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FTC Chairwoman Speaks On Growing US Patent Problem
ectoman writes "In a recent policy speech, Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Edith Ramirez indicated that the FTC might be preparing to seriously address patent abuse in the United States. Mark Bohannon, Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Global Public Policy at Red Hat, has reviewed Ramirez's remarks, calling them 'some of the most direct and specific to date from a senior U.S. Government official regarding "harmful PAE [patent assertion entities] activities."' Bohannon writes that the FTC's proposed roadmap for patent reform 'is both ambitious and doable,' and he discusses how the agency could make its potential contributions to reforms most effective. The piece arrives one week after Bohannon analyzed other patent reform efforts currently ongoing in Washington—in a piece Slashdot readers have been discussing."
Patents are more and more being used as weapons to stop any and all progress of any derivative idea that results from the base idea being patented. The system has been corrupted to stop many inventions that could save lives, and overall better happiness of mankind for the sake of the patent holders keeping their money-making works owned by their masters... FOREVER.
How can the patent process be used to give influence to create new ideas, works. There is none! no new antibiotics, no cures for illnesses, no new chemicals no nothing as long as the patent process is corrupted the way it is!
Case .. Mickey mouse... Q. E D
Edith Ramirez - remember that name. Maybe a future SCOTUS justice.
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Due to Slashdot's "lameness filter" you can read what I was intended to post here over on reddit.
Trade secrets need to come back in a big way.
Let's put a band-aid on it instead of addressing the underlying causes of the problem, and kick the can down the road!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
1) Ambitious
2) Doable
Pick one.
The court in Marshall Texas is acting like an organized-crime operation, plain and simple.
Getting rid of software patents would go a long way towards correcting the problem. That's where the biggest abuse is.
As the FTC noted, patent trolls have become a serious problem IN RECENT YEARS. The patent system worked rather well for a few hundred years. Just recently there have been problems big enough, often enough, to offset the benefits.
What that tells me is that some things need to be fixed.
Throwing out a system that worked so well for so long would be dumb. That would be like trying to reduce the cost of medical care by getting rid of doctors.
If you read her policy speech, her focus is on the need to rein in "Patent Assertion Entities" ("PAE"), defined as "a firm with a business model focused primarily on purchasing and asserting patents". And she talks about solutions such as making it easier/cheaper to defend against frivolous lawsuits etc.
She does not appear to address, or even acknowledge the key underlying problem with the patent system, namely that right now it is too easy to file for and obtain frivolous, undeserving, non-novel or obvious patents. All the powers the patent trolls have stem from the patents they are granted. Cut down on the number of patents issued and you cut down on the abuse that follows.
This will not only cut out the PAEs, but also lessen the ability of legitimate companies to kill off their competition by abusing their patents, such as when Samsung/Apple/HTC/Huawei/Motorola try to block the importation/sale of each other's products on the basis of patents.
If you could get past the overwhelming documentation of prior art by the government alone, you could become the wealthiest person on earth by licensing it. Heck, just imagine how many would sign a deal just to quietly get you to go away rather then drag their company or ogovernment agency into court for violation of your patent on stupidity? Works for political contributions don't it?
Okay, apparently you can spell TROLL without LOL...
I can't figure out why the powers that be seem to care about patent trolls now. Big corps used to love them because it kept upstarts like google from upending whole industries. Investors didn't seem to mind them since like bookies they make their money either way so long as the market stays reasonable stable. The only ppl I know that get the short end are little guys like me.
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This isn't an episode of duckman is it? PC goes too far I think
The corporations with lots of money and lots of patents are making lots of money. The lawyers are making lots and lots of money. Fuck inventors! So what's the problem? Oh, and if you actually look at fixing things, know that patents on software should have remained illegal, patents must actually do something non-obvious, and while you are at it, copyrights are more fucked than patents: 20 years (1 generation) should be the term limit, and if its sold, the time should be cut in half.
Compaines are filing patents and then forming subsidiaries in tax haven countires. The companies licence the patent to the subsidiary and book all the profits in that low tax country. The companies then just show operating losses in the US.
So you dont understand patents, software or more likely, both.
Patents are meant to encourage innovation by providing a limited monopoly. The key words in there are "encourage" and "limited". Patents are not meant to provide a means of extorting other businesses nor are they meant to last for ever. The price of the limited monopoly is that the patent passes into the public domain after a set number of years. Patents are also required to be unique, code is too easily replicated by someone with no knowledge of the patented code to meet this requirement.
LoL, you also dont know your history.
Patent systems are radically different to the systems you claim "worked" and we haven't had the same system for 100's of years. The current iteration started around 50 years ago with most of the abusive changes added in the last 20.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Think about that for a second. You want to trade the pace of progress in the sciences and useful arts that we've had for the last 300 years for the rate of progress for two thousand years before that? Really?
Three hundred years ago, 1713, life was much the same as it was in 300 BC. Our quality of life has improved so much more in the last few hundred years than it improved in the thousands of years before. Are you really wanting to go back to the days when everyone just worried about feeding themselves, because there was no hope of changing your life by creating something new that everyone could benefit from?
Granted, there were certain times, in certain places, where people made real progress long ago. Greece, for example, was unusually productive. It was also unusual in that Greece had patents 2,500 years ago, and it had citizens rather than subjects.
Yes, yes. Technically you're spot on.
Still, this confusion tells us something: the IP forces are winning
This whole IP thing, which at first blush seems like a small "language convenience" is trying to hammer into our heads that you can regard "intellectual property" like physical, trade in it, speculate. It's just annoying that it tends to evaporate after some time (patents take 15 to 30 years, copyrights 90 years plus, trademarks are more complicated).
But with enough creativity ("on a computer", or "for white males between 33 and 39") and enough Congress-massaging and obscure international treaties, this is being fixed.
Soon the distinction will be moot and all will be IP. Brave new world.
Patent systems are radically different to the systems you claim "worked" and we haven't had the same system for 100's of years. The current iteration started around 50 years ago with most of the abusive changes added in the last 20.
They might be changed substantially, but they've been abused heartily for hundreds of years.
The whole "yeah but on a computer^W^Wthe internet^Wcloud" patents used to be "yeah but on a steam engine".
No kidding.
Look up some pictures of an old Watt steam engine. Note the rather odd sun and planet gear arrangement insteadof a crank, because some numpty patented the idea of using a crank on a steam engine.
Not that Watt didn't retard the further development of steam engines by 25 years by vigorously pursuing patents or anything...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
... what the single most import reason was for starting up such property rights,
Agreed, in 1850, people were using thousand year old technology for the most part , so a twenty year lead was reasonable.
These days, 3 years might give a roughly equivalent advantage. The only problem is, since the patent office is government bureaucracy, it takes three years for them to approve it.
Not seeing the analogy of Doctors to software patents at all. But to help out with healthcare my solution would be more like get rid of the lawyers.
> Let me guess - you dont understand software
... Patents are also required to be unique
... days * replies .... blah blah
...
ROTFL at the irony. You didn't notice who you were replying to, did you. Hint - you're talking to a kernel contributor, and an Apache contributor.
> Patents are not meant to provide a means of extorting other businesses nor are they meant to last for ever.
Agreed.
> We dont allow patenting mathematical constructs because they are far too logical and replicable.
A common misconception. We don't allow patenting the laws of nature of of mathematics, because they predate their "invention" - mathematical equations which are "true" are discovered, not actually invented. On the other hand, using a few pages of newly created math to say, detect and eliminate Slashdot trolls, is patentable. 1 = 2 -1 isn't patentable because it's a mathematical fact. On the other hand:
trollscore = sin(posts) / cos(points)
isn't mathematically true, it would be a newly invented way of rating trollishness, and therefoe patentable.
> Anyone looking to do the same thing will logically take the same path with no knowledge of any prior art.
We can quickly determine whether or not that's true. Consider how you'd make a captcha, a web device to prevent bots from posting spam all over slashdot al day long. If you know anything at all about programming, in about 30 seconds you can sketch out how you might do that in your head. if you're intellectually honest, take 30 seconds to think about so we can see if you're right that you and I come up with the same implementation. I'll wait a few line feeds while you do that.
30 seconds later
Having seen a captcha before, you might have imitated prior art and make a really annoying captcha. This is what I came up with:
http://bettercgi.com/images/face-turing-captcha.png
In testing, everyone has been able to quickly solve my captcha while standing ten feet away. It leverages a skill that's been very finely tuned for millions of years - spotting attractive women. Did you come up with the exact same thing? Of course not. ChickCAPTCHA is a new invention. It happens to be implemented in software.
Gears and pulleys can be put together in the same old ways to build the same old machines. Gears and pulleys can also be used to make completely new inventions. The same is true of for loops and if statements - most of the time, they are used to build traditional software. Occasionally, they are used to build entirely new inventions which are much better than what was available before. ChickCAPTHA is an example - it's much, much less annoying than old fashioned captchas, much quicker and easier, and therefore better.
It took significant R&D time to figure out what humans are incredibly good at, much better at than computers. (It turned out we're very, very good at spotting hot babes). Then more time figure out just the right way to use that so it was really easy for humans, but hard for computers. (Subtleties in the images make it harder for computer vision than you might think). I think it's fair than instead of Microsoft or Google ripping off my research, they have to throw me a bone if they want to start using ChickCAPTCHA on gmail. (WIth a reasonable time limit, as you said.)
PS - if any readers think ChickCAPTCHA is cool, don't steal it, contact me. I'll do a very reasonable license if contacted. If you steal my R&D/idea, I will ask my friendly lawyer to help me find some truly evil lawyers.)
Your titl contains it also. Twis.
It appears that Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Edith Ramirez discovered this uncomfortable reality when she violated an Google patent for speaking up in public.
> You seriously contribute *everything* humanity has ever done in the last 300 years to patents? Are you serious?
No, the person I replied to attributed the fast paced progress a thousand years ago to the LACK of patents.
I pointed that progress has accelerated greatly since patents began to be commonly used, so he was wrong
to say that the creation of patents a few hundred years ago caused progress to stop.
Additionally, in places where patents were strong, such as the US, those were exactly the places doing most of the
invention in the last 300 years. (Of course the US lead in innovation had begun to wither in the last 25 years or so.)
> And more recently they've been a tool of choice for abuse
Which is my point. Recently, in the last 5-10 years or so, certain people have started abusing them in a specific way.
What you want is to get back to the system that worked so well from Edison in 1859 to Shockley and to Noyce in 1956.
Edison didn't spend years trying thousands of different prototypes for usable light bulb because he had nothing better to do.
He hoped to invent a workable electric light so that he could live off the earnings his R&D would produce. We should keep
that, while getting rid of the recent "business plan" of systematic abuse.