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Software Patent Reform Stalls Thanks To IBM and Microsoft Lobbying
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington post reports on the progress of a piece of legislation many hoped would address the glut of meaningless software patents used as weapons by patent trolls. Unfortunately, the provision that would have helped the USPTO nix these patents has been nixed itself. The article credits IBM, Microsoft, and other companies with huge patent portfolios for the change, citing an 'aggressive lobbying campaign' that apparently succeeded. Quoting: 'A September letter signed by IBM, Microsoft and several dozen other firms made the case against expanding the program. The proposal, they wrote, "could harm U.S. innovators by unnecessarily undermining the rights of patent holders. Subjecting data processing patents to the CBM program would create uncertainty and risk that discourage investment in any number of fields where we should be trying to spur continued innovation." ... Last week, IBM escalated its campaign against expanding the CBM program. An IBM spokesman told Politico, "While we support what Mr. Goodlatte's trying to do on trolls, if the CBM is included, we'd be forced to oppose the bill." Insiders say the campaign against the CBM provisions of the Goodlatte bill has succeeded. The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold a markup of the legislation Wednesday, and Goodlatte will introduce a "manager's amendment" to remove the CBM language from his own bill. IBM hailed that change in a Monday letter to Goodlatte.'"
FTA: An IBM spokesman told Politico, "While we support what Mr. Goodlatte's trying to do on trolls, if the CBM is included, we'd be forced to oppose the bill."
What about the hundreds of thousands of small developers who support it?
Do they get a "vote", too ... or is it only the people who are rich enough to bribe senators?
No sig today...
Doesn't IBM hold a patent on patent reform?
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
They have to fight to preserve their evil business model.
They will squeeze every cent of Office and the Mainframe till they kill their business :)
Is it simply human nature to attempt to dick over everyone else if you become unfathomably rich?
Why is this forever a struggle between the freedom of the poor and the freedom of one or two extremely rich people or organizations to fuck over everyone else?
... that's owned by Jeff "One Click" Bezos?
If you use the word "bribing" instead of "lobbying" it becomes more clear who are the ones that screwed all there. Being governed by people that not only accept bribes, but is also not worried about that being known is almost as bad as citizens taking that as something normal.
Protecting you from the future since 1976.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Same shit, different property.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
CBM means "Covered Business Method (patent)"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Translation: "We love the absurd and unfair amount of power that the broken patent system gives us over any and all future start-ups and rivals, and will oppose any legislation that doesn't maintain the status quo."
A company is, in theory, like a person so it should not have more power than a normal citizen : Lobbying should be considered the same as bribing : ILLEGAL.
I can't call that English
Just because they sell a product doesn't mean they should be able to keep out new players. I thought patents were supposed to protect the small guy so he can make some money before a corporation scales his idea faster? Why should the corporations be allowed to hold a bazillion patents on lots of obvious things that prevent the small guy from entering the arena? Oh yeah, they have money and bribe congressmen...
Sony is also in that list VIA OnLive...
(fucking cowards!!!)
And you thought it would not happen in your lifetime !!
Jesus has just left Chicago !!
AND
He is bound for New Orleans !!
You heard it on /. first !! Because this is stuff that matters !!
The whole world being held back for the benefit of the few. It will be the defining characteristic of this period in history.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Welcome to serfdom, comrade!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Most people on this forum are IT related, and I do not need to explain how software patents in particular hinder the ability to innovate in the field.
Only the US has terror histories regarding patent trolls and patent dicksizing contests between software companies, which in no way help you be better, faster, and, I would even say more profitable (Lawyers being the only ones profiting out of this)
There is no room for software start ups because of this. Everything that could be patented already is (and a lot that shouldn't is too).
Here, in software patent free world, it's so much better. Whatever you can think of you can do it, and even if you cannot find a solution, you can google for it, code it, and that's it. No lawyers or burocracies needed.
This is a clear situation of the big fish creating rules to eat the small fish. Is that the world you want to live in?
(the same could be applied to the rest of patents, and even things outside patents like equality and justice, but I will stay out of it to keep on topic)
I'm trying to get modded "Interesting Flamebait Informative and Insightful Redundant Troll" *-* Please Help *-*
So, our choices are apparently either:
- an overbearing nanny state in which the government makes all the decisions, or
- a weak state in which the corporations make all the decisions.
Great. That really illustrates why frustrated people turn to Caesarism, and faith in a single strong personality given despotic powers to "fix the mess".
Unfortunately, while you might get lucky and ACTUALLY get a Gaius Marius or someone genuinely interested in the general well-being of the people and nation, *rarely* is that ever sustainable to whomever inherits (earns/steals/etc) that power next....(Marius himself - in pursuit of very-much-needed reforms - could arguably be blamed for turning the Republic into the Empire)
-Styopa
Translation: "We love the absurd and unfair amount of power that the broken patent system gives us over any and all future start-ups and rivals, and will oppose any legislation that doesn't maintain the status quo."
No - see the summary:
An IBM spokesman told Politico, "While we support what Mr. Goodlatte's trying to do on trolls, if the CBM is included, we'd be forced to oppose the bill."
The proper translation is "yes, we want to stop the troll problem, but this nuclear option you've got goes too far. We like all of your other proposals." Just because you don't like 5% of a proposal doesn't mean you necessarily hate 100% of the proposal.
I'm strongly in favor of patent reform, but CBM is not the answer. CBM allows a subset of patents to be challenged administratively on a fast-track, without having to go to court. That hurts the patent trolls, but it hurts anybody without a phalanx of lawyers even more.
Real patent reform has three key parts:
1. Fix "obviousness." The courts didn't like the examiner affirmatively finding that something was obvious so turn it around and require the applicant to justify why anyone of average skill seeking the same result would not have found the same method. Require the examiner to affirmatively find that it isn't obvious. No justification = no patent.
If anybody asked to do X would have tried your approach and X itself doesn't supply the genius either then no patent should be granted. Nor should a minor tweak on something you or somebody else already invented receive a patent. There are too many "routine inventions" receiving patents.
2. A person of average skill in the art should be able to implement the technology from the contents in the patent. Start rejecting packets where that isn't true. Vague or stilted language in the application = no patent.
3. Patent duration should be from application, not from the grant. Effective protection starts with the application. You can't sue anybody until after the grant, but no one dares use the tech unless they're sure the patent won't be granted. That's been abused by delaying the final grant for years or even a decade.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Lobbying should be illegal.
Yes IBM, Microsoft et al. are posers and are the biggest trolls. They hold their cache of patents as a sort of Plan B in case a competitor comes along with a truly novel idea and product that they couldn't make happen themselves and leech off of these guys by looking for ways to suck some money out of them - and usually it's the little guys - the start-ups - that get screwed by the patent system that was supposed to protect them from these monsters.
Fuck the fucking fucks!
1. Fix "obviousness."
Unfortunately, I think you're asking someone to prove a logical negative: the applicant has to prove that something isn't obvious by showing... what, exactly?
I hold six patents, and a few times I've had to prove obviousness to an examiner. The gold standard of obviousness is showing that others tried hard to solve the problem and failed. Sometimes, on problems where others have beaten their heads against the wall and there are failed products and projects in the field, you can point the examiner at prior art which shows obviousness. I was the first person to build a ragdoll physics system which could handle the hard cases. Back in the 1990s, early ragdoll systems tended to have characters flying off in random directions, sometimes with the body parts detaching. (Some physics engines still do that, which is lame, because, fifteen years later, several solutions besides mine are known now.) By pointing to previous failures that extended up to and past my patent application date, I was able to demonstrate non-obviousness.
"Obvious" does not mean "obvious in hindsight".
IBM throws off its inhbitions.
The patent troll industry exists because, in the last decade, it's become much tougher for inventors to enforce patent rights. Four changes in law did this:
Because of those changes, enforcing a single patent is no longer financially feasible in most cases. A big patent portfolio is needed. You either have to be a big patent holder like IBM or Google, or you have to deal with a company that aggregates patents to monetize them. This created the "patent troll" industry.
HR 3309 is an anti-inventor act, designed to make it more expensive to enforce a patent. After the removal of the "covered business method" patent section, patents are as strong as ever. You just have to be richer to enforce them. That's why this is supported by Google, Facebook, etc.
The current Senate bill on patent trolls, S.1720, the "Patent Transparency and Improvements Act of 2013" is much more narrowly focused than HR 3309. It has most of the anti-trolling provisions, but not loser-pays fee shifting. (Loser-pays means if a little guy sues a big company, they can get stuck with the big guy's big-law legal bills. That's a killer.) Instead, S.1720 has a study for a patent small claims court for small patent cases to get litigation costs down. That could work.
IBM literally had mass-meetings of their development staff and contractors with the sole agenda item being everyone writing down any good ideas they may have come up with doing their regular work, to be forwarded to Legal for patent consideration (I know this due to being one such developer).
IBM has not even a passing interest in whether or not the actual innovators are getting "harmed". They are doing the harming themselves.
So is Apple's bounce animation patent, which is just an animated implementation of the step response of an underdamped second order linear system which has been known about for centuries.
The novel part might have been the application of an underdamped second order linear system to the task of representing the edge of a scrollable area. User interfaces in the prior art had typically done so numerically (0% or 100%) or by having a box in a scroll bar reach the start or end of a range.
And there are no longer any other kind.
Nor have I met a set of Libertarian candidates who got elected to the House or Senate in large enough numbers to counter the MPAA's sway on the big two parties. I don't see how Libertarians in local and state office count when software patent reform, the topic of the featured article, is exclusively federal.
People in companies have as much right to ask the government to do things differently, to make things better for their own interests, as everybody else does.
How would you make lobbying illegal? Throw people in jail for talking to their congressman?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's time for US officials to take notice. IBM is not really an American company anymore, so why should they get special treatment by the US administration and Congress?
I am myself employed by one of the large companies that resist patent reform.
I had this idea that someone should set up a crowdsourcing website, which lists all patents, and provides a) a forum for discussion of each patent, and b) where individuals and companies could deposit bitcoins on an escrow account, which will be paid to anyone who provides enough prior art to invalidate the patent. Any known prior art might encourage companies to not to pay for the patent holder, and then the patent holders would have to go to court on individual (crappy) patents, if they want to get any money out of it. The fluctuations in bitcoin excange rate might also create situations, where some patents would get large amounts of money promised for the prior art, which then would generate good publicity for the website.
83b9ba953e9b64e3ccf06b013787d7b8a88e7e4f
From my reading of this thread, Duhavid is not advocating "telling any person that some of the political speech they want to engage in is illegal". Nor is he making any argument regarding business ownership. He is instead arguing that a business (corporation) is not a person, and therefore has no legitimate right to free speech, political or otherwise. By extension, he takes the position that any political speech must come from individuals, not from collectives, be they businesses or unions.
I think you both have good points to make. I also think you're both talking past each other to some extent.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I see a lot of really well-thought out comments here that truly go to the heart of the issues at hand. But, uh, can anyone posting on this page actually describe (no looking it up, now!) the AIA program being debated? Who here even knows what "CBM" stands for?
So how should I lose an election yet make a statement about copyright and patent policy that the election's winner ends up accepting?
when are our politicians going to man up and actually do the right thing?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.