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White House Takes Steps Against Patent Trolls
itwbennett writes "The Obama administration on Thursday launched a website with information to assist people and businesses targeted in patent lawsuits or receiving patent demand letters. The White House also announced that it would launch a new crowdsourcing initiative focused on identifying prior art (evidence of existing inventions) that the USPTO can use to reject bad patent claims and will expand a USPTO patent examiner technical training program by allowing outside technologists to help with the training."
You mean something like patents.stackexchange.com?
Why "nope"? Stackexchange seems like a great (crowdsourced) medium for exactly this. Already a patent application has been struck down thanks to prior art discovered via that site.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/share/patents
Originally patents were for 13 years with one renewal by the original Person that applies and copyright was for 17 years with one renewal by the original Person that applies.
Sure, but none of that is actually in the Constitution. Article 1, Section 8 empowers Congress to secure exculsive rights to inventors "for limited Times[sic]", without stipulating any actual limit. For practical purposes this enables Congress to extend patents and copyrights indefinitely.
The framers were men of remarkable vision to understand that patents were needed all the way back in 1787, but they weren't supermen or fortune tellers. They did not foresee the rise of corporations to become the dominant force in American society, or the uses they would dream up for the patent system. I doubt they ever imagined anything like a business methods patent, or a design patent, or the notion of Federal trademark law.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"the federal government should pursue actionable items [to create] food boards ... set food policy"
That means things like "Public schools shouldn't serve pizza and french fries every day". Mine did. It does not mean "Pizza should be banned from existence".