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Why United States Patent Reform Has Stalled
ectoman (594315) writes Proponents of patent reform in the United States glimpsed a potential victory late last year, when the House of Representatives passed H.R. 3309, the Innovation Act, designed to significantly mitigate patent abuse. Just months ago, however, the Senate pulled consideration of the bill. And since then, patent reform has been at a standstill. In a new analysis for Opensource.com, Mark Bohannon, Vice President of Corporate affairs and Global Public Policy at Red Hat, explains three reasons why. "For this year, at least," he writes, "the prospect of addressing abusive patent litigation through Congressional action is on ice"—despite the unavoidable case for reform.
The article seems to explain what is [not] happening, not why. But I thought we already knew why. It's called the influence of money on politics.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When there is money to be made in perpetuating the problem?
Thirty four characters live here.
Here is the problem.
The Right Wing Media has done such a good job a painting the Democrats and Obama as pure Evil, is that any sign of working with the Democrats on anything is a sign that they are being manipulated. So these politicians cannot dare to do anything that will make Obama side considered a win. As if they did they will get voted out in the next primaries.
The Left Wing Media makes the Right Wing like they are so out of touch and evil, so the Right feels constantly threatened, thus makes their stance more resolved.
This degree of Polarization has gone to the Crazy level.
Simple common sense solutions will not go threw because it was the other side who came up with it first.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Money buys policy in the US, and patent holders have more money. Did we really even need this question?
Yes you can, the world would run so much smoother if they all had the same opinions and beliefs that I do.
This type of thinking is the first step to tyranny. As any opposing opinion must either be from the Stupid (who needs to be reeducated), Coerced (Where we need to find the ring leader spreading the ideas), or from some evil in them (Where they need to be jailed or killed)
Many Tyrants of the world came from people who had good ideas and gained and used their power to try to make real. Unfortunately there always seems to be a part of the population who has a different view that needs to be controlled.
In America sometimes I am very frustrated that our government doesn't move much because they just don't seem to agree on any little thing. However due to the fact that they do disagree, and not feel like the government is going to go out and kill them for disagreeing with them is also comforting.
When you have a government where all the people are working smoothly and efficiently without much conflict. Actually is very scary because you need to ask yourself why does everyone agree with this. Especially as every choice you make normally has some sort of trade-off which someone else may take the different path.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think you'll find that avoiding that particular symbol is fairly straightforward.
Checks are actually moving faster than ever with the Check21 (The 21st Century Checking Act) which went into effect over a decade ago. Now, when WalMart scans a check in front of you at the register, the money instantly moves from your account to WalMart's, and the banks start reconciling where the cash that the transfer represents right away. If there's any delay in a check showing up in your Online Banking, it's because you sent it via the Postal Service and that still takes a little time but is also always getting faster.
If I could just get government approval, I'm willing to set up a bank that really moves fast.
"This was entirely done by the pharmaceutical industry and the trial lawyers."
...
Pharmaceutical and biotech firms are often plaintiffs in patent disputes and haven't been hit hard by troll lawsuits.
...
Many law firms working in traditional plaintiffs' areas like personal injury or securities class actions have added patent work as other sources have dried up.
Fucking. Lawyers.
Patents in the USA are a monopoly granted by the Constitution and laws that follow in order to provide a way for inventors to make money for a limited time, then depositing the idea in the public domain so others can manufacture the product or use the idea to expand upon it. It's all about encouraging innovation, because without a patent system, there'd be no incentive to do so and the inventor would have to find other jobs.
While it's no doubt fun to rail against Big Pharma and Greedy Trial Attorneys, Occam's Razor still holds true.
The piece of the proposed legislation that would have made the most meaningful real-world change in the system was making it easier to collect attorney's fees from losing parties that had taken unreasonable positions in the litigation (e.g., trolls). After the Supreme Court expanded the trial courts' ability to do just that in the Octane Fitness and Highmark cases a few weeks ago, that naturally took a significant amount of wind out of the legislative sails.
The legislative appetite to Just Do Something diminishes quite a bit when the playing field has materially changed and there's not yet any data on how much of the problem was curbed by that change.
you're only a patent troll when you invent something that's part of a product people like and the giant megacorp took your idea from 15 years ago when it was ahead of it's time and decided not to pay you. but since people want that feature now and want it for free because now its obvious, you're a patent troll
The problem is that the situation you describe fits about 0.1% of patents, or less. The dream of the lone inventor making it big with the help of patent law isn't a fantasy, but it's so rare that it might as well be. In the meantime the current patent law structure serves mostly to impede technological progress and enrich patent attorneys.
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I posted an article describing the "why" a month ago. Totally not surprised that the current reform efforts exhibited the same arc.
That general model is exactly why this initiative collapsed as well. Several aspects of this reform - such as "attributable owner" rules, i.e., implementing laws that require patent applications to reveal the real party of interest in the case, as a measure addressing shell companies - were supported by large interests that benefited from them, and opposed by large interests that didn't. The result is stalemate, just as we've seen countless previous times in the patent "reform" discussion.
The only measures that make it through the "reform" system are mild improvements that don't affect some entities differently than others. And even those can be difficult - e.g., the first-to-file change in the America Invents Act is great for well-funded enterprises, but more problematic for small businesses. In that case, large enterprises simply steamrollered the opposition with lobbying cash.
The upshot is that the "reform" sytem is, itself, deeply dysfunctional. An additional tragedy is that efforts that would objectively improve the patent system for everyone, such as giving examiners more time to perform their examination and implementing more accountability for technically incorrect arguments, get lost in the struggle.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
I disagree.
Most of the Internet-related patents are so utterly obvious the patents should never have been issued. The reason companies don't want to license them is because thay add no value: The companies' engineers independently reinvented all of those trivially-obvious inventions, and now the patent holders are trying to hold them up for a lot of money. This is evidence that the system is badly broken.
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So once people say we will limit "abusive patent litigation" what does that mean?
The canonical example of "abusive patent litigation" would be the case where someone else with the same problem came up with the same solution independent of your efforts, and you sued them simply because you happened to register your solution with the patent office first. This covers in particular all the cases of "submarine patents" where someone anticipates a problem and patents all sorts of half-baked variations on possible solutions without actually putting in any of the effort to make them work, and then waits for someone else to do the actual innovation and bring a product to market before suing for infringement.
Independent invention should be an affirmative defense against claims of patent infringement. Put simply, if you developed a solution yourself, you shouldn't need anyone else's permission to use it. Naturally, the problem is proving that the solutions were really independent, since—unlike copyrights, for the most part—patents cover a very broad domain and two machines or manufacturing processes based on the same work need not show an obvious resemblance. A better solution would be to eliminate patents entirely. They don't really work to encourage innovation, they can't be implemented without violating people's natural rights, and they distort the entire economy for the sake of a mere incentive program.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat