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The Man Who Created the Pencil Eraser and How Patents Have Changed
fermion writes "This weeks 'Who Made That' column in The New York Times concerns the built in pencil eraser. In 1858 Hymen Lipman put a rubber plug into the wood shaft of a pencil. An investor then paid about 2 million in today's dollars for the patent. This investor might have become very rich had the supreme court not ruled that all Lipmen had done was put together two known technologies, so the patent was not valid. The question is where has this need for patents to be innovative gone? After all there is the Amazon one-click patent which, after revision, has been upheld. Microsoft Activesync technology patent seems to simply patent copying information from one place to another. In this modern day do patents promote innovation, or simply protect firms from competition?"
You're missing the point. A lot of this was unintentional. They made the USPTO run on fees that were charged for patents which gave the USPTO and incentive to rubber stamp patents while not receiving sufficient funding to cover the cost of having patent examiners that could do the investigation that they used to do.
What needs to happen is that the USPTO needs to go back to being a government service the user fees need to be based upon the amount of time and energy it takes to deal with the application. And while we're at it, the duration of the patent period should go from the point where the first application is received to a reasonable period after that. For technology 7 years is likely more than adequate as a lot of that IP is no longer of value several years later.
And obviously, anybody filing for a patent on software gets to volunteer to test the prototype rectal exam bots.
Some build up, through genius employed.
And lesser men must see work destroyed.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Actually, I think even the idea of enabling people to duplicate inventions is not working anymore
I read an article (can't remember where), saying that companies are actually FORBIDING their employees from checking the patent database, just in case they find out that another patent might perhaps cover something they are working on.
This way, if a lawsuit occurs, they can claim ignorance of existing patents.
But the downside is that people are actively avoiding looking into patent descriptions.