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US Patent Operations May Shut Down In Second Week of February (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office said it may have to cease patent operations in the second week of February if the partial government shutdown continues, though it has money for trademark work through mid-April. Any furlough of staff could mean significant delays in reviewing the tens of thousands of applications on inventions for things like telecommunications hardware and the next cutting-edge medical treatments. Now it takes on average 15.8 months before a patent applicant can expect a preliminary response from an examiner. More than 640,000 patent applications were filed in fiscal 2018.
The patent office, part of the Commerce Department, is funded entirely by user fees and gets no tax dollars, but it requires an appropriation from Congress to spend the money it collects. In fiscal 2018, it had a budget of $3.3 billion and has asked for $3.5 billion for fiscal 2019. The patent office sets aside authorized money in what's called an operating reserve to account for "temporary changes in our cash flow" and that's what it has been using to stay open since the partial shutdown began Dec. 22. At the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, it said it had 1.3 months of operating expenses for patent operations and 4.9 months of expenses for trademark operations.
The patent office, part of the Commerce Department, is funded entirely by user fees and gets no tax dollars, but it requires an appropriation from Congress to spend the money it collects. In fiscal 2018, it had a budget of $3.3 billion and has asked for $3.5 billion for fiscal 2019. The patent office sets aside authorized money in what's called an operating reserve to account for "temporary changes in our cash flow" and that's what it has been using to stay open since the partial shutdown began Dec. 22. At the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, it said it had 1.3 months of operating expenses for patent operations and 4.9 months of expenses for trademark operations.
Get a rope!
The Democrats say Businesses have to much control of the government.
The Republicans say Government have too much control of business.
This is a fair statement of their positions and the truth is they both are wrong. Business and government NEED each other. Not too much and not too little but they quite literally cannot exist without each other. Businesses need to be kept in check by government so that their interests don't run too far contrary to that of the greater society. Governments need businesses to channel profit motives in economically useful ways that governments aren't generally well equipped to handle. Without businesses, governments cannot raise the capital needed to govern properly and without governments, businesses don't have a stable ecosystem in which to operate. Businesses cannot enforce contracts without government. Government isn't very good at raising large amounts of capital. Businesses need regulation to keep the Tragedy of the Commons from becoming real and to keep incentives aligned with those of society. Governments need guidance on when they cross the line to too much regulation. They need each other and don't work well without a good relationship.
There seems to be symbiotic relationship between a business and government. Which both sides thinks the other is actually being parasitic.
There IS a symbiotic relationship between them. The problem is that a lot of bogus political rhetoric and self interest has gotten in the way of a lot of people recognizing this fact lately. But businesses and governments in our modern understanding of them both don't really exist without each other. We need each to keep the other in check and we need both to have a civil and prosperous society.
What seems to be the problem, is really a good lack of a middle ground.
The middle ground is and always has been there. Honestly they've generally done a pretty good job of figuring out where it is. The US and other major economies reflect this fact in their economic success. The process isn't always neat and tidy and there is a lot of debate and messy politics but it tends to get figured out. The problem lately is that the government politics at least in the US has kind of run away from the bargaining table for a variety of reasons. Sound bite ideology gets political power even when it bears no resemblance to evidence based governing.
On top of this, surely the guys flying their private jets around wouldn't like air-traffic to get grounded or for themselves to get in an accident? Just read today that many air-traffic controllers are now working second jobs out of necessity leading to sleep deprivation which sounds like the perfect combination of factors for some massive fuckups to happen. And that's what they're saying. Trump is playing with lives here.
I'm so glad right now that I'm not American because this shit is insane to follow even from the outside. Like, the government is essentially using close to a million people as slave labor right now and putting actual lives at risk because the guy in charge is a dude with the brain of a toddler that wants a massively expensive wall that will do nothing. I mean hell, didn't it just come to light in the el Chapo trial that the cartels are using planes, self-made submarines and tunnels to smuggle stuff in? And isn't it public knowledge at this point that most people who're in the US illegally have entered there legally? How many American lives is this shit worth? Because this keeps going and people will die as a result, that should be clear.
This shouldn't be a partisan issue at all. Like for fuck's sake Republicans: let Trump throw his tantrum about the wall and any other shit as much as you want, but do it without trying to actively ruin the finances and lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Why do they insist on letting him hold the country hostage? I thought there was supposed to be checks and balances. To top of the idiocy the republicans themselves don't want the wall, they could have passed the funding for that prior to the elections but they didn't, so what the fuck is this shit? They're letting a man-baby hold the entire government hostage for what, exactly? Are they this fucking spineless? Because it sure seems that way.
Of all of the outright moronic shit the Solarium Sultan with 'a very good brain' has said and done is this clusterfuck of a presidency, this shit takes the cake. This is beyond idiotic, and I hope you guys now that the longer this goes on, the more you're being laughed at abroad, because at this point it's the only thing left to do. It's absurd, and for the sake of the Americans I know and care about, I really hope you guys get your shit together, because this is some truly dangerous banana republic level bullshit. I expect this from like an African or a south American country, not the fucking US of A.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
The original concept of patents wasn't bad. They were meant to cover the tangible implementation of an idea and give the inventor a way to protect profits for a period (the first patent was 10 years) and then the information about the invention was released freely after the patent expired so that others could make duplicates and/or improve on it.
Of course it only took a few decades for people to start patenting stupid shit like salt. That lead to problems and a sort of patent reform in the 16th century that invalidated virtually all previously granted patents. After that, new inventions had to be novel and unique. For a while , patents worked reasonably well and helped drive the industrial revolution.
Sometime around the early 1800s, patents started being allowed for improvements to existing devices (not entirely a bad thing) and ideas that had no specific use (which was an entirely bad thing and is the basis for the patent trolls we suffer from today).
The late 1800s/early 1900s saw the rise of the use of patents to block competition and create monopolies. From there on, things have generally gone downhill with patents increasingly being granted for stupidly simple things like rounded corners, business models, software that does nothing special and overly broad patents.
We've pulled back a bit and the overly broad patents used by patent trolls have increasingly been being invalidated, but patents are still problematic. Still, the fundamental idea isn't a bad one. The problems primarily stem from the constant expansion of the scope of what can be patented.
(and yes, I've left out about a billion pages of details and significant moments in patent history, but I'm not writing a novel... there are lots of good websites that discuss the history of patents if you're interested in a more comprehensive history)
The patent system is a farce