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Taking the Battle Against Patent Trolls To the Public
First time accepted submitter presspass writes "A group of technology and retail groups is beginning a national ad campaign targeting so-called patent trolls. The Internet Association, National Restaurant Association, National Retail Federation and Food Marketing Institute Patent trolls — a term known more among geeks than the general public — are about to be the target of a national ad campaign. Beginning Friday, a group of retail trade organizations is launching a radio and print campaign in 17 states. They want to raise awareness of a problem they say is draining resources from business and raising prices for consumers."
True! It's the patent system that needs to be fixed! Maybe limit the number of years a patent holder can keep a patent without using it in an actual application!
Of course they are trolls. The definition of patent troll is clear cut:
a) Owns a patent
b) Didn't do the work personally
c) Doesn't make products using the patent.
The Constitutional rationale for patents is not monetisation, that's why:
[Article 1, Section 8:] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Now please inform us as to how patent trolls promote the progress of science and/or useful arts.
...
(Warning--Spoiler ahead:) They don't.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Inventors are out of luck RIGHT NOW. Patent is just a piece of paper that gives you right to sue someone, but to sue someone big/important you need >$100K for lawyer fees.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
The level of scrutiny that applies to patent legislation is the "rational basis" test. That is the lowest level of scrutiny that the Supreme Court applies. Basically, if the government can show that the legislation is rationally related to the purpose (promotion of the progress of the science and useful arts), it is within the scope of power enumerated in the constitution.
Article 1 Section 8 "empowers Congress to determine the intellectual property regimes that, overall, in that body’s judgment, will serve the ends of the Clause." (Golan v. Holder, 565 U.S. ____, and Eldred v. Ashcroft 537 U.S. at 222).
Congress isn't required to keep its copyright and patent legislation within what *you* think promotes the progress of the science and useful arts.
If you accept that mathematics is not patentable then
you must accept that computer programs are not patentable.
Regardless of what lawyers would like to believe; computers are machines
that read and utter mathematical expressions.
This particular patent problem is just another denial of scientific fact!
You should be able to patent a process that contains a computer
program but the program itself is out of bounds.
so there!
If the only way to monetise the invention is to sell it to a patent troll then it does not deserve any money.
The only way a patent troll makes money is if someone willing to actually make the thing has the same (usually pretty obvious) idea so the original 'invention' offered zero value to society.
Said as someone with a few patents ( http://www.patentmaps.com/inventor/Jocelyn_M_Earl_1.html )
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Any thoughts on how the following rule would help the patent system?:
Make patents non transferable.
Now if you are working for a company, or with someone, patenet ownership can be split how ever initially agreed on (I'm a 5% owner of a patent from a pervious job), but this stops a single company, with no product, history, or karma backing it, from buying up bunched of patents and suing major companies trying to sell their product.
What makes you think inventors who "don't have the mental and financial stamina to sue a big corporation for patent infringement" are going to get a good deal out of a patent troll company? They have the same characteristics as other corporations, except they're run by even more shady individuals than average.
The way the patent system is currently run makes it extremely hard for anyone but an expensive patent attorney to navigate too. Your fantasy inventor here is unlikely to get their patent in the first place. Instead it's big corporations who have the resources to file so many garbage patents that the rest of the world is bogged down navigating them, including the small scale inventors. Odds are the mythical lone wolf inventor will be sued into oblivion rather than sue someone else successfully.
The language used in patent applications is extremely hard to decode. The idea that people might be mining for innovation by reading patents has to clear that hurdle. They need to make sense of that mess with less work than developing the same idea from scratch.
Back when patents were disclosing major technical advances, there was some evidence people were doing that. I re-read Portraits in Silicon lately. One of the recurring themes among early computer researchers was the idea that they'd get a patent on some very fundamental and non-obvious technology. Could you reinvent the transistor faster than you could read about it its construction? Probably not.
But lately, there's a lot more evidence that people are concurrently discovering obvious advances that someone patented instead of that sort of thing. And even those old fundamental patents turn out to be not such a big deal after all. The actual history of the transistor shows the concurrent development of its ideas as being really inevitable.
Concurrent discovery is far more likely than unique innovation. The patent system is burdening what turns out to be one of the most common situations seen in scientific advancement: that the next step to build on any innovation will be co-discovered by multiple researchers in parallel. This happens far more often than the fantasy of the lone inventor working in isolation to create something no one else thought of before.
"Trolls" has a narrow definition and to be quite honest, I'm not entirely convinced there's any principled reform that eliminates so-called "trolls" while allowing manufacturers to sue the pants off each other, still less one that would be effective.
A better question though is whether patents are actually necessary, or rather, whether a monopoly is the best way to encourage publication of inventions.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
the rest of the world is bogged down navigating them
Yet at the same time we're incentivized not to navigate (research) the existing patents by the willful infringement rules. Not only does it make a mockery of the patent system as an avenue for "disclosure," but you're trapped between the rock of due diligence and the hard place of triple damages.
.: Semper Absurda