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China Leads In Graphene Patent Applications
hackingbear writes According to British patent consultancy CambridgeIP, China has filed for more than 2,200 graphene patents, the most of any country, followed by the U.S. with more than 1,700 patents, and South Korea with just under 1,200 patents. In terms of institutions, Samsung, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and IBM lead the way of number of patent filing on this futurist materials with seemingly unlimited potentials, followed by Qinghua University of China. As China's moving its economy to be more innovation based and strengthening its IP laws, American companies will perhaps soon be at the receiving ends of patent law suits.
The only ones to get rich will be the lawyers.
Who drafted all these laws in the first place...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
On the other hand, in 20 years or so there won't be a single valid patent :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
China doesn't pay any attention to trademark, copyright, or patent law.
Why should anyone pay attention to their trademark, copyright, or patent applications? Or grants? They should just be round-filed until China takes on the concept of intellectual property. Not that I'm so in love with the whole idea myself, but there still nothing which is not hypocritical about the nation of China expecting us to give a shit about their IP.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We need to distinguish between a discovery and an invention, and prevent patenting the former. You shouldn't be able to patent graphene, as it is a discovery. If you invent a clever way to manufacture it cheaply, than you should be able to patent that method as it is an invention. Also, if you bring a lawsuit against someone for patent infringement and you lose, you should be executed.
This is what happens when you let everything get privatized, including basic research. You end up with no stake in the future.
Why is Snark Required?
I highly doubt that the solution is to abolish patents, though a great deal of patent reform is certainly necessary.
What we should de doing is looking at when patents are and are not useful, and modifying patent law accordingly. A lot of the analysis should be fairly straight forward to do. Patents themselves have to be registered, so we have records. When patent disputes are taken to the courts, we have records. Many, if not most, of the businesses that license patents have to publish financial reports. (Again, there are records.)
Questions can be asked and answered through all of that data. We can look at the optimal duration for patents for different sectors. We can look at what types of patents stimulate innovation, and what types of patents stifle innovation. We can even look at licensing practices in an effort to reduce the burden that patents place upon the courts.
It isn't all or nothing. Patents are neither entirely good, nor entirely bad. We simply need a way to separate the good from the bad so that we can keep the former and discard the latter.
What would be the point? We have no real manufacturing capability, so we'd just end up sending the stolen back IP to China to be made into products.
The U.S. still remains the largest producer of advanced technology products
Like everything else, these are mostly produced in other countries and then assembled here. Only a small portion of the manufacturing is actually done here, but we take credit for the whole thing. If everyone did that, we could probably double the world's reported production, but it wouldn't actually result in anything more being produced. I like to point to my engine, which is an International-Navistar supposedly MADE IN 'MERICA but whose block was cast in China. And that's over a decade old.
There are foreign companies that are in the process of moving some of their manufacturing to the US because of the reduced energy costs and reduced shipping costs are balancing the higher labor costs.
A little bit of manufacturing, and a whole bunch of assembly. Most of the actual manufacturing is being done in China, then the parts get shipped over and assembled. Subaru might assemble an engine here in the USA, but they don't cast parts here, either. Etc. This practice is restricted to large and heavy items, predominantly automobiles. All the modules (relays, computers etc) are made in other countries, like China or Malaysia. The leather is imported. The metal is imported if it isn't virgin; we send our steel to other countries for recycling so that we can abstract away the pollution.
China has had to manipulate it's currency to keep it's export costs down and attract business but there are limits to the manipulation.
Only the fat cats at the top win a race to the bottom.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's time to abolish patents completely.
It's clear that the patent system has serious problems. Patents on software or algorithms or business methods are absurd. However before we go ahead and abolish patents altogether, what is your proposed alternative solution to the free rider problem? Patents were created as a means to mitigate that specific problem. If you have no alternative to solve the free rider problem that is better than a well executed patent system (our current one is not well executed), then your argument is a non-starter. If you do have a solution to the free rider problem then let us know so we can alert the Nobel committee that they owe you a prize.
And before anyone says it, just abolishing patents and doing nothing else is NOT a better system even as screwed up as our patent system has become. If you need evidence of this, please show me how many inventions that would be patentable in the US or Europe that were invented in places without a patent system. Drugs, vehicles, integrated circuits, etc. You will find that places without something resembling a patent system also have a rather low rate of invention. While this is evidence based on a correlation, the correlation is VERY strong. Without some way to mitigate the free rider problem there is limited incentive to solve certain types of problems.
Unless we abolish patents, our children and grandchildren are going to be living in a world that is scarcely more technically advanced than our own is now.
Oh cut out the hyperbole. Technology is advancing very quickly even in the face of an arguably broken patent system. There is no evidence that our rate of technological advancement is slowing down.
Study: Patent Trolls Cost Companies $29 Billion Last Year
While I'm not arguing that patent trolls aren't a real problem (they are), $29 billion is pocket change compared to what companies made off of patented products last year. Intel alone had $52 billion in revenue last year, virtually all of it from patented products. Patented inventions account for literally Trillions of dollars of economic benefit to society, much of which would not exist without some sort of system resembling patents. For many types of inventions, it is virtually impossible to bring products to market in the face of the free rider problem. The solution to the free rider problem doesn't have to be patents in their current form but there does have to be some sort of solution to that problem. Simply tossing out patents without some alternative way to mitigate the free rider problem will almost certainly do more harm than good.