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Patents Are A Big Part Of Why We Can't Own Nice Things (eff.org)
An anonymous reader shares an EFF article: Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could allow companies to keep a dead hand of control over their products, even after you buy them. The case, Impression Products v. Lexmark International, is on appeal from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, who last year affirmed its own precedent allowing patent holders to restrict how consumers can use the products they buy. That decision, and the precedent it relied on, departs from long established legal rules that safeguard consumers and enable innovation. When you buy something physical -- a toaster, a book, or a printer, for example -- you expect to be free to use it as you see fit: to adapt it to suit your needs, fix it when it breaks, re-use it, lend it, sell it, or give it away when you're done with it. Your freedom to do those things is a necessary aspect of your ownership of those objects. If you can't do them, because the seller or manufacturer has imposed restrictions or limitations on your use of the product, then you don't really own them. Traditionally, the law safeguards these freedoms by discouraging sellers from imposing certain conditions or restrictions on the sale of goods and property, and limiting the circumstances in which those restrictions may be imposed by contract. But some companies are relentless in their quest to circumvent and undermine these protections. They want to control what end users of their products can do with the stuff they ostensibly own, by attaching restrictions and conditions on purchasers, locking down their products, and locking you (along with competitors and researchers) out. If they can do that through patent law, rather than ordinary contract, it would mean they could evade legal limits on contracts, and that any one using a product in violation of those restrictions (whether a consumer or competitor) could face harsh penalties for patent infringement.
Depends on the country you're in. Especially in consumer contract areas, laws in Europe very quickly void anything that could be considered an adhesion contract.
How it is handled in the United Corporations of America, though...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
John Deere tractors are already there.
So, essentially, "You have food, you have shelter, what are you complaining about? STFU!".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Mag-Moss: Learn it. Love it. Shove it down your lying dealer's throat.
While they are constantly trying to gut Mag-Moss and work around it with special tools that independents can't afford to stay up with, they still have zero legal power to void your warranty for having your car worked on by someone other than the dealer. They do, however, do an excellent job of convincing people that they can do it.
The other one they like to try is convincing you of is that your whole warranty is void because you made some modification (e.g. lowered suspension, replaced the radio, etc..).
Ever heard of the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act? Per federal statute, if you provide a full warranty at all, you are not allowed to require servicing only at dealer facilities. If the warrantor disclaims coverage due to alleged improper parts or servicing, even self servicing, he must prove that the outside servicing actually caused damage.
I'm really sick and tired of you Euro-trash running your mouths about the United States. You have an order of magnitude more of your own smelly shit going on, but do you own up to it? Hell no you don't. Your shit stinks just as bad as ours does, maybe even worse since there are so damned many of you. Meanwhile without the U.S. the world would be in a more sorry state right now than it already is. So how about you knock that shit off already?
Capitalism can become a kind of disease. Just like cancer, capitalism tries to expand its domain and take over everything that it touches. So here we have capitalism using patents to try to restrict the degree of ownership that a purchaser is allowed. The medical industry takes this sort of thing to new depths. The current Hep- C drug costs $80,000 in the US for the usual course of treatment. In India the identical drug costs $200... The fact that people in the US die for lack of that drug does not seem to bother the medical industry one bit. That is what patents and capitalism can do for you.
They are written vague on purpose, because to be specific, would allow others to build upon your patent, and patent their improvements, locking you into a stale old way of building said invention, never able to improve it.
This is precisely the type of abuse, by a handful of unscrupulous assholes (patent holders being, relative to the entirety of the population, a handful of people), which I propose we amend patent laws to prevent.
And, by amend, I truly mean "actually enforce the laws as written", since they already require some degree of specificity.
I am a patent lawyer, and I completely agree. My patents, of course, are clear and informative; but yes, there are many terrible ones out there. Frankly, it's partly unscrupulous assholes, but mostly incompetent and lazy assholes: to write a good patent application, you have to understand the invention... too many patent lawyers skip that step, take whatever the inventor sent them and slap some boilerplate "in some embodiments" language on it, and file it. Heck, you can still charge the same amount as a well-written patent, but can crank it out in an afternoon! What a world!
Fortunately, the courts and the patent office are finally pushing back on this. Most of the "abstract idea" rejections under Bilski and Alice Corp and other related 35 USC 101 cases are really about badly written patents that claim "A method for doing something awesome, comprising: applying rules, by an expert computer system, to do something awesome." What rules? How does it achieve that awesome result? Fark if anyone knows... the person drafting the patent sure as hell didn't. The cases that are being upheld are the ones that go into detail about what calculations are being performed, how the thing works, the low-level specifics of what it does, etc.
That said, patent law and courts and such are glacial. It'll be another decade and change before patents drafted and granted, say, 5 years ago, expire. And patent litigation with terrible patents will keep popping up over that time. But maybe by the 2030s, things'll start looking better. \_()_/
It's debatable whether the term should be shortened; many would argue it should be extended, as was done with copyright. Personally, I believe that patents and copyright were given the terms they were originally given based on how long it took to produce and circulate a work at the time that those respective laws were written; as both now take considerably less time, yes, I agree that the terms should be shortened.
Patent term has only ever been extended twice, and the second one wasn't a real extension (the change from 17-years-from-issue to 20-years-from-filing was based on an average 3 year prosecution queue, so the result is the same). Copyright has big money publishers on one side like Sony, Disney, Columbia, etc. wanting longer term and, what, pirates? The public? No money on the other side. So your bought-and-sold Congresscritter happily votes for term extensions.
But in patents, Apple, say, wants longer terms for their own patents, but shorter terms for Google and Microsoft's. And vice versa. So you get this pressure on both sides, with no real imbalance in money and lobbyists.
Incidentally, there's a safety valve in patent term already - patent owners have to pay maintenance fees that increase over the life of the patent, or it goes abandoned. Most patents in the tech sector are abandoned long before that 20 year term expires, because, after 10 years, say, they're obsolete. It's the pharmaceutical people who try to keep them alive until the very end, because of how long R&D and FDA approval takes. Increasing those maintenance fees would have the same effect of shortening patent term in fast moving industries while keeping it long where it's needed.