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Has the Supreme Court Made Patent Reform Legislation Unnecessary?
An anonymous reader writes: As Congress gears up again to seriously consider patent litigation abuse—starting with the introduction of H.R. 9 (the "Innovation Act") last month—opponents of reform are arguing that recent Supreme Court cases have addressed concerns. Give the decisions time to work their way through the system, they assert. A recent hearing on the subject before a U.S. House Judiciary Committee (HJC) Subcommittee shined some light on the matter. And, as HJC Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a long-time leader in Internet and intellectual property issues, put it succinctly in his opening remarks: "We've heard this before, and though I believe that the Court has taken several positive steps in the right direction, their decisions can't take the place of a clear, updated and modernized statute. In fact, many of the provisions in the Innovation Act do not necessarily lend themselves to being solved by case law, but by actual law—Congressional legislation."
you owe me 10000000 tiriion dollars for the electric motor .. assholes
What I relief, I expect Boehner and McConnell to pull their conservative troops together and whip this up in a jiffy...
well?
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Granted, the biggest problem with the patent system has been that the criteria for patentability has been so loose, and the recent Supreme Court rulings will certainly do more to fix that root cause than the recent patent reform bills. Hopefully going forward these new rulings will improve the quality of patents approved and upheld in court, which is by far the single most important reform needed in the long run.
But in the meanwhile there are more than 20 years of bad patents that have been granted, and the costs of defending against a patent lawsuit is still far greater than the cost of settling. We need to make it less expensive to challenge existing patents if we don't want them to continue to be a burden for the next 20+ years. That is exactly what the reform bills were about. They were designed to be complementary to the Supreme Court rulings, addressing a different parts of the problem.
I'm no Doomsayer, but which group of really old people should I be rooting for to straighten out this proprietary nightmare: the Congress or the Supreme Court?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Correction: the Chief Justice now insists that we call it "the SCOTUS/systemd system".
Here is the text of the law in question. Parts that interest me (ianalbirp):
1) Formalization of 'Covenant Not to Sue.'
2) Makes it harder to sue the customer when the manufacturer commits a patent violation.
3) Commissions various interesting studies on the effectiveness (or on the negative effects) of patents.
There might be more but I only have so much tolerance for reading legalese......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Goodlatte is a Republican who represents Virginia's 6th Congressional District. Any credible editor (i.e. not the Slashdot ones) would make sure that American legislators are identifed by, at a minimum, their State and party.
When patents serve no further purpose to society, as mere methods to stifle competition and society advancement.
Example of modern patent: we know that atoms are constructed of subatomic particles. We know how all molecules are made and we have secretly mapped it all out do that we know all possible combinations. We know how t rearrange matter into new shapes doing things with the basic properties of the universe. We know how math works and how information can be displayed in various ways. We know new information will come and need displayed. The modern patents are about pulling one of these designs out of the hat that is fully mapped out and predicted that anyone can fathom is there, because everything is made the same, giving whoever filed for the patent exclusive rights for monetary gain holding up and preventing others from using it.
Like we could imagine new types of atoms of different particle arrangements even without observing the atom itself, we knew it was there and could be made. This is what patents are being used for today. We are patenting things we already knew existed and which required nothing to invent. First come first served often times. Or whoever had the legal team and resources to get the patent filed, typically exclusively big corporations.
In today's system everyone is a patent troll because we are all at the same level of technology, and expertise, capable of "inventing" the same things. Subsequentialy there is no value in any invention (other than to corporations and rich people who use patents improperly, as I laid out), thus patents should be abolished entirely.
Copyrights similarly serve no purpose to the common man and while are more useful (a book author can have exclusive rights to their work for income), should be heavily restricted to prevent copyright being used merely to monopolize information and to bully others in society around who use it for cultural purposes or human expressions. Let's say a 20 year copyright is long enough. Then information should enter the public domain, and fair use rights should be expanded to allow information to be freely used socially and culturally.
obamasweapon.com
The thing is, the government has an almost unassailable lock on the use of force. Not that ANYONE can't use force. But the government can do it bigger, badder and better than pretty much anyone else.
With that, they can pretty much dictate what your "rights" are and are not.
It's only because the politicians can't guarantee loyalty (and their own security) from their armed forces if given such orders that prevents them from simply dictating that you have no rights and telling the public to go pound sand.
So we get the byzantine crap with our government slowly, but inexorably eroding our rights through legislation and all the "rights" are for rent (not sale, as sale implies a permanent situation) to the highest bidder of the moment.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The constitution gjves congres the ability to establish and regulate copyright. But yoy question was basically answered by its own wording. Any right granted can be removed also. That is why the founding documents talk about inalienable rights endowed by a creator- rights that exist purely becaause you exist and inherent within the conciousness of the majority of people.
This is why the GP is wrong too. One of the roles thd federal government was constituted to do was copyrights and pattents. Collective barganing is a bit different though. It is using the interstate commerce clause to impose requirements on employers to recognize unions and collective bargaining which is also exempt from monopoly laws too.
Precedent is good if you can afford to go through court and fight it... especially when trolls like to shop for a venue that's most favorable to them and least to their opponents. While reform might not stop all lawsuits (and certainly the trolls will try for some loopholes where possible) it should hopefully do better at knocking cases out before they even hit the courtroom.
The Constitution itself takes freedom from the people by giving Congress the power to grant a copyright.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
They have to take the patent cases out of the regular court system where places like east texas can be used to load the dice. Maybe create a federal patent court that specializes in patent cases would do the job - so you cannot shop for the best venue. They also have to make the plaintiff pay court costs for failed lawsuits plus maybe 10% of the claimed damages which would be split between the defendant and the courts/government. They also have to tighten up what is patentable, and for the most part software should not be patentable - it should be copyrightable only. Anything that is used for interoperability (APIs, interfaces and languages should be excluded).
Any time a headline ends with a question mark, the answer is a resounding "No."
A friend's boss saw him talking to a valve actuator using a tapping device and told him to talk to the patent lawyer about the invention. The "invention" was using a single wire to talk to something inside containment areas where drilling holes was a bad thing so wires could cost about a million a conductor. The resulting patent application didn't have that bit in it. It did have the use of a single wire for sending code using a keying device to another device. He ended up with a patent for using Morse code complete with encoding and everything else that was invented long ago. The bit about using the old technology in a unique way was missing.
While SCOTUS has made some sensible rulings recently, the lower courts are still making decisions as if nothing has changed.
Switching from "first to invent" to "first to file" makes no sense to me. If you're working on something for several years and some asshat hacks your computer, copies all the data, then files the patent, why should they get credit for it? Beyond that, I don't understand how some filers seem to be able to get patents in a few months while others take YEARS to even get reviewed. Something doesn't smell right here. And then there's the patent troll problem. Why has nobody put forth legislation that requires the patent holder to also be the applier of the technology? Nobody likes campers in a MMO game. IMHO, if you own a patent, you should be required to create a real product with it and sell it in order to benefit from the patent protection.
Good luck trying to actually prove that not having patents does more harm than having sane patents. You can't really prove it. It was another social experiment like the ones before it. Without patents, people will sit on secrets and use security by obscurity which could prevent or lose inventions that benefit society. Which is the reason patents were created; however, today we better understand this situation. Furthermore, this is the information age where secrets are not well hidden for long.
Employers have to be careful with their secrets... but because of patents they don't have to worry much about secrets leaking out so their employees are disposable... not entirely because there is plenty of stuff they can't OWN so they try to force people into non-compete contracts so they can screw over more employees! The paranoia of competition never really goes away even for the many monopolies (who worry about democracy and the free market so they attack it constantly. the true traitors.)
Sure some inventions wouldn't happen; but a great deal of the big inventions come from publicly funded sources who do most the groundwork if not nearly everything up to the mass production stage. Sure, we now have private funding playing a bigger role at undermining our research institutions but they used to be better funded... Also we used to do research without patents PREVENTING and adding to the cost of doing important research that benefits all of humanity.
Great discoveries are not happening because some prof and his students are unable to use patented techniques or because they only can get grants for better Viagra and not for dull groundwork but fundamental to future discovery.
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The extensions to copyright haven't revoked the public-domain status of any material where the copyright has expired; what is *HAS* done is delay, again and again, the point at which existing copyrighted material falls into public-domain. This is popularly attributed to Hollywood, especially Disney, not wanting to see their properties fall out of copyright. It's believed, for example, that the inclusion of the legacy Oswald Rabbit character in the Epic Mickey videogames was a deliberate attempt to 'refresh' the copyright to avoid it falling into PD status. Sadly, the arguments to SCOTUS have failed to produce any improvement on this; the Justices have basically said that setting copyright terms falls to Congress, and that "securing for limited times" theoretically means eternity-minus-one-day if they so choose. Practically speaking, someone with an interest in bringing material out of copyright is going to have to out-spend/lobby Hollywood to overcome the MAFIAA wishes to keep extending terms.
Not an appeals court, that is several levels up. It may already be too late since you might be required to post a bond in the matter of 100s of millions of dollars while you are appealing - which in many cases force the company into settlement talks since that may not be affordable. There should be a specialized court which handles patent cases right at the beginning of the process. Decisions would still be able to be appealed through the appropriate channels.
How about this for a potential solution? NIH, as federally funded, cannot or will not patent new devices you (and other researchers) come up with. Fine. How about sending copies of your writings directly to the Patent board - for inclusion in the body of prior art they use to reject patents.
That may be one way to put them in the public domain, so to speak, so that companies could USE your design, but could not patent it for themselves - any patent application would just get rejected via prior art.
May be worth a shot.
Patent law invented largely fol physical inventions in a bygone age where the pace of change was at least an order of magnitude slower certainly need deep revising. As does the notion of what can be legitimately patented. Patenting software is like patenting a mathematical proof or a bit of music.
IP law granting all rights to one party (copyright) for on the order of 99 years or more make no sense at all in an era of rapid innovation and when copying is as easy and ubiquitous as breathing rather than what was the case in the days of old school printing.
I would go for severely restricting what is subject to patent and making open licensing mandatory after 5 years and dropping the patent protection after 15. We want to reward creators and implementation folks, yes. But we don't want to or need to criminalize legitimate productive activity and simply enjoying what our technooloy can bring us to do so.