might actually be worthy of a patent.
It really doesn't matter what system you put in place people are always going to game it and therefore abuse it.
You can get the best and the brightest to create it but they'll always be unable to think of the myriad of ways others will come up with to game it.
In short we're all doomed and there's nothing to be done about it.
However I do understand we have to do something with our oversized brains so go ahead - knock yourselves out bantering about how to fix these unfixable problems.
Enjoy!
OK, How many of you misread the title as Stupid Parents?
It wasn't until I read the line "...patent litigation..." that I clicked.
Strangely, it seemed a fantastic idea when read both ways.
Who better the Notch, the man who tried to get complete and total control of the word Scrolls in nearly every field of work, to know how the patent / trademark system can be abused.
I read this as "The Mark Cuban Chair To Eliminate Stupid Parents" and was all for it, but now . . .
Why does EFF never oppose software patents as a concept?
They always want to eliminate the 10 worst software patents, but they have enough educated/informed people to know that the world isn't plagued by 10 lousy software patents. It's thickets like the 346 US patents exploited by MPEG LA.
Or the thousands of patents held by Intellectual Ventures, Apple, and Microsoft.
C'mon EFF. You have the cash and the lawyers. Give us a hand fixing the problem (legislation, court briefs) and stop trying to wipe out malaria by swatting mosquitoes! You know that doesn't work.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
If half the country was on welfare and required charity in order to support itself, we would all agreed this is bad. Why when software development has become sustainable in large part only due to the donations of individuals to open source projects, do we not scorn ?
I use Linux as my desktop machine and in my servers. It doesn't mean I don't understand that while it is the only good os available, it's also decades behind the times. I know this is also true regarding my CPU. That mid evil monstrosity X86. Not even an Intel spokesman can deny an ARM is beating at it's heart.
Hacks. That what we have come to admire in this industry. The ability to circumvent antiquated technology instead of inventing new tech. And that what we have become. The peddlers of Java \ C++ \ C# as innovative. Abstractions hiding the horror are computers have become. Entire OSs dedicated to make the mess that the patents have allowed to be somehow usable and their associated languages of choice.
And now we're surprised the third world has caught up. Maybe if we would have put some effort into making sure not to stand still this wouldn't have happened. Maybe if patents wouldn't have been there to allow this... Mea Culpa as part of the system.
I wonder if someone thought of this as a good patent, I can see the title now"
Process to keep Mark Cuban busy by putting him on a panel to root out silly patents.
Invalidate and reject ALL software patents.
ALL of them. Computers are math, you cant patent math, therefore you cant freaking patent anything that is software.
Until they do that, they are just spinning their wheels.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I think that patents do not increase technological advance but only change how they are released. If patents did not exist there would always be pressure to make a better product. This would happen in smaller but quicker steps. Patents don't increase the rate of innovation. What people do is hold back releasing products until the advances are enough to get a patent. This results in larger but less frequent advances. In the modern world there is no reason for any patents. If your technological advance is sufficiently large you will gain a natural monopoly as the competition tries to catch up.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I hear law firms are doing great out of the current situation
"Why does EFF never oppose software patents as a concept?"
Probably because patents aren't necessarily bad, as a concept. If regulated properly, and granted properly, they can in fact, promote business and industry. Unfortunately, such a playing field doesn't exist in the US, and likely won't for the foreseeable future, if ever.
It's nice to think that every competitive market can in fact cooperate and survive without patents, and let true competition dominate, but your dreaming if you think we can get to there from here. We can't, not because of market restriction, but because grassroots underdogs will eventually make the larger markets obsolete. If you don't think it's possible, you have not been paying attention to the open hardware technology movement.
> It's thickets like the 346 US patents exploited by MPEG LA
I can't comment on the MPEG LA portfolio, but I believe that sufficiently complex algorithms deserve to be protected. Having said that, almost all software patents should be thrown out. Most of Apple's patents are a joke and make anyone who is NOT a fanboy think that Apple are a pack of asshats. I've specifically listed Apple because of the fanboy zealousy and Apple's "holier than thou" marketing tripe ... not because I believe that Apple is the only offender.
That was a MUCH better time. And he could order you killed for no reason. Good times! What was the King back then - the 0.000001%??
most? or most of the ones you hear about incessantly on slashdot?
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
maybe it's because they want to actually have some measurable return on their money.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Jpeg and mpeg compression are non obvious, involved base research and experimentation and have and/or had fully legitmate patents, and their invention and subsequent take up drove the internet forward, and drove the subsequent development of patent skirting formats.
The problem I think is finding a method of assessing patents for their obviousness that is both fair and not subject to regulatory capture.
EFF sold out to corporate interests when Mitch Kapor lost interest (he was hoping for a Cabinet spot in the Clinton administration), and when Jerry Berman took over and moved them to Washington DC, where he promptly sold all their credibility for whatever money and resume fodder he could scrounge and got them to sign off on the "TeleCommunications (utter lack of ) Privacy Act".
They've never completely recovered from that.
Mark Cuban is wealthy because he conned a sell out of a business that was all smoke and mirrors. He now has billions to throw around into already well-established industries and people are calling him prescient? Please.
The heart of the US Patent problems are both conceptual and economic. But the problems are easy to understand.
First, we have adopted the idea that more patents are better than fewer patents. This idea has been proven false. We believed that US Patents were a license to create. But, this is not true. US Patents are nothing more than a license to hire lawyers and sue a competitor. They don't guarantee creation or progress. They only guarantee legal action. A little legal action is necessary, but a lot destroys economies.
Since we believed that more Patents were better, in the last couple decades we have 'reformed' the US patent process to maximize the creation of patents.
We need to a admit we are wrong. Once we have managed to do that, reform is fairly easy. Reform should address:
Currently most of the revenue of the US Patent Office comes from GRANTING patents. See the USPTO FY 2013 President's Budget page 37: www.uspto.gov/about/stratplan/budget/fy13pbr.pdf "..More than half of all patent fee collections are from issue and maintenance fees, which essentially subsidize examination activities."
Also, if you examine the fee structure in Public Law 112 - 29 - Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, you see that patent application fees are 1/3 or less that the Issue fee. See: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-112publ29/content-detail.html
This means that, regardless of merit, about 1/3 of all patent applications must be granted in order to fund the US Patent Office. This economy creates unavoidable pressure to grant many patents that should not otherwise be considered. It also creates economic pressure that greatly decreases the time that can be devoted to examination.
Reform could come in many forms, but the simplest and most reliable would be to eliminate and unify the Patent office fees into a single filing fee. This fee would provide no guarantee of receiving a patent, only a guarantee that your patent would be considered. This would free the Patent Office to be able to deny poor patents.
Currently, we expand the number of patent examiners based on demand. See the USPTO FY 2013 President's Budget, page 60, Gap Assessment: "Meeting this commitment assumes efficiency improvements brought about by reengineering many USPTO management and operational processes (e.g., the patent examination process) and systems, and hiring about 3,000 patent examiners in the two-year period FY 2012 and FY 2013 (including examiners for Three-Track Examination)."
Again, the assumption is, more patents are better, even if it means decreasing examination, and increasing the number of untrained examiners. Poor quality is an inevitable result of this patent process.
The resulting flood of patents creates patent thickets. These thickets eliminate competition and stagnate markets.
Reform would require somehow limiting the number of granted patents in a field. This could be accomplished several ways. The easiest would be to restrict the number of Patent examiners. If you eliminate the idea of cost recovery, then the natural process of limited congressional funding would probably suffice to limit the examination staff. Patent quotas would also work, but an PTO quota would be subject to regulatory capture. Patent Quotas would work best if they were set by Congressional Act.
A review of recent Patent Law will reveal that the minimum standard for granting a patent has consistently shifted downwards during the past few decades. We must abandon the idea that any patent that meets minimum standards is granted. Over time, the standard always de
US Patent No: 8,112,497 http://www.patentbuddy.com/Patent/8112497
I'm pretty sure what round red fruit they'll be inevitably swingin' at. The cure for inanimate objects, like stupid patents.
> Jpeg and mpeg
Nonsense. Patents might have funded R&D in one building, but those patents blocked R&D in every other building.
In the 90s, everyone was after image and video compression, there were piles of people working on it, or wanting to work on it. Studies show that software patents caused money to be diverted *away* from R&D (toward patent defence, defensive acquisition etc.).
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Studies_on_economics_and_innovation
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/An_Empirical_Look_at_Software_Patents
And if you want to fund researchers, just abolish software patents and suddenly you free up a few billion in application fees, maintenance fees, freedom to operate search fees, defence costs, out of court settlements, licensing fees...
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
That would be around 1992, right?
So EFF was good for two years and then sold out? If that's correct, how have they managed to maintain a high profile and good reputation?
There patent work always disappoints me, but I assumed they were valuable in some other area, but I know very little about their work.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
I actually thought the headline read "stupid parents".
> One of the qualifications of a patent is that it is non-obvious to a professional in that industry. That is pretty well ignored when most patents that I see litigated are 100% obvious to people well outside that area. Keyboards on a cell phone for texting. Wow that must have take a room full of geniuses working since Edison to work out that combo.
The law is an ass, especially the Adversarial system of law practiced in the US where lawyers dispute everything, no matter how obvious. They say "In my opinion, my client's patent is most certainly not obvious and my client has a strong case." Rules forbid lawyers from bringing weak cases "without merit", but the lawyer simply insist they believe their case is strong and the judge (also a lawyer) will agree the only way to sort it out is in court, at great expense. You can't rely on "truth" winning in the end. Court room proceedings aren't debates like you have in highschool: All you have to do is convince an ignorant jury to go with your side. Look at the Koh Samsung debacle. It's very hard to get a wrong decision reversed since Judges don't like looking stupid or making other judge's look stupid. There are some very dirty and entirely legal tactics that lawyers use to bring the juries over to their side. I can't list them here because I would be howled down. This is why it's in your interests to settle with a troll, no matter how crazy their claim. Don't expect the judge to save you: There are some very one-eyed judges out there in patent troll county.
Litigating a patent, whether you are the plaintiff or defendant costs $3M-$5M. Lawyers get paid no matter what. Even if you win, it's very unlikely the other side will be ordered to pay your full costs. You have to treat that money as a write off. You won't see it again. Some lawyers work on contingency for patent trolls, but this makes it worse for the victim because neither the plaintiff or their lawyers need to give a s*** about costs and refuse to settle. If they can fool a stupid jury they can end up owning your business, so why settle for a modest and mutually agreeable fee?
The system is so bad that the smartest thing a software developer can do is take the money and run at the first chance before someone sues you, because you can't write a program these days without infringing a hundred 'obvious' patents. As soon as you get the whiff of money around you, the trolls will come. Expect submarine patents and out right bogus ones too. Writing software is like being an OB-GYN... too risky. Find something safer.
Lawyers are opportunists, and I blame the USPTO and Congress for giving them the opportunity. Instead of looking at stupid patents, they need to go after the root cause.
Hey, Mark Cuban doesn't do what Mark Cuban does for Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban does what Mark Cuban does because he IS Mark Cuban.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Laws are usually written up by lawyers. The only beneficiaries of the current software patent system are ... lawyers.
Coincidence?
The patent system works against the freedom of people doing anything they want.
If we didn't have the patent system, then everyone interested in making a living creating or selling a product would do that, and may the best one win, get the monopoly, and grow fat.
With the patent system, we see big fish still behave like big fish and do what they like, we see some small fry become big fish, a rare occurence but it can happen, and we see lots and lots of leeches, which hurt everyone, but not enough to kill anyone outright, not anyone already established anyway.
You should NOT need a working product to get a patent, and most definitely should not need one that you can sale. This would pretty much eliminate any "little guy" from ever getting a patent.
If you cannot get the invention to work then there is no way to know if the idea works in the real world. If it can't be proven then it isn't real and is not worthy of a patent. Just having an idea first is not a sufficient standard. Building a prototype will not keep "the little guy" out any more than it does already. A prototype or early model doesn't have to be a final perfected version - just something that works. Someone with the resources to create something useful isn't going to have a hard time getting funding to build a working model. I don't think the sale requirement adds anything to the argument but I definitely think the requirement to build a tangible working model is a useful idea. Patents worthy of the a government sponsored monopoly have to be more than just someones random idea's written down.
While I think software patents are nonsense, I'm not sure how your "runs on someone else's product" should eliminate it.
I think he is saying that you have to provide a tangible product that YOU created. If your product is merely operating instructions to someone else's invention then you haven't invented a tangible product. Problem with his logic is that it doesn't work for vertically integrated companies like IBM or HP which are capable of manufacturing entire computers (or purchasing the suppliers who do) and thus circumventing his plan. Much easier to just say that machine instructions, mathematics, language, meta-data, business methods and intangible products and ideas can not be patented.
I thought it said "Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Parents. That, honestly, is probably more critical.
Patent law demands the people to defy the laws of physics. It's obvious from the court cases that examining the true meaning, depth and breadth of a single patent can take months or years. On the other hand USPTO granted 247,713 patents in 2011 alone. Assuming a full-time job (240 working days and 8 hours a day) this equates to 129 patents per hour. It's physically impossible to even read the monopoly rights granted to patent holders. Even if that was possible it's still impossible to analyse and understand the selected patents that my be related to the line of business. Even if that was possible the language used in paten applications make impossible to judge the validity and extend of the patent protection. Can an inventor or small company be held responsible for not defying the laws of physics? I'm not talking about the negligence. It's physically impossible to keep up with the current rate of patent granting. Would that be a sufficient defence line?
"If I have not seen further, it is because the giants sued me when I tried to stand on their shoulders."
-Modern day Isaac Newton
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
You throw the chair on people who file stupid patents.
Steve Ballmer will ever have a chair named after him. Maybe in a physics department?
How is one supposed to decide if a patent is stupid or ingenious? The decision is quite subjective in most cases. I fear such a anti-stupid patent committee can be used by vested interests to reject valid/clever patents as stupid.
It's about time that someone did something about stupid parents, we suffer from their badly brought up children all the time. And the poor children themselves are suffering badly.
Victory in a legal setting is often achieved by simply setting a precedent in a higher court.
Removal of all software patents is a job for the legislature.
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Mark Cuban is an accidental billionaire with a lot of attitude and an itchy twitter finger. His smarts are debatable, but his chutzpah is not. In this instance, however, I agree with him.
Judge Posner who ruled on an Apple v Samsung case agrees with a lot of us here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/judge-decries-excessive-copyright-and-software-patent-protections/ . It's time the USPTO did something drastic about frivolous patents and patent trolling. The problem cannot go away with major systemic change, and because of the complexity of laws involved, you can't just make reforms such as "ban all patent trolls" willy-nilly. The patent trolls will just reincarnate as software company holding companies or some other type of legal entity that bends the rules.
What needs to happen are major changes to the patent examination process itself. Very few people know that when looking for prior art, patent examiners don't use Google or even the Internet to do their research. They do searches in a few official patent/scientific databases in order to make their opinions about prior art. The patent applicant and his attorney can provide USPTO with references from the Internet to prove their point and those are read over by the examiner, but otherwise the examiner has their hands tied.
If the examiner wants to deny a patent application, he/she has to move mountains and prove without a doubt that the invention is not patentable. Patent attorneys are persistent leech-like creatures who will keep appealing any such decisions using any possible argument for as long as possible. Every time a patent attorney argues and disproves a patent examiner's decision, the examiner looks stupid in front of his peers. So, by default, the path of least resistance for the patent examiner is to just keep on awarding patents based on the limited knowledge of USPTO's databases.
I know this from working as a software patent litigation expert.
Firstly, not everyone that has a great idea has the resources to build a working prototype, this could be a huge hit to "the little guy".
If you don't have the resources for a prototype you sure as heck don't have the resources to go into production. If you have no plans to go into production then you really don't need a patent. The ONLY party that benefits from having patents on things they don't build are patent trolls.
Second; so what if it ends up being unfeasible then the patent simply has no value, so long as it isn't so broad that it stops an actual working innovation.
You can build a physical prototype of a useless device. Don't know why you would but you can do it. However if it cannot be built then there shouldn't be a patent.
"Cuban said, 'The current state of patents and patent litigation in this country is shameful," said Cuban"
I've invented a system for automatically removing double quotation attributions from news stories. Should I take out a patent, folks?
Step zero: abolish ALL patents. It's good for business. The Netherlands had no patents around 1900 for more than a decade. That was the time when a few companies were founded (Philips, for example), that are big and doing fine even today. Patents are only a way to make business competition impossible.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
It might even be the case that the inventor doesn't have the right to manufacture his invention due to his invention being covered by another's patent.
If they don't have the right to manufacture their invention then it isn't worthy of being granted a patent. Without making even a proof of concept product there is no way to be certain that it will work as designed. If it cannot proven to work then there is no way the patent office should be permitted to grant a monopoly on the idea. Granting a monopoly to someone who cannot possibly take advantage of that monopoly is a pointless endeavor and a waste of money, brains and time for everyone involved.