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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. '"
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
My first thought was that they would put people who ask for and/or approve stupid patents in the Comfy Chair.
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 you have the same attitude, you tell all of your repair men and doctors to give up so easily. Sounds like the only thing doomed is you dooming yourself.
You'd be surprised. A chair was pretty effective against Clint Eastwood.
Sent from my PDP-11
I believe it involves Steve Ballmer and hunting down every patent attorney in the world, but I'm a little fuzzy on the details.
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.
OK, How many of you misread the title as Stupid Parents?
Bows head in shame... Seriously though, it sounded plausible enough at the moment.
I hear law firms are doing great out of the current situation
My doctor won't be able to save my life if his life depended on it and I am not the cause of entropy which means yes - no matter what I think we're all doomed.
But you're free to continue pretending otherwise.
Those two statements may both be true, but they aren't strongly related. He's a billionaire because he sold a shitty website to Yahoo!, at the height of the dot-com bubble, for $6 billion. Yes, Yahoo paid him six billion dollars for a website. Not even a website that was making much money, either. They subsequently, unsurprisingly, took a huge write-down on broadcast.com's value, which collapsed to near nothing. So, Cuban got lucky in riding the bubble and cashing out before it burst.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You'd be surprised. A chair was pretty effective against Clint Eastwood.
And is the weapon of choice of Steve Ballmer.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
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
Yeah, fair enough, but he was one of the very few people who sold his shitty company at the peak of the dot.com bubble who was able to think ahead enough to actually keep his fortune.
> 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!
> 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.
Actually, that sounds pretty smart to me.
He hates stupid patents there was a guy on Shark Tank who had the patent for running Apple product speaker wires threw clothing. Mark flipped and said I will run blue tooth with pairing just so you don't get any money. lol He was been open as well that patents stand in the way of innovation.
http://thetechnologygeek.org/
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.
"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?