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."

Comments

A new crowdsourcing initiative to find prior art!

[Laxori666]

You mean something like patents.stackexchange.com?

Re:A new crowdsourcing initiative to find prior ar

[Laxori666]

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.

Or we could just go back to the Constitution

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Go back to that and all the problems disappear.

Re:Or we could just go back to the Constitution

[hey!]

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.

Re:Bureaucratic solution is not a solution

[guises]

It's a bureaucratic problem. What are you suggesting, a military solution?

How about the REAL link?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.whitehouse.gov/share/patents

Re:Chickens...roost

[rahvin112]

Yes it would be a diabolical communistic liberal plot to give every god fearing red blooded American diabetes to make them dependent on the government and make government larger.

That's all Obama ever does, that is make government bigger. Obama is responsible for the massive increase in Federal spending, even under the Bush years. He's especially responsible for the financial meltdown started during the second Bush term that was triggered by financial deregulation passed by a veto proof margin of a completely republican controlled congress during the Clinton years.And he's liberal, and we all know Liberal is bad bad bad. And he's so liberal he's just one step from being Karl Marx himself. And the lead singer of Korn told me he single handily wrote legislation that gives him the power to kill any american he wants and no republican was involved in the passage of that bill. And before I forget, he created (and only he created) the TSA to make sure he can personally fondle grannies and little kids and he plans to use the TSA to seize permanent control of the US!

Re:Was kidding, but no. "Actionable federal govt f

[Ralph Wiggam]

"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".