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Ten States Pass Anti-Patent-Troll Laws, With More To Come
An anonymous reader writes "With patent reform stalled in the Senate, many states have decided to take up the issue themselves. 'As states kicked off their legislative sessions this winter, lawmakers responded to the threats against small businesses by writing bills that would ban "bad faith patent assertions" as a violation of consumer-protection laws. The bills target a specific type of patent troll: the kind that sends out vaguely worded letters demanding licensing fees. The thousands of letters sent out by the "scanner trolls" at MPHJ Technology are often brought up as a case-in-point. The new laws allow trolls that break rules around letter-writing to be sued in state court, either by private companies they've approached for licensing fees, or by state authorities themselves.'"
Please don't use the term "Intellectual Property" to describe the clause of the Constitution: "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;"
Intellectual property is a modern day term meant to confuse the differences between copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Using a modern day corruption of the concepts to describe the initial writings further confuses the relevant issues.
Most of the "patent troll" problem comes from three law firms. They're the only ones who've sent out more than two demand letters, according to the EFF.
Using a modern day corruption of the concepts to describe the initial writings further confuses the relevant issues.
The history of patents does not begin with inventions, but rather with royal grants by Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) for monopoly privileges...[snip]...In an 1818 collection of his writings, the French liberal theorist, Benjamin Constant, argued against the recently introduced idea of "property which has been called intellectual."[7] The term intellectual property can be found used in an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown., in which Justice Charles L. Woodbury wrote that "only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, productions and interests are as much a man's own...as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears."[8] The statement that "discoveries are...property" goes back earlier. Section 1 of the French law of 1791 stated, "All new discoveries are the property of the author; to assure the inventor the property and temporary enjoyment of his discovery, there shall be delivered to him a patent for five, ten or fifteen years."[9] In Europe, French author A. Nion mentioned propriété intellectuelle in his Droits civils des auteurs, artistes et inventeurs, published in 1846. - WP link
The advent of Hollywood in the 20th century did two things, created wealthy and respectable citizens out of previously "immoral" entertainers, changed the notion of copyright from a temporary monopoly on property into an eternal property right, the computer industry came up with machines that could be anything you told them to be, the conceptual distinction between ideas and iron vanished and they were able to gain the protections afforded by both copyright and patent law.
I want to see IP law radically reformed: Art would be sponsored not sold, research would be sponsored not sold, software would be serviced not sold, scientific discoveries would be treated the same way as a finding an ancient "treasure trove", depending on it's value to society you either get to keep it in your head or the state publishes it and hand you a token cash reward commensurate with it's perceived value to society.
That's simply not going to happen in my life time, nor would I want it to happen "overnight" since such a rapid switch in basic property law would probably throw the global economy into black hole. It's taken at least 100yrs for the social pendulum to overshoot "reasonable" in the author's/inventor's favour. If you want to help push it back the other way, publishing conspiracy theories on Slashdot is not the way to do it. Getting your facts straight would be a start but "being right" may not help, politics is all about "being listened to" and nothing makes a politicians ears prick up more than the sound of a pen scratching against a cheque book.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.