Slashdot Mirror
Patent 'Death Squad' System Upheld by US Supreme Court (bloomberg.com)
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld an administrative review system that has helped Google, Apple and other companies invalidate hundreds of issued patents. From a report: The justices, voting 7-2, said Tuesday a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office review board that critics call a patent "death squad" wasn't unconstitutionally wielding powers that belong to the courts. Silicon Valley companies have used the system as a less-expensive way to ward off demands for royalties, particularly from patent owners derided as "trolls" because they don't use their patents to make products. Drugmakers and independent inventors complain that it unfairly upends what they thought were established property rights. "It came down to this: Is the patent office fixing its own mistakes or is the government taking property?" said Wayne Stacy, a patent lawyer with Baker Botts. "They came down on the side of the patent office fixing its own mistakes." The ruling caused shares to drop in companies whose main source of revenue -- their patents -- are under threat from challenges. VirnetX, which is trying to protect almost $1 billion in damages it won against Apple, dropped as much as 12 percent. The patent office has said its patents are invalid in a case currently before an appeals court.
If the patent shouldn't have been granted, then it isn't a taking of property because it was never properly instantiated as IP.
Maybe this addendum to the patent office operation is a bad idea, but that's a different issue. Write to your Congressman.
Here are some ideas;
1. If it is done without computers, migrating a process to computers is not patentable.
2. If it is done locally on a computer, distributing pieces over a network (internal to the computer or external, esp. over the Internet) is not patentable.
3. Doing something already being done, but now "Over the Internet!", is not patentable.
4. Creating a virtual machine similar to a real one is not patentable.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The patent office has said its patents are invalid in a case currently before an appeals court.
If I am reading correctly (big if), this death squad is the first cut, and if you don't like it you can sue? Meaning, you just don't have the first round in court, but subsequent rounds are?
1 if your "portfolio" gets gutted by this then ALL of your patents are voided
2 these patents get put on a list of search here first items (to prevent somebody else from doing the same thing)
3 if your business is patents and 1 happens then all the execs should be barred from being an exec for ten years
(and no earning income from "consulting" either)
They might as well be saying, "We hide our taxes outside the USA [abusing the system], so closing the tax loophole will negatively affect us!"
Not a single tear.
I was hoping the Patent "Death Squad" actually hunted down patent trolls...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I read the article twice and still don't know what this is about. What was the problem before? And what did the ruling make happen? All I get is that some patents won't be enforced now, but that sounds like that should just be bad for everyone?
phew, your comment stinks. Yes creating a machine that can smell things on your behalf (an artificial nose?) should be patentable. No, taking said machine and putting one on either end of an internet connection should not be patentable.
Patents themselves are a government-issued monopoly to protect the companies from having to compete with others using the results of research without remuneration. It is an invention to try to encourage companies into research and costly development - with the promise that they will have a monopoly for a period of time.
What the government issues, they can revoke if they believe that it was issued in error.
Or is this basically a way for dominant corporations to flyswat people claiming infringement?
It's easy to like a system that makes "bad patents" get invalidated without the Eastern District of Texas seeing its income tick up due to court cases challenging patents.
But part of me worries that this will be just a system for big corporations to steal patents from legitimate patent holders.
At first I thought this was related to some kind of anti- socialized medicine propaganda about government run "death squads" that decide if patients get access to medical care! :)
The attempts to identify patents with "property rights" are part of the problem. At least here in the US THEY'RE NOT property rights. They're (supposed to be) a short term monopoly granted on an idea by the public to encourage more invention, not a commodity to be bought, sold, sat on and/or leased. The patent office/courts SHOULD lean towards the right of everyone to utilize these ideas/inventions freely unless the patent holder can show concrete evidence proving that it is an idea/invention they created first and that no one else could easily have thought of/developed it.
The patent should not be on the chemical produced (it exists in mature), but in the mehtod used to create it. If someone comes up with a better method (via whatever metric you want), then it will benefit the inventor. And if the process can be carried out by anyone with a still, then why do you deserve a monopoly?
The homily is "build a better moustrap" niot "patent the idea of catching rodents or other small pests for later disposal".
Partly the efficiency is having the first round not be in court, so the *appeals court* received all the records, and the decision, from the review board. All that process of gathering and presenting the facts and arguments is done through the board.
Secondly, it goes to an appeals court, not a trial court. The appeals court generally doesn't decide who is right, they decide whether the previous tribunal clearly screwed up. The difference may be subtle, but it's important. The question before an appeals court is "could the previous tribunal reasonably and properly come to that decision", not whether they SHOULD come to that decision.
What that means is you can't argue your case over, you have to articulate what the original tribunal did wrong.
Originally patents were not intended to spur innovation, engineers will always innovate, but to encourage inventors to share their ideas. This was so that we as society would not have to reinvent things over and over. This made sense 500 years ago when a research was minimal and often inventions involved luck and chance. Many societies forgot how to do things. If a good engineer can't invent the same thing that is in a patient in a months worth of work then your invention isn't innovative. 99% of all software patients are the obvious solution to the first person who sees the problem. It gets worse, since most patients are shit (I can't even read the ones my name is on), no one ever reads them. So the inventors aren't truly sharing their idea with the world because getting a patient is essentially hiding an idea in a huge pile of shit. If we want to keep patients then they should be things that are so truly innovative that I will want to read about them in a trade journal.
There is one special type of patient that some of you will argue for, that is for drug patents. However the huge cost of drugs is not the cost of research but because of the broken certification and marketing processes. A better way to find new drugs would have health providers pool their money and do their own research. That would mean in most countries the government would pay for not just the pure research but also the testing and certification.
Last point. At the moment, if someone does invent something new, useful and that isn't obvious from the finished product, they don't patent it. Look at how many manufacturing processes that are trade secrets. This is actually the area that England first introduced patents to avoid.
...patents are for multi-billion dollar companies to crush start ups that might compete with them.
The US legal system rubber stamps whatever the rich guy says.
Film at eleven.
And so it would appear that it is the US Patent Office that is invalid, not the patents themselves. The patents may have had merits, but the patent office has none.
Don't allow patents on something unless there is a working implementation of it (I say that just as one minimal barrier, not to say it should be the only requirement).