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Is H.R.1907 Patent Reform that We Want?
"What is Trudel ranting against? I wasn't quite sure after reading his pages. Is his only gripe the publishing of patent applications 18 months after filing, whether or not the patent is granted? What does Trudel stand to gain or lose? Might Trudel have a hidden agenda against other provisions in H.R.1907?
What kind of "reform" are Trudel's antagonists proposing? I couldn't determine this from his rants either. (I haven't read H.R.1907 in its entirety, because frankly, I don't have time.) What do Trudel's antagonists stand to gain or lose?
What are the implications?
Could Trudel be right? Will the "reform" usher us into a world where US inventors and corporations are hurt by foreign concerns? I don't see how.
- If a patent is granted, the patent holder has his US monopoly, even if foreigners could read his application before the monopoly was bestowed.
- If a patent wasn't granted, it can't be argued that the patent application filer has lost anything because the idea was either: prior art, not innovative, or obvious. (Damn bloody obvious with how the PTO grants patents even for obvious methods!)
So what are the real issues?
What does it all mean?"
I think that the BIGGEST problem with current patent laws is that the duration of patents is too long. The original timeframes were desinged for a world in which change (technological, social, financial) happened at a FRACTION of what it does today.
I believe that we should tie the duration of a patent to the amount of time that it takes for a given industry to get 'up to speed' on a new product and get profit from it.
For example:
Pharmaceutical patents should 15-20 years.
Hardware patents should last 8 years.
Software patents should last 4 years.
If you haven't made your fortune in the patent window, then get off the pot, buddy, someone else wants a turn!
Also, I believe that the situation is not quite as simple as it has been portrayed here. I may be wrong, but my understanding was that celera would release the genetic information for free to academia and for research purposes, and only charge royalties for medicines or other mass products made with this information. This makes a lot of sense, since it will take huge amounts of money to actually mass produce these medicines, so the producer can certainly afford some royalties and not be prevented from operating.
According to the actual laws, you couldn't patent something for "use in treatment of cancer." You have to patent a process.
Of course, what is actually on the books, and what happens are two different things. See software patents. They were illegal for many years, then some judge suddenly decided that he didn't like them being illegal ($$$$), and set a precedent. There was enough money involved that only the barest outlines of a precedent was all that was needed to open the floodgates.
Software patents are corrupt and illegal.
Umm....this only applies to something NEW that the "inventor" has done. They have discovered a new process or invented a new gadget. If they find out how something OLD works, then that is hardly new.
Is the ability to choose whether or not you let other people use your idea and whether or not you charge for this irrelevant to you anti-patent people? I don't believe that patents are a government-granted monopoly any more than anti-theft laws give people property monopolies. People earn thingd and those thing should be protected from theft. And whether you view it this way or not, if you copy someones invention without their permission, you are stealing the same as if you shook them down and stole their wallet. E.
Thge patent office already determine whether something is good/bad before patenting it. They simply need to hire someone that knows whether someone is trying to patent something very simple and obvious or something that is a real breakthrough. But, don't expect many people here on Slashdot to agree with you, the party line here at slashdot is that ownership of any kind and in any form is oppression. E.
Well, you see, when you're arguing for doing away with private property and implement this great "you can steal from me if I can steal from the next guy" orgy that doing away with patents will bring about.... you can't make sense. There is absolutely 0 logic behind it, only flawed premises and conclusions based on an intense desire to not have to produce anything of value and to not have anyone else find out how worthless they are. So when you argue this, you simply have to ramble and ramble, throw in some mentions of how cruel an honest system is to louts and unproductive people, etc. Don't be surprised by this.
E.
The point of patents isn't to ensure compensation for R&D (patents do attempt to do this, but it's a means to an end, not an end in itself). Rather, patents exist to encourage companies and individuals to publish their ideas. If you invent something neat, you have two choices: Patent it, and get a guaranteed monopoly for 17 years (after which anyone can use the idea), or don't patent it, and do everything in your power to keep the idea behind your product hidden, so that nobody can duplicate it and compete with you. If patents didn't exist, only the latter choice would be available, and nobody would publish the ideas behind neat inventions.
Okay.
Your turn; how do you reward inventors without allowing them to control (with threat of legal force against brigands) their Int.Prop.?
Solve that one, and yeah, we don't need Patents/etc.
Problem is how to do it without making the government subsidize everyone who claims to be an 'inventor'.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
> Their patent system tends more to distribute technology than to restrict its use.
Yes, and look at where Japan is: leadership in electronic technology, majority market share. And look at the US: companies fighting each other with patents, wasting money in lawsuits instead of actually building things and making a profit.
I guess he'd rather have an economy based on litigation than manufacturing.
imagine 5 auto companies on the virge of making an safety breakthrough, but then one gets the patents first and the others get locked out for 20 years. also, imagine a pharmacutical company that finds that the most promising path for cureing aids uses a common chemical group that they cant patent, but a less promising path uses chemichals they can patent - even though they may not be as effective and have lots of side-effects
I hope you don't read Trudel's claims uncritically. First, 18-30 months is more typical for the period for issuance of a patent. You don't have to take my word for it--look up some patents yourself on a patent server such as http://www.patents.ibm.com/. Both filing dates and issue dates are listed.
Second, third parties were allowed to request reexamination proceedings even before HR 1907. HR 1907 only allows them to be more directly involved in the process--prior to HR 1907, they could file the Request for Reexamination but had no additional input into the reexamination proceedings.
Third, a Request for Reexamination is something that can be filed only after a patent is granted anyway, so it can't possibly affect the time it takes to grant the patent.
Fourth, to claim the First Inventor Defense, you have to have been doing it at least a year before the effective filing date (which basically means the earliest filing date anywhere in the world), not just before the issue date as Trudel claims. This is fairly clear in the text of HR 1907--at least as clear as legalese gets--so I have to wonder whether Trudel is deliberately misrepresenting the law, or is just stupid.
Yeah, how do you do this without running it as taxes, distributed by the government, and how do you keep it from being a popularity contest? Or is that all it's about?
I agree. But how do you make it *pay*, and how do you do that without burning the people at the bottom (see current taxes).
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
is not just the publishing of patent applications after 18 months. It is that combined with prior use being a defense against infringement. Unless there were last minute changes, if someone uses the technology covered by a patent before it is issued, they never have to pay royalties. It takes an average of 47 months for a patent to be issued. This will increase, now that uninvolved third parties can challenge the application on a whim.
Maybe if this theft of ideas continues, the innovators should take a leaf out of Atlas Shrugged, withdraw from the system and let it all go to hell...
when the government sanctions a monopoly for 20 years, this is not capitalisim by any rational means. property rights just dont come about because the govt says so!! was slave ownership a property right too??
WRONG! I suggest you read the reasoning the founders (US) gave for patents. I believe Jefferson and Franklin specifically stated some stuff reguarding the matter.
Give an explicit quote by one of these two, or admit that you're pulling this out of your ass.
Historians know perfectly well that the purpose of patents was primarily to benefit society, not the individual inventor.
And what about the rights of the person who invented the same thing 10 seconds after the patenter? Get real. Patents might work if they were a realistic reflection of the real world. eg. an independent inventor of a patented product gets rewarded too but at the moment the patent system is a close to total stuffup and a massive tax on the community.
Hear, hear! The number one argument for patents given by the IP industry is that it encourages innovation. I've seen very little evidence of that. The highest growth industries have been those that didn't have patents. The onus should be on the patent office to justify their tax on the community.
The lack of funding could be destructive to life-saving research. Therefore a 10% tariff on all sales of anything to anybody should be imposed, to go to organizations that engage in life-saving research.
It makes a whole lot of sense. Let's do it!
Well, that's their problem. If you say you invented something I've been making for 50 years then you're just wrong. Why should you get a patent on it?
Complete and utter bullcrap. 1.5-2.5 years is typical. Filing+20 is almost always longer than Issue+17.
You don't have to take my word for it. Look up some U.S. patents on a patent server such as http://www.patents.ibm.com/. The filing date and issue date are both listed.
They already are, as reexaminations are already part of the current patent law. The fact that U.S. firms don't have to endlessly defend their patents against re-examination by Japanese keiretsus shows that this is not a major problem.
And it works both ways, too--if this were true, Japanese keiretsus would have to endlessly defend their patents against re-examination by U.S. firms.
One of the right things about U.S. (and worldwide) patent law is that it is completely oblivious to whether the parties involved are American or foreign. Foreign inventors have neither more nor less rights to patent protection in the U.S. than American inventors. (Of course, that in itself probably drives protectionists like Trudel crazy.)
Not so. Once a patent application is published it becomes part of the prior art, thus preventing anyone else from patenting it. At least in theory. But the solution to that is to improve the PTO's prior art searching, not to continue to prohibit publication of patent applications.
My brain does not have that capablity, so what the hell do you exspect me to do?
--Delmoi, posting anon to save what little karma I've got
If this IS automatically generated (I have my doubts), it reads better than a lot of human-generated documents I have encountered. Is the source available anywhere, or is the technique patented ? This could save me a lot of work...
Surely as the inventer of the Internet Al Hore has a CS background (or at least a EE/Networking background) What makes you think he is not qualified to review patents ?
There are rumors circulating that I myself will never identify with libidinous pernicious dipsomaniacs, so let me just clarify something: A great many of us don't want the US Government Patent Policy to lead an active disinformation campaign. But we feel an enormous societal pressure to smile, to be nice, and not to object to its neurotic clueless editorials. As something that enjoys brandishing words like "stereophotogrammetry" and "honorificabilitudinity" as a smoke screen to hide its policies' inherent paradoxes, the US Government Patent Policy must unequivocally be at a loss when someone presents a logical counterargument to its cocky press releases. There are some huffy heretics who are two-faced. There are also some who are contumelious. Which category does the US Government Patent Policy fall into? If the question overwhelms you, I suggest you check "both". In closing, the US Government Patent Policy's scribblings are nothing short of crapulous.
It's not as bad as it looks, especially when you compare it to current law.
In order for something to constitute prior art, it generally must be published. If you've been building X for 50 years out in your garage, but nothing was ever published about it, that's not prior art. Someone else can still patent it. That may not seem fair, but look at it from a practical standpoint--how is the person who wants to patent it, or the PTO, even supposed to know that you've been doing it for 50 years?
The change the HR 1907 makes in its First Inventor Defense is that you would get to keep making X, in spite of the fact that the other inventor has a patent on X. Currently, you can't even do that.
Your Flaming the wrong person, those comments are the submiters, Ken Hendrickson N8KH, not the posters.
(I take it you meant to write "against patent reform?") Only by filling it with misinformation, apparently.
The protections granted by the US Patent system was the Engine of Prosperity (the title of Trudel's book) that drove the explosion US industrial development in the last two centuries.
I seem to recall from high school history that the Industrial Revolution hit Europe about a hundred years before it hit the U.S. Granted, this is due mainly to other historical factors and not the respective patent systems specifically, but it's hardly an endorsement of the U.S. patent system above all others.
The US Patent system, as defined in the Constitution, is the strongest and best patent system in the world. It was also the first.
First, the patent system isn't "defined" in the Constitution, the Constitution only grants Congress the power to establish a patent system. Second, I think the discussion here shows clearly that the U.S. system is not the best in the world. Third, as far as its strength goes, I don't know about that. Fourth, the U.S. patent system was definitely not the first--the Statute of Monopolies, passed by British parliament in 1624, was the first patent system. (Patents were granted even earlier than that, but they were pretty much at the whim of whomever was in power.)
Japan successfully lobbied the US Congress to change US Patent law. The changes resulted in substantially weakening the international protective power of US patents.
US Patents have no "international protective power," and never did. A US patent protects an invention only in the US. If you want your invention protected in Japan, you need a Japanese patent. This is nothing new--this is how it's always been.
The Japanese lobbying effort started when one of the heads of a major keiretsu declared that US Patent protections were an unacceptable obstacle to Japanese competitiveness. He points out that this amounted to a systematic campaign by the Japanese to steal a fundamental constitutional right from the citizens of the US.
Um, exactly what right was stolen? US patent law treats foreigners exactly the same as US citizens, with neither more nor less rights. As far as I know, it always has. Of course, I imagine this in itself would bug a xenophobe like Trudel.
Patent filings were once held unpublished until approved. Now they are openly accessable to competitors for 18 months. This allows competitors (foreign and domestic) to copy the design, sell it, and then defend themselves against patent suits by claiming "prior use".
"Once?" They still are in the US. The rest of the world publishes patent applications 18 months after filing, and their patent protection hasn't collapsed. The part about competitors being able to claim "prior use" is nonsense--you have to have been doing it before the patent application was filed--not granted--to claim prior use.
Originally, patents lasted for 17 years from issue. Now they are for 20 years after filing. Many patents take 10 or more years to be approved. The effective lifespan for a patent is now much shorter and in many cases is zero.
Complete nonsense. Patents usually take 1.5-2.5 years to grant in the US. The patent term is longer for most patents than it would have been under the old system. Don't take my word for it--look up US patents yourself on one of the patent servers, which list both filing dates and issue dates.
and I'm tired of all the poor justifications people use to uphold them ..
a simple way to see through them is to see they're like an older incentive.:
eg
slavery was considered a property right
without slavery there is no incentive to grow cotton
the fact that they had a productive cotton crop "prooved" that slavery was good?
most people, even slaves think slavery is right, so it must be ok
I took the time and effort to get a slave, therefore i deserve to own one
now apply these arguments to patents as a right and you will see that it's a bunch ok bunk
http://www.shugashack.com/
We could get along just fine without technology patents. All we need is a system that allows companies to control their implementation of a technology. I am not talking about stuff like TCP/IP I am talking about things like allowing M$ to control DirectX while allowing Apple and Linux developers to make compatable products.
Budding lawyers and activists? ha.
I'm an engineer and the application of the US patent system affects many aspects of my work. I personally own 6 patents and have brought 17 to various companies. I have expended the resources to get these patents out of plausible protectionist speculation. If I didn't, other individuals and companies would do so and attempt to extort money or bring barriers to competition.
I have to be very careful as to not infringe on pending or granted patents. Thanks to my stupidity, I brought some broad sweeping and fairly obvious patents into the hands of previous employers, who, after I left the company, threatened litigation as I had been implementing solutions using similar principles.
This story is very legitimate given the original intent of this site. If an article does not spark your interest, then do not read it. If you want more articles relating to high level *nix knowledge, then submit them please.
Someone clue me in - how can you patent _knowledge_? I understand patenting an idea based upon that knowledge, or a mechanism for utilizing that knowledge, but are companies actually trying to patent the knowledge of the function of a gene? Sounds idiotic to me.
If I invent a really cool noncomputer hardware machine in my garage it will take me more than two years to bring it to market after the patent is applied for.
In the real world a large company will ship millions of the machine I invented the day the patent runs out. I, small time operator, will go bankrupt and end out my days saying, "Would you like fries with that maam?"
And this is only if the device dosn't fall under any government supervision at all. The feds can make the intro of a new product take as long as decades in some fields.
I myself suffer from an incurable, but in all likelyhood treatable, genetic (they think) disease that isn't even being studied because the current patent laws don't allow a drug company to even recoup research costs, let alone make a profit. Where does that benifit me and the millions like me?
People here in the computer world think of 3 year standard eternities as the norm. They arn't.
The current patent system is deeply flawed on many levels. The patent concept isn't.
that are the problem. The actual issue is the duality of **stupid** patents and the fact that searching for cases of prior art etc.. is nearly impossible for the average mortal. The way things are currently, I don't even think it's necessary to submit samples of whatever is being patented - you can just write a fairly brief statement describing it and then that's that.. What might help alleviate the problem would be a more simplified method of accessing the (database?) listing of patents, and perhaps even a better system of tracking patents altogether; not to mention that a pre-requisite should be a sample of code/technical schematics or whatever.. anyway, just my $.02
Don't worry, this guy checks out ok. I called and he has an expensive digital answering machine.
Okay, and assuming you prosecute people who use the Free and Open ideas (tm) who aren't part of the profit-sharing plan...
:)
Sounds similar to Open Source
So we need critical mass in order to do this, (again). Musicians against the Copywrite of Samples would be one place to start, as would a number of MP3 groups, I wonder if an MP3 site would like to take the lead on this.
Ideas for other content-providers?
-- Ender, Duke_or_URL
Unfortunately, we still have to jump thru hoops for patents and things -- in order to prosecute against people who aren't playing in the Free & Open Network (tm).
And how do we keep from segmenting into a bunch of Free & Open Networks, with different renumeration standards, etc - each having to watch the other organizations (and individuals who don't want to play in them at all) -- or do you think it would all even out in the market? (ie: best renumeration for musicians would attract the best musicians eventually beating out all other groups?) -- What about cross-content vs. fragmentation; ie: MP3 manufacturers benefit from having lots of MP3 content, but if they play in the Manufacturers Free & Open Network (ie: patents on memory, etc), and the musicians all play in the Recording Artists Free & Open Network, how do they get benefits?
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
These automatic script generators are starting to scare me. It first sounded like a campain speech, but it has the structure of a fill in the blank name calling rant sheet.
On the calendar, perhaps. As far as the patent system goes, they need to first get to where the rest of the world was in the 20th century before they can think about joining the 21st.
Actually YOU are speaking for all Slashdotters by saying that we don't want to be spoken for. Perhaps you do not like it. That is fine. Slashdot attracts a certain type of person. In that sense generalization is possible. If you are not that type of person, don't read it...
-Chuck
PTO regulations state that a patent is denied if it would be obvious to someone of "ordinary skill in the art" -- to a peer. Chemical process patents should not be obvious to "ordinary" chemical engineers, and so forth.
The usual method of showing obviousness is to show prior art that does much the same thing. Previously granted patents, journal articles, and products in the marketplace all help establish that a method was already well-known when the person applied for a patent.
Hah. Patents are getting granted for the kinds of ideas I come up with while sitting on the can. The people who make the most noise about patents and protecting their IP rights always seem to be the ones with mediocre ideas that anyone could think of. The Amazon one-click is just one of a long lineage. People with real innovations just release software and move on to their next idea.
Alas, yes! That's very exactly what some companies tried to do : to patent the genes themselves. They thought they could decode a DNA sequence without having any idea of its functionnality (if any) and to wait for somebody else to find out any useful cure or whatever involving this gene and claim royalties...
... I know all those patents have been set on hold, but I'm not entirely sure there's now a well defined policy of repelling once for good this kind of patents.
The rationale behind this attempt was to "compensate" the cost of DNA sequencing. Hum
The remaining issue is whether or not somebody can claim a patent on gene functionnality or only on cures and medecines using this functionnality.
If the IP rights of the inventor were the purpose of patents, and not the means to an end (i.e., disclosure of information)--that is, if inventors had a fundamental right to their inventions--then the founders would have granted patent rights in perpetuity, not just for a limited time. The fact that such rights are specified in the Constitution to be granted only for a limited time indicates that the founders did not view such rights as fundamental.
I agree (except for blaming Cliff - I imagine it was the person who submitted the post).
I don't want the patent system to be removed. I think the patent system is great, with the exception that software patents are too often too obvious and secondly actually involve no true invention. I personally don't think software should be patentable - I think it should have its own form of copyright/patent that lasts only 2-5 years, but since this probably won't happen, I'd at least like to see some reform.
Of course, if I read this correctly, this is very bad news...
You mean the "effective filing date"? That's just the first date you filed the patent application anywhere in the world. This is not a change from current law.
Pg. 20: requires that a process be reduced to "practice" at least a year prior to the filing of a patent in order to be a defense. Seems dangerous. What if I have developed a process in my business, but haven't documented it to a practice -- and some bozo tries to patent that same process and I don't get word of it. Did I just lose my "prior art" defense against infringement?
"Reduced to practice" means you've actually done it. Just thinking of it isn't sufficient. For example, one might argue that Da Vinci "invented" the helicopter, but he never "reduced it to practice," that is, he never built a working helicopter.
Burden of proof: So far my worst finding... It puts the burden of proof for infringment on the "alleged" infringer. 'xcuse me. I thought under US law a person was innocent until proven guilty.
It's saying if you use this particular defense against a claim of patent infringement, the burden of proof is on you. This is not the only possible defense against an infringment claim, and the person claiming infringement still has the burden of proof of showing you were doing what is claimed in the patent.
To put it another way: if I claim you are infringing a patent of mine, it is up to me to prove that you are doing what is claimed in my patent. However, if I meet that burden of proof, once I have conclusively demonstrated that you are doing what is claimed in the patent, you can still get away with it if you can show that you were doing it at least a year prior to my patent filing. But the burden of proof for that defense is on you. I have already met my burden of proof.
Pg:23==>A successful infringement defense does not necessarily invalidate the patent. Oh yeah? Isn't a successful defense somewhat a proof of "prior art".
Keep in mind that this section is talking only about the First Inventor Defense. There are other defenses against a patent infringement claim not discussed in this section, for example, that the patent is invalid. What this section says is, if you were doing it long before I was (but you never published, thus there is no prior art), you are permitted to keep doing it, but my patent is still valid and I can enforce it against anyone else besides you. The fact that you were doing it does not necessarily constitute prior art, because prior art requires publication.
It is illegal to patent math. Computer science IS math. (I mean CS, not "IT"). Software patents are illegal. But there is too much money involved, so exceptions are made.
Patents Act 1977
- --
------------------
Section 1: Patentable Inventions
1.07:
It is hereby declared that the following (among other things) are not inventions for the
purposes of this Act, that is to say, anything which consists of -(
a) a discovery, scientific theory or mathematical method;
(b) a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work or any other aesthetic creation
whatsoever;
(c) a scheme, rule or method for performing a mental act, playing a game or doing
business, or a program for a computer;
(d) the presentation of information;
-----------------------------------------------
This Act is not new and is unlikely to change any time soon with respect to software. Hopefully, Parliament will add an amendment for the exclusion of discovered genetic material, just in case.
Things are soo much simpler in England and Europe - why is the U.S., supposedly the world's most advanced nation, having to play catch-up to the rest of the world? Even WIPO and EPO tow the line - they currently state that software-only inventions have the same legal status as literary and scientific works and thus should not be protected via patent.
My £0.02 (pounds sterling),
An Englishwoman.
I'm probably just as misinformed, but from what I've heard, our system is much better. Theirs supposedly leaves quite a bit more open to patent abuse.
<MISINFORMATION><RANT>Our major problem is that obvious stuff can get patented. But from what understand, in the Japanese system, not only can you patent obvious things, you don't have to apply it. You can basically just patent the idea of doing something a certain way. Also, all patent details are published far (i.e. nearly a decade) in advance of when the monopoly is granted. And until its granted, you have very limited protection. By the time its granted, its obsolete. The system only really supports abusive patents. It's great for giant corporations that need a new technology. Basically, its a sham. They can use your idea if you patent it, and you have even less protection if you don't.</MISINFORMATION></RANT>
The Principia IS a serious work of literature!
I think there is a misperception here on Slashdot about "obviousness." In the USA, a patent must merely be unobvious to the common individual, not the common Slashdot reader. To you or I, one click shopping may be an obvious database query, but to the average layman, this is rocket science. How many computer scientists would think that the "Davy Process" in chemical engineering is obvious and should not be patented?
As it currently stands, there is a HUGE benefit to a company holding even a bogus software patent. Namely, the fact that it takes a long time to invalid a patent going through the either the courts, and/or the Patent Office.
Look at what happens while a patent is being contested. Namely, the Patent Holder can cast doubt upon its competition, driving away their customers. All they have to do is say: "hey - if we lose, it's no big deal - you'll still have access to the code from us. But if we win you will have wasted time and money by not going with us".
If you're familiar with technology, you're familiar with the "Gorilla game" - where one tech company becomes very dominate in a field. Bogus patents can be thus used to help a tech company become The Gorilla in their field - and by the time the company's patent is invalidate (IF anyone bothers), it's too late. You have a big uphill battle to fight.
It would stir up more competition, and be better for the consumer, if the playing field were leveled in software, by eliminating software patents completely.
And, of course, this is one of the advantages of Open Source, with many contributors; as you can move the technology along more quickly, and not have to worry (as much) about software patents.
Now here's a question for the politicians - which method moves technology along faster: Open Source, or Software Patents?
I agree!!!! Here at the ACM retirement home in Guelph, Ontario there are a lot of bhitter old-avant-fart-guarders who are STILL suspeyhsius of anything that comes from West of the sPacific! I think that our Review Bhoarde should (like the French judiciary, which, like most of the best things about France, managed NOT to live on here in Beautiful Canada [home of the BHCSITW]) be composed of Three separate yet indivisible branches, appointed--please Ghod, not elected like justices in America--and enforcing what essentially amounts to Three Separate Bodies of Law!!! That is exciting!
This is already the case. However, H.R. 1907 would give the third party additional rights in the subsequent proceedings. Currently, the third party can file the Request for Reexamination, but has no further input into the reexamination. H.R. 1907 would allow the third party additional input throughout the reexamination process.
One of the problems Trudel has (basing this on an article I read a month or two ago in Analog), is that under previous patent law, if your patent was denied, it wasn't published, and you could go back and rework the patent application. Now, the application is published no matter what, meaning that people other than the patent applicant could take the idea of a patent from an application that was rejected for other reasons and file it themselves, meaning they profit from someone else's invention.
The HGP only covers human genes. What about squirrel genes? or worse yet New-Leaf Potato(e) genes? Genes are a basic truth of nature and should not be subject to patenting.
is actually Taiwan, which the PRC (People's Repulic of China) considers as a renegade province. To stop short of a history lesson, the Nationalist party fled the mainland to Taiwan after they lost all the key battles in the communist revolution. Last decade, Taiwan has undergone some legislative reforms and can be considered a multi-party democratic country. However, its status as a soverign country remains disputed, and is often bullied by, the mainland government.
Why is it that whenever somebody comes up with a good argument against the status quo involving money or IP some idiot always whines about "capitalistism" and "communism"? Bud.. he's not advocating a dictatorship of the workers, he's saying patents suck. That has nothing to do with capitalism, and everything to do with government policy. Using "socialist" as a childish insult only weakens your argument.
You must be new here. You can't just go around on Slashdot spreading these "facts" around, sheesh. I thought they already put this in the FAQ. If you're going to be a regular Slashdot poster, you're going to have to learn how to pass stuff you've blown out your ass through a thesaurus.
What I'm talking about *is* the unique creation of a sequence of genetic code.
There are some patents being filed on artificially created genes, but the vast majority of patents on genes are on naturally occuring genes. The only originality claim the "inventor" can make is that s/he was the first to sequence the gene.
Do a search for recent news on the Human Genome Project, and you'll find that a couple companies are rushing to sequence as many human genes as they can before government-funded researchers get there. They're doing this so they can patent the genes. You are undoubtedly using a few patented genes -- and many patent-pending genes -- as you read this. That's the absurd part.
A patent is a government grant of a monopoly to a private individual. It's not even remotely based on the notion of a contract, as copyright could be construed to be (not that I'm in favor of very strong copyright "protection" either, but that's another matter), or a matter of honest identification (as trademarks are).
Oddly, I'm not really a libertarian. I do believe that there's a legitimate role for government that extends beyond the military and protection of private property. I just don't think that the government should extend to one individual the right to forbid others from using knowledge, whatever the benefits may (or may not) be. I guess that in this regard I go even further than RMS. So be it.
I could envision some kind of voluntary patent system, where individuals or corporations could opt in or out of in its entirety (opting in or out of individual patents is obviously ludicrous). So those of us who are opposed to patents could opt out of the patent system entirely -- we would not be bound by any patents, but we could not file for, contribute any work to, or hold any either.
There are obvious practical problems here -- how does one switch sides, as it were? The obvious solution is that one can change sides, but with a mandatory two-year waiting period during which time one is bound by the patent system but cannot receive any benefit from it.
That's only the start of things, too -- how to handle issues of employees pursuing their own interests vs. employers on the other side of the fence (either direction); patent-free subsidiaries of opted-in holding companies, and so forth. But it strikes me as an interesting idea, at least as an intellectual exercise (and possibly, in the long run, a way out of the current mess).
The point isn't to protect anyone... its to further innovation.
:)
Or at least, that is what the constitution says [Article 1 Section 8].
If your goal is to protect someone (the inventor, the little guy, the big guy, yourself, etc.), you will be able to come up with a lot better arguments for patenting things like software that seem to have a very low "critical mess" for innovative feedback).
I personally am on the side of "science" rather than any other interest here.
Pax -- Ob
Warning- I am about to get pedantic...
I think it can be deduced somewhat trivially that the extent to which patents are detrimental to the societal good is inversely correlated to the extent to which they speed up the public release of information. (That is, the speed at which the released information causes new innovation that would otherwise have taken longer to occur).
The problem is, I have yet to see any credible evidence one way or another that isn't annectdotal or highly biased. I think that this is probably more of a political issue than an academic one right now, but...Does anyone know of any references/research on this?
As an interesting aside, I recently looked for classes in IP at the University of Michigan, but all I could find were Law classes, not Economics classes (my central interest).
Pax -- Ob
Can't one take the argument that the creation of a mathematic algorythm is in fact discovery? (The same as the genetic situation).
:/
I mean, code aside [copyright covers that just fine], what you are talking about is patenting algorythms (or in lawyer terms- the method and apparatus for implementing an algorythm on a universally generic "machine"). Once we have that, can't an arbitrary algorythm be independently "discovered" from multiple independent sources? And isn't it possible for said algorythm to be present in nature in the form of some natural process?
The original posters problems once again apply.
I don't have any answers... just more problems.
Pax -- Ob
It's 116 pages in the PDF form from the Government Printing Office, but the letters are big and it's a quick read.
Title I - Inventors' Rights
Basically protects inventors from those shady late-night TV commercials promoting "invention" services, where you sign your inventions over to them for the purposes of "evaluating" and "promoting" it, and they keep the patents, royalties, etc.
This is a good thing.
Title II - First Inventor Defense
Protects an inventor from patent infringement charges if the original inventor brought the subject matter to practical use at least a year before the filing of the other guy's patent and used the patent commercially at some point prior to the filing.
It seems to me like this kinda matches my own interpretation of what "prior art" was, but maybe not. Maybe this just makes it more explicit.
Title III - Patent Term Guarantee
Very basically, if the patent office is butt-slow in getting your patent approved, your patent term is adjusted accordingly.
I'm not sure if I'm reading this right, but I guess in the past your patent term began when you filed the patent? So I guess here you get extra days for every day the patent office is unnecessarily slow in getting it processed. Maybe someone has a better analysis.
Title IV - United States Publication of Patent Applications Published Abroad
Presumably this is where all of the fuss occurs. Unfortunately, it's very hard to read for me, and makes extensive references to the various patent treaties.
My understanding is this: Patents are generally published/made available to foreign countries after 18 months. You can request that it be made available earlier, or, if you're not filing patents in a different country, you can request that it not be published at all. If you do file patents in other countries, presumably treaties require these patent applications to be shared between member countries after 18 months.
I think this is what some people are angry about. I don't know the rationale behind the sharing of applications, so maybe somebody else can step up and elaborate for us? I guess by publishing these patent applications, anyone in another country where the patent holder isn't planning on applying for a patent could then in turn patent it himself. Anybody in a country where the US patent wouldn't be legal could use the information in the patent for his own good. I may be totally off-base here, but that's how I read it. Corrections are welcome.
Title V - Patent Litigation Reduction Act (I like it already)
Anybody can write the patent office with a request for re-examination, citing examples of prior art. Their letter will become an official part of the patent, and the patent office must make a determination (whether or not to re-examine) within 3 months. The requester gets copies of the progress.
Title VI - Patent and Trademark Office
This takes up about half of the actual bill. Since I'm not totally familiar with the current structure of the PTO, this could either be a lot of re-wording, or (more likely) a complete restructuring of the office itself. Note that this seems to only apply to the PTO office/organization. It doesn't have anything to do with the types of patents issued, but how they do their day-to-day business, how they evaluate their staff, and pick their work force.
But most importantly, the bill includes wording to bring the PTO out of the dark ages. They're given permission to make use of whatever equipment and technology they need (like broadband) and lets them hire their examiners more competitively.
I meant to hit preview, and our proxy server at work came back with an error, so I assumed it hadn't been posted, so I preview, fix it, come back, and they're both here.
Sorry.
Can anyone suggest a more technical place to hang to learn more about *nixes? Between the license arguments and other IP it seems this has become a place for budding lawyers and activists, not techies.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
For many inventions, the boundaries between blatent copy and new innovation are reasonably clear cut. If, for example, I were to register a patent for a fork (you know, you eat with them) and then someone came along and added an extra tine and bent it at a slightly different angle it would still be a fork - they couldn't register a patent for it and would be violating my patent if they didn't own a licence.
:-)
If only this were true.
Unfortunately, patent law more often comes down to the relative quality of the patent lawyers.
If yours was particularly good, you'd probably be able to show everything from toothpicks to garden forks to be in violation of your patent. If you were less lucky, they would probably only have to paint the handle to avoid your patent.
I saw a patent for window lintels once that was a) totally incomprehensible to a mere mortal (i.e. I was only vaguely aware that it was related to walls after reading it twice), and b) apparently very good.
It was written for some people that had modified another patented design by changing the ends of the lintel from being square to being slightly angled.
The other people's patent was also totally incomprehensible, but pretty poor, given that such a trivial change circumvented it.
To add insult to injury, the trivial change that was introduced solely to avoid the patent actually made the lintels stronger and lighter
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
I don't think people are patenting the genes themselves - what they are doing is looking at what the gene does, and then rushing out and getting a huge wodge of patents for possible uses - 'use of gene X434 to treat cancer' and so on.
I think the answer to this is to not allow speculative patents, which more are like weeing on a patch of ground to claim it than like a positive contribution to knowledge. Unless you can actually show a treatment, and argue convincingly that it would not be obvious to anyone else with knowledge of the gene sequence, you should not get a patent. (IMHO; I am neither a geneticist nor a lawyer.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It is illegal to patent math. Computer science IS math. (I mean CS, not "IT"). Software patents are illegal. But there is too much money involved, so exceptions are made.
Problem is that in the beginning, you just programmed your algorithm into a piece of hardware and pattented the hardware with that software as one of the components. Now, people don't seem to bother with the hardware and just patent the software itself. Patent review process should be more like defending a thesis and less like shopping for barriers to entry.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
I remember reading somewhere that USPO was asked to not grant patents where only claim was 'idntification of gene' as
what human genome project and celera are doing.
Further...
The US PO was directed to grant gene patents only for claim that describes use of a particular gene i.e. identifying its function and purpose.
I am fundamentally against either form of patents,
but can someone confirm this... ?
-ak
I was in flat mode, so I have no idea where this should be, context wise.
:) and not patentable. Now think of a Quantum Computer, which would be an invention, and patentable.
.10 micron rules. Invention. Patent.
Lets start with the steam engine and then go for velcro.
Expansion of water becomes non-linear in the vicinity of the boiling point. Discovery.
Device to produce mechanical or electrical power by boiling water. Invention. Patent.
Hooks and loops can be used as an adhesive. Discovery.
Practical two component system of reuseable adhesive. Invention. Patent.
Any questions?
That patent law someone quoted (sorry no link, set your threshold to 2 and search for 'EXPCITE') seems kinda vague. It says inventions and discoveries, and then lists some kinds inventions. Think of Quantum Electrodynamics, which is a discovery (or a bad joke
Also, the Patent Office doesn't grant patents (other than for software and genetics) without a working device, and a detailed plan. So that ZPF power generator that the little green men shoved up your ass when they abducted you from some rural forest with no witnesses can't be patented until you figure out exactly how it works.
Some more nerdly examples:
Realization that smaller pathways in an IC will allow higher speeds and lower power consumption. Discovery.
Device for etching circuits with
Knowledge that certain gene sequences can preprogram an animal with specific instincts. Discovery.
New strain of mouse that can kick your ass in chess. Invention. Patent (?)
See that "Preview" button?
And from WHERE does he get the money from if they who can pay also is they who can afford lawyers and time ... ??
Most patents are of a kind that are NOT of obvious (money) value to most of companys. And if a big company fights a patent owner other companys does NOT want to use such a licence !!
Remember that the costs in court could easy (if the big company wants..) reach several 10's of millions !
Mundus Vult Decipi
These are relatively recent (1995?) changes the USPTO made to help independent inventors:
1. Provisional patents. These submissions include only the disclosure part, not the claims. They give you a patent number and one year to secure your investment and submit the full patent. They are much cheaper since they are not examined by a patent examiner and do not require a patent attorney to write the claims.
2. Patent maintenance fees. Unless a periodic fee is payed to the USPTO the patent expires. The idea is that if the patent is used in actual business these fees will be insignificant, but they help reduce the cost of initial applications, again to help the independent inventor.
A note about obviousness:
I am still not sure what my opinion is on the subject of software patents, but it is quite obvious (...) that most of the software patent problems arise from the fact that there are not
enough patent examiners with software background.
Courts seem to be very reluctant to rule a patent as obvious. How would you prove a patent is obvious in court? If you approach 5 engineers skilled in the art and present them with the problem and 4 of them come up with an identical solution would it be enough proof?
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Slashdot readers are involved with software, and recognize great abuses of the US Patent system as it has been applied to software. We want the patent system to bereformed. (This means we want software patents to be invalidated and no longer issued. [...])
I may read slashdot. I may even contribute to it by occassionally submitting articles, posting replies, and such. But I resent being lumped into this one single zealotist ideology.
While I certainly feel the patent system needs significant and substantial reform, I don't think it needs reformed so much that it mandates GPL on every piece of code... or such that it fails to pretect novel new concepts (even cheesy GUI widgets whined about in other posts).
Intellectual property is a serious matter which should not be trivialized (lest the truly creative people of the world will... well... stop creating). But the rate of change/development in the software industry does sorta necessitate a certain limit on the duration of patents for novel software ideas in order to prevent market stagnation or absolute monopolization.
On another note, we all worry about huge corporations exploiting their workforce's creativity by patenting every door hinge modification (read "jury rigging") some janitor makes to keep the flies out. Some change needs to occur in this area too.
And lastly, we all worry about the patent and trademark lackeys who allow lamers to apply for and GET trademarks such as John Q. Lamer getting a trademark on the name "Linus Torvalds" or Jane U. Byteme getting a patent on soap suds. Reform certainly has room in these areas.
But let's not get too hasty to slap an across the board characterization of the 'Slashdot ideology or agenda'. Personally, I detest having words put into my mouth.
~~~~~~~~
Signature illegible, could be somebody else.
Small correction: If I've never known about what you were doing in your garage, and I've (by chance) worked it out in the same details as you did, I think I should be rewarded for my work. To put it in other words (please don't flame me for this, I'm just trying to make it a little clearer): You've been plain stupid that you didn't claim the invention, and you've been (according to the ideas behind IP laws) non-social by withholding your ideas from the rest of the world.
To put things in perspective: I do agree that it should be impossible to patent something that has been published but not patented/used commercially. I guess this is what you meant by your comment, but if you did, could you please state it a little clearer?
The intellectual property industry these days typically uses the argument that intellectual property law helps innovation, because without the rewards that they can get through being granted a monopoly, the creators of intellectual property would have no incentive to create. I am usually sceptical of this claim, because I think that if there is an incentive to use an invention, then there is an incentive for potential users to pay for its creation. At least there certainly is when the costs of creation are relatively low. Perhaps in cases where the up front costs of the invention are high and the potential users are widely dispersed (eg pharmaceuticals) then this argument might hold. (Actually I'm still not convinced. Many people would have applied it in this form to such things as operating systems just a few years ago). However, in most instances I don't think the argument holds very well at all. By granting monopolies on ideas and inventions and what I can do with them, patent laws are placing restrictions on my freedom. Very strong arguments are needed to justify this.
No, I am not wrong. Do not you see the difference between discovering "a new and useful blah. blah, blah" and a scientific discovery? The difference being that scientific fact would exist independently from the civilization (let's forget philosophy for now). While discovery requires a man to be acting. If you make some more searches you would find that mathematical formulas, chemical compounds (though you can patent the process of making said compound), physical laws etc. can not be patented. - Altough with the current system I would not be surprized if something like that happened. Software algorithms happened to be patentable as they were originally very related to the ahrdware implementations. Nowdays, it is more of a pure science, and should be treated accordingly. As for protection of independent software developers, I would think they will be much better off not worrying about hundreds of patents big corporations have to crush them.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
While discovery requires a man to be acting.
Of course I meant to say "invention".. Whatever..
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Additional comment - sure, making a useful algorithm out of a theory deserves to be rewarded. For this copyright protection, trade secrets, NDA's and so on is more than enough.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Well...
Doesn't that make his comment even more valid?
It's called new wave but it's just the same.
Works fine in mozilla, yeah!
Hmm, I do. What if this combination occurs by natural selection after the patent was issued. Should the resultant organism be required to pay royalties if the patent holder so requires?!
Ridiculous... as is software patents IMHO. By the way, if we see it from a philosophical point of view, whats the difference between a program and a gene anyway? =)
You can not grant patents for SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY.
In principle I think that one should not be able to patent scientific discoveries, but the line between a scientific discovery, and an invention is often quite thin. It is actually quite common that scientists do patent their discoveries (if they realize their commercial potential, that is). M. F. Barnsley, and his patent of the fractal image coding process is one example.
The point of patents is not to protect the little guy. They're not there to *protect* anyone. The reason US patent law came into existence was out of a desire to foster scientific/technological development and the *sharing* of information.
A patent is a deal between an inventor and the US government that grants the inventor a monopoly for a limited period of time in exchange for information about an invention. That is why patents were established. People (particularly those in the government) seem to forget that a lot when talking about patents.
Under the current policy of the US patent office, the public is getting the shaft. If there are half a million people in the country who can reverse-engineer your invention just by looking at the model they bought on the market, then whoopie--you get a monopoly, and we the public get... a piece of paper telling us that we'll be sued if we try to do the same thing, even though it's a perfectly obvious thing to do.
And then a corporation buys up the patent, and all the money eventually funnels to the faceless giant that hires marketroids and middle management... hmm.
They don't make it impossible, but they do make practially any program likely to infringe on a potentially large number of patents, which threatens to make software development the preserve of the wealthy and the foolhardy. Imagine having to negotiate with tens or hundreds of patent holders (or, more likely, their laywers) before you can publish even a moderately complex program in safety. (By moderately complex, I mean between about 10,000-50,000 lines of code).
>Just beacuse you can't create a program that uses fractal image compression dosn't mean that your really hindered, you can use Jpeg or somthing. Sure the result will be a little worse, but you're still doing what you want.
Not necessarily. Literally thousands of more-or-less obvious programming techniques and algorithms are already patented, and tons more are currently wending their way through the U.S. patent system in secret, waiting to bite you at some point in the future. For example, there is currently a patent threatening any company that did an obvious fix for Y2K, which showed up in late 1999. Anyone who wants to fight this needs to have certainly tens of thousands of dollars, maybe as much as a million, with no guarantee of success. And that's the cost of dealing with just one bad patent -- currently, there are thousands, and the Patent Office clearly won't be on your side in the fight.
>So whats the problem, if it was obvious, then it shouldn't have been patented.
Most people misunderstand the kinds of things that can be patented, and as such vastly underestimate the number of trivially-different things that have patents. A hundred years ago, there were hundreds of patents on paper clips alone, all trivially different from one another. If the PTO thinks it's 'novel' (which generally means "hasn't been patented yet in exactly this form", not "doesn't exist"), and if they don't think it's 'obvious' (which generally means that they think an average practitioner wouldn't have thought of it right away in the course of his work, without effort), then it's patentable. What this means is that patents usually describe things that are fairly similar to lots of other things that have already been patented ('prior art'), and are awarded to whoever filed a patent first, irrespective of whether they invented it first.
Because of all this, it's likely that ordinary practitioners in a field are doing things that are infringing patents held by others, unless they're routinely working at the fringes of technical or scientific research, and have a group of tame patent lawyers filing what they do as they do it. If you write software in the U.S., almost everything you do is a potential problem, and what's especially bad is that it is impossible to find out what's going to be a problem, because you can't find out about patents currently being processed within the system.
>Unfortunetly the USPO is doing a pretty bad job of letting bad patents through, but thats a flaw in the implementation, not the theory.
This isn't an 'implementation problem', this is the official, US government-backed system; there are no other implementations that you can currently consider switching to. Changing to a better implementation isn't a matter of buying a new motherboard, but of persuading law-makers and bureaucrats to change a system that currently suits business interests better than the replacement one would, an almost impossible task. The current situation is nothing short of a disaster for programmers, and is especially hard on free software, since by its nature, anyone can see what it does and how it does it, so proving infrigement is easy, and most people writing it don't have the means to put up a defence.
Ultimately, patent law exists to promote progress, as has been said earlier. Ironically, open source development is perhaps the best way to achieve this, and yet is the way most jeopardised by the current US patent system.
Of course, being written by lawyers, et. al, it's hard to know what else to expect.
One perception still remains as I am reading. Judging by the names and reputations House members who sponsored the bill, I am highly suspicious that there's some special interest influence that I don't get. As you read, let me know what you think.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
We have these things called universities where people earn quite respectable salaries innovating for a living. There's your compensation (that and the fame of being the inventor).
The thing is, if fractal compression hadn't been invented, we would never have known about it and perhaps someone else would eventually have had the same idea. Instead, the system HAS been invented and has now become standard, rather, a REQUIREMENT for viewing most websites. If patent law allowed a company to monopolize on this it's nothing short of taxation.
Here's an idea - the patent office should estimate a value for patents as they are registered, based on the innovation and work involved (NOT its success), such that 3rd parties can then cooperate to "free" the patent by paying for it.
It's not that, it's that before, you were guarenteed 17 years of protection, no longer how long the patent took to be approved by the patent office. Now, you get 20 years - time it takes to be approved, which in some cases, can be five years, ten years, or more. In one case, it took something like forty years to approve a patent, because the patent office kept requesting changes to be made.
Silly signature limit . . .
Of course, this guy with the Y2K windowing patent had the right idea...ask for a license fee cost of showing up in court. Um, that was sarcasm. I'll say it one more time, for those of you that missed me saying it the first time: Abolish the Patent Office!
Poppycock! The only people whom are rewarded for their patents fall into two categories: a) the very rich, as they can afford to win a legal pissing contest against any infringers and b) the small guy that doesn't really ask for what the innovation is worth.
Exactly which major innovations of software have been patented (and defended successfully).
Certainly the STAC compressed disk volume was. Microsoft had to pay a $100 million dollar settlement for infringement in this case.
Besides the fact that Congress has made "business processes" patentable, in violation of the spirit of patent law.
Well, not to pick nits, but this was a court decision - current patent law does forbid business process patents, however courts have streached the conventional process patent criterea to cover business processes.
Submarine patents are obvious abuses, and should not be valid.
Submarine patents are bogeymen. There have been very few actual cases of 'submarine patents'.
If two people independantly come up with an idea, obviously it wasn't patentable to begin with.
I think that is nonsense. Two great mathematicians, Leibnitz and Newton came up with the idea of calculus independently. One of the greatest intellectual achievements in history. If this is a criterea of rejection, there is a good chance that NO invention will be patentable.
You may think that intellectual property is a dubious notion, but the fact of the matter is that it is not a new concept, and has been around since the Magna Carta, at least. It is a well entrenched aspect of our society that has accepted social benefits.
As I said before, if you are going to start reducing the term of a patent, you are going to end up making patents worthless. Inventors will then just keep their work secret. When that happens there will be great damage to technological progress.
Since the software world is different from patents involving industry, how about this:
Patent granting exclusive use for 6 years from date of application. No extension. Same holds for all IP based patents (chemical formulas, drugs, etc.) In fact, why not all patents?
Of course, the international business community would fight this tooth and nail (they are trying harder to protect and extend IP rights in the U.S. and abroad, using GATT and other trade agreements that can effectively sidestep national law)
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
I have no problems with a company holding or enforcing a patent for something it has developed. What I wish we could do away with is the patent speculation companies, i.e. the people that get together to buy patents then 'enforce' those patents on others. My feeling is that patents should not be transferrable in cases like this.
how do software patents make writing code imposible?
Look, While software patents can hamper work by not alowing you to use everything you know about, It dosn't really matter. If you can't program somthing without using someone elses protected ideas, then you should really pay them royaltys. If its an open source project, and they don't want you to use it, its there call. I mean, it was there Idea right?
Just beacuse you can't create a program that uses fractal image compression dosn't mean that your really hindered, you can use Jpeg or somthing. Sure the result will be a little worse, but you're still doing what you want.
If the patent isn't obvious, then you wouldn't get to use there tech ether. So whats the problem, if it was obvious, then it shouldn't have been patented. Unfortunetly the USPO is doing a pretty bad job of letting bad patents through, but thats a flaw in the implementation, not the theory.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Very good point.
While I don't see a problem with people patenting DNA that they come up with themselves, hardly anyone is doing that at all. There all just running around trying to patent stuff that's already been there forever.
I mean, someone tried to patent the fucking AIDS virus for christ sakes, (so they could make money off any cures that came around in 17 years, smart move....)
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Ridiculous... as is software patents IMHO. By the way, if we see it from a philosophical point of view, whats the difference between a program and a gene anyway? =)
I don't know, whats the diffrence between software and a physical device? Ether could be described as seqences of mathimatical formulas. Just look at the current state of CPU design, everything's done with Veralog or whatever as opposed to laying out the transisors by hand.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Yes, the phisical device is not math, but the design is, and the design is what you patent.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
It wasn't Cliff who said it, the passage you are refering to is part of the quoted text from Ken Hendrickson N8KH .
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The spirit of the current patent law seems to already say that "algorithms and laws of nature should not be patentable."
Well, I think that depends, really.This post earlier in the discussion got me thinking, it's the one right before yours, and I think he has a point.
But, one could go even farther to say that all things are collections of algorithms. I mean at the base level atoms are really just mathematical functions, right? psy^2 or whatever defines there shape (They wouldn't tell me what psy was though...).
Beyond that even, any device could be described by a collection of mathematical formulas based on Newtonian physics as well (Unless your talking about really high density microchips where you have to take quantum effects into consideration, or spaceships where you need relativity).
While I agree that some patents are silly, such as the Amazon.com one, some software patents are pretty valid in my mind, and some of those "collections of algorithms" are far more complex then the "Collections of algorithms" use to create, say, a steam engine.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Move along, nothing to see here...
You need a physical device which performs the action described by your function. Your function may say how to change the altitude of something, but you need an escalator, elevator, catapult, aircraft, or rocket to actually move the object.
Actually... although this is in jest, I wonder. If we had the right address, and everybody picked lets say a one week period to mail out one letter a day to them (even if its a form letter). Stating our feelings, they would recieved one heck of a surprise in their morning in-box, all for only :)
(.33x7=$2.31 if you live in the states)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Ya know... the scary thing is, this is almost starting to sound like a viable idea (and should I be worried or is this sound like a fun to organize?).
.... and I hope the messages are worded politer than traditional bricks through windows (we'd stand more chance of making our point if we don't curse, throw a tantrum, and insult them, but instead just say our piece).
The only problem I see with mailing bricks is that people need to box them before the post office would take them. The extra effort (how many people have boxes vs. have envelopes) may discourage some people. On the other hand this does sound _real_ appealing. Its sort of the equivalent of throwing a brick through their window and sending them a message but in a sort of civilized way.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
inventions may voluntarily publish their applications immediately after filing (i.e., much earlier than 18 months after filing) and enjoy the protection of the provisional royalty right while promoting the inventions in public.
[Posted 4/3/98 at http://www.ipo.org/whatsnew.html]
Now there is a reasonable argument, right?
Sorry, the devil is in the fine print. Look at S.507 Section 204, subsection (d), paragraph number (2), which states:
RIGHT BASED ON SUBSTANTIALLY IDENTICAL INVENTIONS - The right under paragraph (1) to obtain a
reasonable royalty SHALL NOT BE AVAILABLE under this subsection UNLESS the invention as claimed in the
[ultimately, if ever-issued] patent is SUBSTANTIALLY IDENTICAL to the invention as claimed in the published patent
application.
[Capitalization and bracketed text added.]
Those who are knowledgeable in patent law and the workings of the U.S. Patent Office (PTO) can easily see that the
alleged grant to inventors of "provisional rights" in exchange for destroying their trade secrets is just a set of smoke and
mirrors. The US PTO rarely issues patents with the initial claims being "SUBSTANTIALLY IDENTICAL" to those that
were filed.
The reason we in the USA have an "examination" process in the first place is so that the PTO can locate prior art which
the inventor was not aware of. This PTO-identified prior art is then "cited" against inventors.
Inventors then have a right to "amend" their claims so as to compensate for the cited art. (Note that the PTO-cited art can
include so-called "secret" art under 35 USC 102(e) which the inventor never had a chance of locating even with the best
of novelty searches.)
If an inventor amends his/her claims in response to cited art, the amendment is invariably seen by the courts as being
"substantial". A recent SUPREME COURT decision (WARNER JENKINSON CO., INC. v. HILTON DAVIS
CHEMICAL CO., decided 3/3/97) says so.
There is nothing shameful or devious about the inventor amending his/her claims in a "substantial" way after filing the
application. It is a practice as old as our 200 year Patent system. It serves both the public interest and the interests of the inventor to have the claims properly adjusted so that the claims do not read on prior art which is appropriately cited by the PTO while at the same time giving the inventor a fair chance to receive compensation for his/her contribution to
society.
S.507 destroys that fair chance for just compensation. It refuses to recognize pre-issuance rights for claims to which a "substantial" change has been made. At the same time, the pre-issuance publication of the inventor's contribution
destroys his/her leverage as against free-loading competitors. Everyone in the world may freely take advantage of the inventor's contribution, while the inventor begs and grovels with the PTO for a quick disposition.
Unlike negotiations under the old law, where the inventor can threaten to withdraw his/her patent application and keep it as a trade secret unless the PTO deals with him/her on more reasonable terms, if S.507 passes, the inventor has no
bargaining leverage. He/she has given everything away and now relies only on the good will and mercy of the PTO to do the "right thing." Which, we of course all know, is a thing commonly done by large bureaucracies.
So he has shown one good reason. but it took me a while to finally find it!
Seriously, if this gusy wants to make his point he need to learn to be light on the retoric and more to the point.
nuff said!
I did. A quick check shows 14 patents, a fair chunk of which involve dealing with issues related to cryptography.
For what it's worth, I am glad to see that he is protecting his intellectual property. It is his choice what to do with his patents (except for the several I noticed are assigned to various corporate entities), and he does not need to fear some other entity laying claim to his inventions.
There is one coherent point Mr. Trudel made about the Japanese:
Their patent system tends more to distribute technology than to restrict its use.
He wants us to believe that's a bad thing. I'd say that's exactly what we want.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I don't know what is in the bill and hopefully some lawyer type will post a synopsis shortly, and we can all have a discussion of its merits.
However this guy's webpage is poor departure point for this debate. As has already been pointed out, the layout is atrocious. In addition, he rants on about this horrible bill and how it was passed and that it is bad for all of us, especially our children(?!?). But nowhere in his incoherent gibberish does he give any examples of what exactly he thinks is wrong with the bill.
And his suggestions on how to handle this situation? (partially hidden under the graphic) He puts up a couple of sound clips of movie dialogue of people recommending nuclear strikes as the best option for solving their problems. Real fscking mature.
If this had been posted in Slashdot threads, it would immediately been tagged as Flamebait and ignore by all. Instead it gets posted as a story so we can all rush out and read the page.
Sheesh.
Ideology is for ideots.
I've never understood why software patents are allowed in the first place. As I understood it, you can't patent concepts, only expressions of concepts.
It would seem to me that an algorithm (being a plan to achieve a result) is purely conceptual - the algorithm only being expressed in the specific code that implements the algorithm.
It seems commonsense that algo's shouldn't be patentable, but then I'm not a lawyer and commonsense doesn't seem to apply to that breed.
Because we all know that the wily Japanese hang around playgrounds cheating our kids out of valuable improvements in 4-square business models, monkey bar technology, and duck-duck-goose software.
GAK!
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
I agree that if we have software patents then they should have a short lifetime. Perhaps if a second agency could be created that would award a lifetime to patents. This would create some balance to the current system as well as allow some discretion.
As an aside, what patented technology has kept Microsoft a software monopoly? DOS "technology" (snicker, did I just write that?) would fall under copyright or trade secret status.
The point of a patent is not to get to market, but to prevent someone from reverse-engineering your invention.
Don't think of everything in terms of software, though you say you're not, I think you are. Take something as simple as velcro. Why would the inventor of velcro take a product to market that anyone could reverse engineer? His patent shook an entire industry and did not "browbeat" competitors out of market. Had there been no patents, I am convinced he would have been "browbeaten" by established businesses.
What about a drug company that developes a drug over the course of years (spending millions on it). Should every other drug company be able to simply reverse engineer the drug and make its own version? The first company would lose it's shirt, since it invest orders of magnitude more on the drug.
Reward the developer, don't punish her.
Cheers,
Slak
that should explain it. Also, such incompentence (using AOL Press and failing) definitely could hurt anyone's credibility.
Juln
i agree short term exclusive right to truly new idaes is a good idea. although 5 years is nearly an eternity in the computer world, one or two would be more practical.
.....ta ta
the pharmaceutical indrustry has done this. a company that creates a new drug is allowed to sell it exclusivly for a year or two, then it is opened up.(this was the case to Alleve an OTC pain reliever that is now available generically) this allows them to cash in for a couple years which justifies the $$$ they spend in R&D, & then opens it up which benefits the consumer with lower prices due to increased competition.
in other words it balances the need of the individual with the need of the group. in the big picture a balance between socialism & capitolism, which is the foundation of our society.
also i think copyrights are more fitting for software than patents for software. mark twain could'nt patent the idea of writing a book about to boys and a slave, but he could copyright his words, his style, his characters. you shouldn't be able to patent the 'idea' of one-click service for on a web site, but could copyright or trademark, your specific terminology, logos, & code used to implement it...
i have walked down train tracks, walked down train tracks, drunk at 3 a.m. it not magic, it's no great trick, w
Nobody seems to be posting anything of use - I think its this, I think its that.
Is there anyone out there that actually understands the current patent system and the actual proposed changes?
Please, do let us know.
Don't like my sig? I don't either.
Getting license fees through a patent is obviously not the only way to get "some compensation" from having some bright idea in the software field. You could exploit it smartly in some freely available software, get a name in the field or even in the media, and then cash on it. Big and small corporations have huge needs for people with ideas to solve their own software problems and/or software problems of their customers.
But the main problem in my view is that software patents might make it just impossible to write any software, even of the "free" kind, at all without spending 90% of your ressources on lawyers (and the remaining 10% on software engineers). How can innovation occur when no one can code any more?
And again what does the patent system really have to offer to promote innovation in the software field where thousands of programmers are already publishing for free their source code full of innovative ideas? And I do believe they'll making great money using their talent to assemble together other people ideas with a bit of their own to provide custom services solutions to people who need them.
The patent system was created to protect the investment of individuals and companys and encourage the dissemination of information. However, the patent system has beeen transformed over the years as a business weapon, in which those who can afford and survive the multi-million dollar lawsuits would win. The crux of the problem lies with the perception of what a patent is. American society at the current state is so used to the concept that ideas are not only owned by individuals (but more often corporations), but also to the idea that it is a god given right for someone to exploit his or her idea, regardless of prior art, or common sense. Patents should not be thought as "owned" but rather "assigned". Patents are assigned as an incentive to make investments feasible, and that goal is noble. However, the current attitude that patents are "intellectual property" is plain wrong, and the current mess with business process patents can be attributed to this attitude. Just because a company patents a obvious process, does not by any means the company owns it. The patent is a conditional grant of a local monopoly by the government (which can be challenged), and it should be viewed as such, no more and no less.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
But you don't. There is only one way that I want patents, and that is that they last an absolute maximum of two years - not a day more.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
if we had no software patents, or hardware patents, then what the hell would we be able to patent?
Dioxoribonucleic acid.
Into the fetid septic tank that America has become, we go.
Does anyone here with a smidgeon of intelligence and experience honestly expect the government to begin acting logically and rationally?
Continue behaving normally -- ignore government and it generally ignores you.
Life sucks, kill a friend today.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
I'm not trying to start a flame war, but isn't it quite clear that this guy is a racist? I'm not sure exactly how his argument works, and perhaps he does have a point, but the way he presents it seem only to be appealing to racists insincts. I thought saying things like 'Not only does this harm us, but most of all it harms the children' and then pointing a finger at some external group was sniffed at since we learnt what harm this sort of thing can do in the hands of hard-liners such as fascists.
Frankly, the thing this article does to me isn't to make me worried about this change in patenting law, or even the opposite - I just find it very scary.
The flaw in your argument as stated: you are assuming that without a patent, inventors of things will get no compensation. But, many software companies make money from much unpatented software. Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft BASIC and DOS, Oracle, etc., these things were not patented, and their inventors got plenty of compensation.
Not everybody wants to (or is able to/or should have to) start a company and market a product to be compensated for their hard work.
Patents are like any other tool. They can be used for their intended purpose (to allow people to be compensated for invention), but they can also be used for nasty purposes (as weapons in corporate warfare, for example).
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
He's right. Consider the story of the fellow
:)
who invented interval wipers. The big three only
ripped him off for 10-20 years. And when they
were done, they only had to pay a fraction of
the license fee he had asked for initially.
Please note that this is a real story. If there
is a requirement for me to document the complete story, I'll do so. But I had to 'post first, think later'
Do anal-retentive people hyphenate 'anal retentive'?
I think that the big problem here is that when the laws for patents were drawn, software didn't exist.
Maybe what we need is a new set of rules. A new legal device that takes into account the issues involved in creating software. Possibly have sections involving the protection of algorithms, icon designs, user interface design or other aspects of the functionality. Dependant on certain criteria, these seperate sections could have a more reasonable amount of time in which they were allowed protection under the law so that the holders of the rights to the device have a chance to recoup their investment in the R&D of their software.
As far as patenting the human genome or even those of other creatures found in nature. I'm sorry but the stuff was already there and they just took the time to stick labels on it. While I believe that they are doing a great deal of good by doing this research, they did not create the DNA for existing creatures (including humans.) As was pointed out in another reply, this is equivalent to weeing on something to make it yours. I do believe that they should be allowed to patent any mutations that they might create as well as the method for doing those mutations but what they are doing is equivalent to decompiling humans, sticking some comments in, recompiling and then saying "I did this." We can't legally do it with software and I think that the same principles should apply to what they are doing.
-chaosgrrl
When you can't find your jello don't come screaming at me to remove the weasle from your headgear.
while i agree wholeheartedly with the Ed's post, i can't imagine that the patent office would ever say "no more software patents". but what about this:
it seems software patents could be made to expire after a much shortened period of time, say 5 years.
patents usually expire 17 or 20 years after they are issued, or much longer (29 years, i think, though i can't find a reference right now) for drugs. however even 17 years is quite a long time to exclude competition in the software industry. i would argue that 5 years or so would be a much more reasonable ammount of time for anyone to have a software patent.
5 years would give any company a reasonable ammount of time to recoup their R&D costs, and would also have the effect of discouraging companies from hoarding software patents in hopes that someone eventually steps on them.
cheers,
sh_
cheers,
sh_
Interested in learning Chinese or Japanese? check out Chinese/Japanese-English Dictiona
here's the link i meant to post. and no more signatures :)
Interested in learning Chinese or Japanese? check out Chinese/Japanese-English Dictiona
If a large corporation decides to steal your idea, and say it was theirs in the first place, a patent will not protect you. "Prior Art" invalidates any patent. You make it sound like getting a patent is the end all of legal protection for your product. This is not true. You not only have to get the patent, you also have to protect it.
I disagree with your take on software patents. If I invented some sort of compression or encryption algorithm, which I may actually do, I believe that I should seek my rewards from patenting it, but from having a complete, quality product that has value in its own right, outside just the underlying algorithm. I don't have to think of software development as "another point of view", because that's really what I do for a living. Most of what I write is either internal software, with its own inherent value, or is open source. And I don't have a problem affording pizza.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
"Slashdot readers are involved with software, and recognize great abuses of the US Patent system as it has been applied to software. We want the patent system to be reformed (This means we want software patents to be invalidated and no longer issued. We are probably also highly suspect of even hardware patents, as they are a government granted monopoly)."
Since when does Cliff speak for me, not to mention every other Slashdotter?
I, for one, would liek to see a reform of the patent system. However, I would not go so far as to call for an end to software patents.
Adam K
Sorry about that. I get really upset when I see someone claiming to speak for me, and sometimes I jump the Gun.
Adam
Well, if anyone's going to organize something like this, it might as well be /.tters. Bricks sounds a little... rude, not to mention not working as well, but a huge letter (standard issue mail, of course) campaign might have a nice hefty impact, especially if we all use one of a few formish letters so as to make sure we're all obviously in agreement.
-- "Of course the meek shall inherit the earth. They're welcome to it. As for the rest of us - Pavonis Mons, here we c
Ok, sorry I shouted, but no, no, no, no, no, (emphatic enough?), the point of patents is not "to protect" ANYONE. The point of patents is to encourage invention and innovation. They do this (in theory) BY protecting the patent holder, but this is a means, not an end. If you doubt this, read the US constitution.
However, these days the highly competitive marketplace for most things does a far better job of encouraging invention and innovation (stagnation == death), so large organisations do not need patents for this purpose and individual inventors cannot afford to file and protect patents anyway.
To make matters worse, large corporations now use patents very cynically, as bargaining chips or means of preventing competition, meaning only the very biggest can play in some fields and invention and innovation are suppressed. The entire patent business has become a perverse mirror of its original intention. Personally, I say scrap the whole darn fiasco. We don't need 'em or can't afford 'em and they don't do the ordinary folk any good whatsoever. Get rid of them all, the sooner the better.
What about little companies that would otherwise be trampled by huge companies (Microsoft, Intel, etc..)
A patent is actually good for these little guys, which could very well be you or I in the near future.
On the otherhand, you almost need a judge to decide on the patent grant - to make sure it's not a stupid patent on some everyday thing (like amazon's click patent)
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
An interesting 3 examples that he mentioned:-
;->
CD-ROM - a Sony/Philips invention (Japan/Holland)
VCR - JVC ( I think, or maybe Sony ), again a Japanese company.
Windows - American, but ripped off from Xerox/Apple.
So maybe he really does have Japan's interests at heart after all
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
U.S. patent duration has been changed from 17 years after issue to 20 years after filing. Sound harmless? Hardly. Significant patents take from six to 10 years--or more--to issue. The major revenue from a killer technology (like CD-ROM, VCR or Windows) comes a decade or more after first product introduction. Therefore, this one change cuts your patent protection by 10 to 50 percent, and it won't be easy to undo.
If I'm interpreting this correctly, it means that (According to Trudel) the patents now don't take effect until after they are appoved by the bureaucracy, which takes years. So will I be able to open an e-commerce site with "one-click shopping" in the next year or so, and not get sued into the grave? I think not.
I've seen unmoderated Slashdot posts with more logical coherence than what I'm getting out of this guy. I'm surprised the whole page isn't between blink tags.
In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -Carl Sagan
That paragraph says that even successfully using this defense only acquits the one using it - it doesn't invalidate the patent. This looks real bad - a big monkey-wrench to invalidating bad patents.
I sure hope I'm wrong - is there a lawyer in the house who can make better sense of this &%#$%@! ?
This is a very important question that needs to be answered by someone competent in legalese. Does this now really mean that prior use does not automatically invalidate a patent???
I agree that software patents are inherently suspect and the best course of action is to discard the current crop and no longer issue them. I'd join in extending that to gene and related bio-patents. That track would lead to silliness like patenting elements! Hardware patents serve a purpose however, and while the cumbersome process should be reviewed they should not be thrown out with the software bathwater.
disclosure: 5,715,675, 5,893,266
aem
-a.e.mossberg
Maybe. But I think he was just ... umm... grasping for clichés.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
It use to be that you could patent hardware. Things like LZW compression were patented as hardware based compression which then protected software emulations as well. Wavelet and fractal compression would have been easy to handle in the same way.
The software patent issue that bothers most people are things like Amazons One-click checkout which is more a business process than software. There are all sorts of really obvious stuff that has been granted patents that probably won't stand up to legal challenge, but someone will have to pay the cost of the challenge.
--rick
Now, as for software patents, my thought is that since software engineering is such a new science, the "wheels" so to speak are still being invented. I say we should set an arbitrary date, say 2029, where we say "OK! All the obvious software algorithms have been invented. After that point, clearly it was not obvious and someone deserves to own it." Note that after that date any undiscovered algorithm is going to be extremely complicated (like the recipe for intelligence or something).
The problem with this is the fact that what is "obvious" changes every day. Every time someone learns a new piece of information, that information can make another (until then) unobvious fact obvious. That's how most of science is done. People build on previous knowledge one piece at a time. Only occasionally are great leaps made.
"The obvious is that which is least understood and most difficult to prove." -- A fortune cookie
> I'm not sure about Blowfish and IDEA, but I'm
:)
> pretty sure that Diffie-Helman isn't
> under a patent because the patent ran out a
> couple of years ago.
Just to confirm.
Yes Diffie-Hellman patent just ran out recently.
Blowfish is not patented and is placed "In the
public domain" by the author
Idea I believe is patented in some parts of
Europe.
and yes...I am in the middle of reading Applied
Cryptography
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The problem with people coming up independantly with an idea is... Is how can you prove that neither one had never seen, or even overheard a conversation about the original product. If it's in the computer field, if they would have to be intentionally not paying attention to anything; to not at least heard of a similar comercial product/concept, before they came up with the idea.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but for the computer field where information is dessiminated so quickly and so completely (it's not like it takes 3 years for the product to get outside the country, like maybe a new mousetrap) that a programmer coming up with something exactly the same and being able to show that he never even heard the concept before would be damn difficult.
In Trudel's main(?) HR 1907 page, under THE MAIN THING TO REMEMBER, he complains about Title VI. The specific part that he mentions is Section 2(b)(6) on page 62. This paragraph says:
If the "consent of the United States" became easily obtainable, I can see how this could be seen as a potential loss of sovereignty (although perhaps many non-US people would be arguably better at checking) but I don't see why he specifically points to Japan; a search thru the text of HR1907 for "japan" yields no hits.
The earlier issue(s) he mentions can be found in Section 3(a) on pages 65-68:
- (1)
... 'Director' ... shall be appointed by the President ... - (5) REMOVAL.--The Director may be removed from office by the President.
I believe that Federal Judges are less easily removed but there's more than one of them.Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
Trudel did a much better job of presenting his case for Patent reform in the January 2000 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact. Unfortunately, the article is not posted online. Some of the main points I remember from the article are:
- The protections granted by the US Patent system was the Engine of Prosperity (the title of Trudel's book) that drove the explosion US industrial development in the last two centuries.
- The US Patent system, as defined in the Constitution, is the strongest and best patent system in the world. It was also the first.
- Japan successfully lobbied the US Congress to change US Patent law. The changes resulted in substantially weakening the international protective power of US patents.
- The Japanese lobbying effort started when one of the heads of a major keiretsu declared that US Patent protections were an unacceptable obstacle to Japanese competitiveness. He points out that this amounted to a systematic campaign by the Japanese to steal a fundamental constitutional right from the citizens of the US.
- Patent filings were once held unpublished until approved. Now they are openly accessable to competitors for 18 months. This allows competitors (foreign and domestic) to copy the design, sell it, and then defend themselves against patent suits by claiming "prior use".
- Originally, patents lasted for 17 years from issue. Now they are for 20 years after filing. Many patents take 10 or more years to be approved. The effective lifespan for a patent is now much shorter and in many cases is zero.
Caveat. I don't necessarily agree with Trudel, but he makes a strong case. I know a patent attorney for a major university. After I read the article, I asked her what we should do to reform the patent system. She said "Kill it."
IV
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
All IP is bunk. The sooner we come to terms with this the happier we will be.
:-). Nor should it be closed. The global missallocation of resources resulting from IP is truly frightening (and we can all think of a trivial example of about USD100B can't we :-).
Private property, as we Anglo jurisdescendents know it, was invented to protect the new merchant class at the time of the industrial revolution. Designed to allow the aggregation of the New Capital by people who had no estate from which to protect their stuff. If someone took their new property they suffered _actual_ loss ie. they did not have it anymore.
And there's the rub, to "take" someones Intellectuall Property is to cause them no loss they still have their original such as it is worth.
If Joe Techie is of a mind to fund the solution to a problem (by giving up their leisure time and hacking it together in their garage, or whatever) where the solution belongs in IP space then, once solved, why should society have to pay to solve it again, the box is opened it cannot be closed again without some legal fiction (corollary DeCSS
Well the answer in todays world is because of some stupid artifice derived from a fundamental misunderstanding of the origins of Private property. A stupid artifice that you and I know as IP. (This does not mean that the torts such as Passing Off do not apply to protect the integrity of the creators authorship).
/rant
--
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Sorry, I just don't agree that anyone can "own" an abstract idea. No more than they can own the day Tuesday, the number 5, or gravity. Laws that regard ideas as property are simply a travesty.
Abstract ideas are things that always existed, nobody built them. A few gifted people may occasionally stumble across a new one. But they are explorers, not creators.
That's not to say I don't think people should be rewarded for discovering genuinely useful ideas. But there are far better ways to do this than the patent system, which have the added advantage of avoiding this absurd notion of "intellectual property".
If there's one freedom I value above all others, it is the freedom to think of whatever I choose. Nobody owns any of the ideas in my mind. Anything that I can imagine or comprehend, I believe I have as much right to utilise as anyone else on this planet.
Intellectual Property is an injustice which I think a lot of people intuitively dislike, even if they can't put their finger on the exact reason why. The reason is this: the non-proprietary nature of ideas is a fundamental truth, a fundamental right which should not be denied. The sooner that human society wakes up to this fact, the better.
Freedom is about youself, as an individual, and the rights that you enjoy. It is never about power over the lives and works of others. Always remember that.
Not everybody wants to (or is able to/or should have to) start a company and market a product to be compensated for their hard work. you raise a good point, I hadn't thought of it necessarily, but getting compensated for ideas that way could be covered by contract law. "I don't want to develop this idea, but you pay me for it and you develop it." Patents would make that sort of transaction a little easier because they obviate the need for a non-disclosure agreement, or rather, a non-"if you tell me your idea I promise I won't develop it" agreement, but as the patent system was designed to encourage disclosure, so this is a bit of a sideline (that's not necessarily a reason to be against it, of course.)
(Somewhat offtopic)
Actually, I'm convinced cold fusion works. A search on slashdot would reveal a recent link to a story on another news site where a reporter visited some scientists doing cold fusion research in secret, because they knew they would be ruined if it was public. A recent Analog SF&F (the F stands for Fact) told about some cold fusion experiments in a Tokyo lab that produced a very large number of elecments, not just helium. Other cold fuision researchers have seen their expensive palladium electrodes transmutate into half a dozen cheap metals.
Dr Bussard, as well, has rediscovered an old method of starting a fusion reaction with minimal power, and the JPL has three prototypes (a recent Analog SF&F and Popular Science, I don't know which ones.) Dr Bussard's electrostatic method involves a spherical grid at high voltage inside a vaccuum bulb - in short, by accelerating the ions at very high speed through a central point, they collide head-on instead of the glancing impacts in a thermonuclear fusion rector. They are fascinating articles, and made a believer out of me.
(Back on topic)
Math research can be duplicated cheaply by anyone skilled in the art, as can software programs be written by anyone who cares to learn.
Software is written, not invented. It is already protected by copyright, and that's all it should have. Math processes and algorithms (including compression and encryption, hardware and software) cannot be patented, because there is no barrier to entry. I have no problem with 'smart cards' as a whole being patented, because I'm sure there is something innovative going on, and it's a very specific application. However, wavelets can't be allowed to be patented, because they appear in so many fields and have so many applications. It'd be almost like patenting radio.
Maybe a specific radio transmitter/reciever design could be patented, but the idea of patenting radio itself is ridiculus.
> Someone mentioned wavelets as an example of what I would consider patentable.
I wouldn't. I thought of the idea myself, three or four years ago. I was staring at this spectrograph, wondering about how they must do that, and figured it must be like fourier analysis. Then I wondered, 'what if they store phase information along with the frequency? Maybe that could be used as an audio file format, better than midi or wav?' I knew fourier analysis would not work well for recovering the original signal form the results. I thought about it later, figuring they'd have to map each wave's beginning, amplitude, phase, and end. Now, unless I totally miss my guess, this is what wavelets are, right? I asked my dad aboutit, asking if storing phase and frequency information in a file would make a good method of audio compression. He said it probably wouldn't work, and I dropped the idea. Btw, I always thought wavelets had the coolest name.
Wavelets had already been discovered. I just came across an obvious idea that someone else had published papers about that I had never read.
If I can come up with it, so can thousands of guys just like me. Wavelets would have been discovered, they are the obvious next step up from fourier analysis. Wavelets are an obvious idea, even to me, even back then. A patent on wavelets is as wrong as a patent on fourier analysis.
This server seems slashdotted right now but I found out earlier that you can often use google to access slashdotted servers, by typing the URL http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:[url of slashdotted server] so in this particular case you can use this link. Note that this doesnt make the URLS on the target page valid so you'll have to do some editing in the address bar of your browser to get to the cached version of the featured links.
In the "Intro to Crypto" that Phil Zimmerman wrote and which is distributed with PGP, the man says that a good crypto scheme should be extensively peer reviewed. In the end it doesn't matter if the algorithm is known. What matters is how long it will take you to crack the code...
and now I really need to go to bed
Use Adsense for Charity
some patents are not a Bad Thing. patenting obvious things like one click shopping is a Bad Thing. Patenting the 'feel' of a program [a lawsuit about this was fought between lotus and corel years ago about lotus notes and corels similar product] is also bad. Some things are not, such as hardware patents, and true innovation. Patents should be reviewed by people that know technology [no, not the creator of the internet 'Al Gore'] but people that work in patent law and also have cs background.. that's what i think anyway.
'Mullethead. A hairstyle that's a way of life'
Who says that anyone has the fundamental right to be compensated for coming up with an idea "first"? Furthermore, the patent system was never intended to protect the "intellectual property" rights of patent owners. The purpose of patents was to foster innovation by promoting the spread of scientific ideas. Keep in mind we're talking turn of the century stuff here. The current reality of the patent system prohibits scientists and engineers from looking at patents for fear of tripling the damages in a subsequent infringement suit. What was the point of patents again?
A grassroots approach to stopping patents and their abuse is for the engineers (who now appear at the bottom of the food chain) to refuse to sign off on the patent application. If the employer doesn't like this, I'm sure there are other companies around looking for smart people with good ideas.
aaron
First off, the linked article was useless. The web design was horrid. Picture covering text? I had to turn off images to read what little fluff there actually was. Anyways... Does the patent system need reform? Yes. The human genome cannot be patented, I'm sorry, but thats already been invented. Software patents are ok, with reasonable restrictions. Amazon using one technique to implement one clck shopping, and patenting one click shopping rather than the way they implemented it. Patenting the latter is reasonable, the former is not. This guy doesn't seem concerned with reform, or the patent system at all. He's just one of the crackpot "america is the source of all that is good in the world" people. The USA is great, and I'm in the USMC ready to defend my country at a moments notice, but I am not that arrogrant. Other cultures have things to offer the USA.
One of the biggest problems with software is the fact these days it seems that it's both patentable and copyrightable. I don't think there's a single industry out there that can acquire both sets of protection for their products. I have no problem with software copyrights. In fact, I think they're generally a good thing. But software patents bug me. What would happen if suddenly books could be patented, and music could be patented, and TV programmes could be patented. It sounds insane, but it's really no stupider than what's already going on.
I suppose things wouldn't be so bad if patent protection was limited to a very short time on software (say three to five years max). Copyright protection's limitations are also a little extreme for software, as well. For an industry that didn't really exist 20 years ago, protection for 50 years seems a little excessive, especially when you consider the fact in most cases the original product probably won't be sold ever again after 5-7 years after the original publication. There might eventually come a time when 20 year life cycles for software make sense, but that doesn't look like it's gonna happen anytime in the foreseeable future -- the personal computer industry is still rapidly growing and changing. Few software companies can claim they made it to where they are without copying from anyone else, and the ones who do claim that, are probably lying.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
"I have been quite visible in helping to block the weakening of our patent system. I am sure that some clever justice department lawyer could find a way to claim that I benefited somehow from helping inventors, even though I did it for free."
- But doesn't seem to realise that the lawyers are doing worse under the umbrella of the outdated system.
Admittedly I don't know anything about this bill (UK bod), but plainly something in the system needs changing.
Foolishly, I'm still stunned that people can avoid reality so effectively.
Just because you can't, doesn't mean you shouldn't.
Although Dry it does have some interesting points>
1) The only sign of patent reform is sec. 705 Which pretty much says the the Patent and Trademark Commisioner has to come up with a study 6 months from passage about why American Biotech interests need to be able to file patents. (Bad thing)
2) Sec 311, "Any person, at any time" we request reexamination. Provide you pay 1) pay the fee, 2) disclose the real parties interested. (Generally a good thing) The director makes a ruling if a new quesiton has been raised. This decision is final. If it is reject they "may" refund the fee.
3) This is the part the Irks me. In sec. 709, National Security and sec. 304, technical clarification there are many claus to how a patent could be kept confidential. This can be at the request of the applicant or under the terms described in sec. 181. Sec. 181 is not published in the text of the bill. (Generally BAD)
4) No where is there any technical reform. Beyond a better appeals process this really is counter productive.
2. Is the whole POINT. If something like wavelet compression is invented, then the company that has it has three options: keep it as a 'trade secret', give it away (open source), or patent it. If they're greedy, they'll try to keep it secret, but this will impede progess. The granting of the temporary monoploy PROMOTES progress because everyone else will get to see this new idea, and (eventually) get to use it for free. Okay, giving it away from the outset would be nice, and promote progress sooner, but being nice doesn't pay the bills, and if inventing doesn't pay somehow, it won't get done (as much).
Patents are a compromise, but also an optimazation. A compromise because "the world" gets some and "the inventor" gets some, an optimazation because no patents leads to more secrets leads to less progress AND no patents leads to less reward leads to less progress: the strenght of patent law must be balanced between extremes of less progress.
Perhaps the system is out of balance.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Well, as soon as my lawyer is finished, i'm gonna patent the human genome and charge everyone for existing. or i could just sue. har har, what wonderful things lawyers are good for. i also agree with the guy who wants 3-year software patents, because most software is obsolete after 3 years. after that, would it become public domain, or open source?
"There is no spoon."
I'm not sure about Blowfish and IDEA, but I'm pretty sure that Diffie-Helman isn't under a patent because the patent ran out a couple of years ago.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
Furthermore, the patent system was never intended to protect the "intellectual property" rights of patent owners. The purpose of patents was to foster innovation by promoting the spread of scientific ideas
WRONG! I suggest you read the reasoning the founders (US) gave for patents. I believe Jefferson and Franklin specifically stated some stuff reguarding the matter. They were established to protect the ip rights of the inventor. By doing so, they would PROMOTE invention and research because a person is a time-limmited monopoly for their effort. We live in a capitailst society, not some communist dictatorship. You people need to wake up.
The three major software patent cases regurgitated over and over again on /. are Amazon 1-click shopping, RSA Encryption, and LWZ compression. Amazon's patent will most like be repealed in the courts and thus they system will have corrected itself. Except for the extremists, I think most /.ers believe we should have some form of patents in existance. That said, if RSA encyrption isn't patentable, then what is? LWZ compression really isn't a big loss. Wow no gifs! Boo hoo, now you have to use one of the other 50 formats that do the same thing. Unisys is going to lose out on that one.
It shoudl be obvious. The patent system provides a reward mechanism for inventors and researchers. Capitalism is based on rewards. Once the idea is patented, it is out in the public. Other researchers and inventors can improve on the idea and use it on their own. Of course they will have to pay, but, if they are really inventing or discovering, they will still make money. This is only a lose situation for idiots who can't come up with their own ideas and want to sell other people's ideas instead. See my other post in this thread, for more
For many inventions, the boundaries between blatent copy and new innovation are reasonably clear cut. If, for example, I were to register a patent for a fork (you know, you eat with them) and then someone came along and added an extra tine and bent it at a slightly different angle it would still be a fork - they couldn't register a patent for it and would be violating my patent if they didn't own a licence.
:)
The trouble with software is that the boundaries of change are relatively vague compared with other types of innovation. An algorithm or process for doing something can only be patented if it isn't "obvious" (IANAL, so if I'm wrong please correct me). If I want to write a program that adds two numbers together, there are only so many ways I can do that and still be efficient. So I might patent those methods. However, if someone else comes along and wants to add (gasp!) three numbers together, are they violating my patent if they use a similar block of code to my two-number-adder? Tricky question!
Obviously these examples are trivial (and obvious) but when you think about the ways that software can be written to perform a certain task, yes there are lots of options with regards to compilers and languages etc, but when it comes down to it there will probably be only one or two "most efficient" algorithms. For software writers, this poses many unfortunate problems when trying to achieve a result that is acceptable to users.
Of course, you might say that if I want to acheive a certain result that already has a patented method, why not simply use the patented method and pay a licencing fee? This is where we get to the (un)fortunate reality of a "first come, first served" patent system. This is very much a double edged sword. For example, I might invest $100m in designing a new type of car. Person X, who lives half a world away, might also spend $100m designing a car that, purely by coincidence, shares exactly the same patentable principles as my car. Person X might go to the patent office and register his ideas. But does that mean I can't use my idea without paying Person X a licence fee? Yes!
Consider, however, the adjunct to that idea. I might spend $100m designing my new type of car and registering its patentable parts. Person X, who lives half a world away, might see a design for my type of car and start churning out copies, but all he had to spend was $25 to view the design. In this example, damn right I want a patent enforced wherein I can sue Person X's pants off!
For the Open Source software community at the moment, the general feeling seems to be that people should be able to use and produce software no matter where they get the ideas from. This is great when everyone participates in these ideas, and I personally feel quite proud to have contributed to it. But, we are seeing a lot of non-technical entrepeneurs starting up companies and making lots of money out of the Open Source community, simply by exploiting its naivety. It seems to be an unfortunate reality that if I ever want to make sure my code / ideas aren't exploited (which is different to being shared) I may have to subscribe to a patent system in which I can patent software. The GPL goes part of the way towards protecting innovation, but there is definately chinks in its armour. The issue of software patents is certainly something that the Open Source community will have to review very closely and approach with, as always, a combined front.
Just to make sure I remain on topic, what the heck is that Trudel guy on about? He seems to be stirring up a mass of anti-everything, pro-nationalist feelings (check out his support groups!) about an issue that the U.S. government is trying to deal with. I think Americans (I'm not, BTW) should be proud of that fact that their government is at least trying to deal with the internationalisation of.. well, everything! Far better that than living in a country which wants to close its doors and pretend that they can remain that way and still survive. To quote: "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated".
email me or not.
You'll find that the bill is really quick a work of literature.
Partly right...the point of patents is to protect the little guy and the mega corporation.
Consider this: MegaResearchPharmaCorp spends millions of dollars and several years to develop a new medication. They must run clinical trials usually having over a thousand subjects. After all the time, money, and effort they finally manage to get the product approved and bring it to market.
Now, without the patent system, what happens? GenericPharmaCorp makes the same compound. (MegaResearchPharmaCorp might try to keep it secret, but determining chemical structures--"reverse engineering" the medication, if you will--is a fairly established procedure for chemical compounds, and can be done in a matter of days, if not hours.) GenericPharmaCorp does not have to do all the clinical trials, as the compound has already been shown safe and effective by the clinical trials of MegaResearchPharmaCorp. GenericPharmaCorp can have a production facility up and running in a matter of months, and they don't have to recoup the millions of dollars that MegaResearchPharmaCorp spent on developing the compound.
There's absolutely no way MegaResearchPharmaCorp can survive under such conditions.
Did velco exist before it was discovered/invented?
This is an interesting question even in this simple example -- velcro is an "improvement" of the mechanism that was used by various plants that distributed their seeds covered with hook-shaped thorns by attaching them to animals' fur. However there are two things that can justify the patent. First, velcro uses large flat surface to increase the strength of the bond, and materials that didn't exist in nature, so this is an improvement that never existed before. Second, the application is noticeably different -- velcro isn't limited to carrying objects on the surface, can be reused without damaging the hooks and losing them in the wool, and is designed to allow the use by humans without any tools.
However small those differences are, velcro didn't exist before, and humans knew about seeds that stick to wool and fabric for as long as humans exist, so it's definitely not a discovery. Velcro patent doesn't cover seeds, and I hope, no one will argue that it will apply to, say, nanotechnological equivalent of velcro if such thing will be developed later.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
You make it sound like getting a patent is the end all of legal protection for your product. This is not true. You not only have to get the patent, you also have to protect it.
You would be right if government would pay everyone who challenge others' patents -- then after patenting everything would be under strict scrutiny. Unfortunately the reverse is true now -- one has to pay to challenge a patent (law prohibits challenging a patent without a patent lawyer), and fees that are involved in this process are incomparably higher than any fees spent on patenting, thus encouraging "blanket-patenting" obvious things and cross-licensing them in some exclusive "club" of patent-holder companies instead of challenging bogus patents.
Also, the existence of patent grants its holder a right to prevent others to do anything that is covered by the patent even if the patent itself was never challenged and thus should be considered to be unproven (PTO definitely doesn't do anything that can be considered "challenging"). This is even a deeper legal problem -- an accused person is presumed guilty and has to prove his innocence.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adelman, after its inventors) patents actually apply to smart cards, but the flotilla of lawyers they have deployed and the effort they put into writing a useful SDK pretty much ensured that people would take the easy way out and respect their, uh, property.
Since it isn't patented in Canada, among other places, you can judge for yourself how it has or has not impeded innovation. I'd have to agree that it has. And the blowfish, IDEA, Diffie-Hellman, et al. algorithms are variously available without restriction in some or all parts of the world, so I don't think that the only way to encourage innovation is via patents. Especially for algorithms -- patents should be allowable on *implementations*, and the algorithms can be kept a secret of course, but patents on a pattern of thoughts (eg. an abstractly described algorithm or look-and-feel) are pretty ridiculous.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
If I can come up with it, so can thousands of guys just like me. Wavelets would have been discovered, they are the obvious next step up from fourier analysis.
Agreed, I thought of it when studying sin, cosine, and parametric equasions. It seemed only sensable that the constants would be more compact than the sample values. I then wondered about using other waveforms that might more closely reflect natural sounds. In particular, the triangle, square (pulse), and sawtooth waves from the SID chip in a C64 which were actually the summation of an infinite series of sine waves. Those waves can all be expressed and computed much more simply than the summation they represent (much as the endless series of epicycles astrologers and astronomers were using were DRASTICALLY simplified by elipses which actually are the summation of an infinite series of epicycles).
Some of the specific techniques for breaking a sample into wavelets may well be non-obvious and novel, but the wavelets themselves are obvious even to a rank amateur.
I don't know, whats the diffrence between software and a physical device?
That is an interesting philosophical consideration. On an immediatly practical level, the difference is that the gene sequence will likely occur in nature eventually, while the CPU probably won't. As for the philosophical, it's a hard question, and I'd like some time to think about it :-)
Contrast this with the one-click shopping patent, where "what you can do" is definitely disclosed, but "how you do it" is only partially disclosed, as you can certainly see any cookies deposited, but you can only make intelligent guesses as to exactly how they are used.
Thje problem with the one-click patent is that any good programmer/analyst can make those guesses in less than an hour. Many probably thought of it already, but didn't implement due to liability issues (what if someone else (like a three year old) one-clicks while a parent is in the bathroom? If the customer disputes, we can't argue that they were specifically shown an invoice which they accepted by pressing submit, etc...). In fact, I thought of it in '96 and discarded it for exactly that reason. If the one-click patent were invalidated today, I would be most happy, but would still STRONGLY reccommend against using it.
The thesis of the Oh, No! The Japanese are bribing the US Patent Office Out of Existence site isn't terribly clear. When the argumentation isn't completely coherent, it can be tough to tell apart someone that's got a good idea, but can't quite spit it out right, and feels too strongly about the matter to be completely coherent, from someone that is a completely loony raving nutter.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I don't believe information gleamed from sequencing a chunk of genetic code should be patentable.
What I'm talking about *is* the unique creation of a sequence of genetic code. Take some basic (un-patentable and naturally occuring) genetic sequences and put them together to construct a unique and useful genetic code, or, if you're the adventurous sort, code the base pairs by hand. THAT should be something patentable.
This is exactly like writing software. You take known building blocks (while loops, procedural calls) that can be individually broken down to known, simple, obvious components, and put them together to create a program that has a specific functional use.
Now that I give it some more thought, maybe this should fall more under the realm of copyright law instead of patent law?
Exactly which major innovations of software have been patented (and defended successfully). Multi-tasking? Virtual memory? Spreadsheets? Databases? TCP/IP? Windowing GUIs?
I really don't know, but I haven't heard of any major ones. I know quite a few small (in scope) innovations have been patented. LZW, RSA, MP3 compression. But since each of these has non-patented alternatives, I think it is safe to say that innovation would not be hurt where it mattered if software patents were not issued. Where innovation was hurt, it would be more than made up for by the increase in programmer productivity from not having to worry about stupid patents.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Assume the code being patented is contained in my body. Legally, the patent would make it illegal for me to be alive, because my body would be using the patented gene to make proteins. What if they patented a blood protein. I could now no longer donate blood because the use of the gene is patented by some corporation, and that corporation must be compensated for that donation. So, it seems far fetched, but that is what the letter of the law says.
It could also be argued that because the gene is part of my body, it is my property, therefore granting exclusive rights to use that gene to someone amounts to the illegal seizure of my property. The key point here is that patenting genetic code discovered through the sequencing of human DNA implies the human DNA came from a person or group of people. The only argument that needs to be made is that a person legally owns their own DNA. Once that assertion is made, there is no justification for patents on human DNA sequences.
The only problem is that this argument might work for human DNA, but it won't invalidate other animal or plant DNA patents.
Dastardly
er, there are great advances in mathematics and they can't get patents. that field seems to do ok w/o patents and it has less of a money making potential...
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
It's true, there are some genuinely difficult ideas which take a lot of research to come up with, and might arguably be suitable for patenting. However, IMHO we still shouldn't have patents for any software.
The overall effect of software patents is so bad that we will just have to grit our teeth and exclude all software from patenting. There is no easy way to distinguish a 'worthwhile' patent from a useless or obstructive one - certainly I don't think the USPTO could ever manage it, and it could get very hairy in court.
But fundamentally, I'm not sure that patents are necessary for software - we have to ask, would these algorithms be developed anyway? Companies like IBM say that without getting a patent monopoly, they would not - but 50 years of computer history shows otherwise.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I think that the business model patents are in the form of software patents. You can't get a patent on the priceline.com 'name your price' model, but write a computer program to do it and voila!
This is another reason why software patents are a very bad idea. More and more of everyday life is automated using software; if we allow patents on software, then any everyday process or business model can effectively be patented.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
This must be evident to anyone who considers it, for only production gives rise to an absolute and perpetual claim of ownership. Could one man claim absolute dominion of the whole soil, all others would be his slave, for none could exist without his consent. Ideas, too, cannot be held out of general use indefinitely, or we might remain in caves while the descendents of the first discoverers of fire and the wheel would be the only ones permitted to use it.
Yet, there is an interest secured by intellectual property, limited in scope and duration. For it is an incentive, not to invention itself, but to disclosure. In the absence of IP, every idea would have to be independently discovered by each person who would employ it, for those desiring a competitive advantage would be strongly inclined to keep their ideas as secret as possible.
Peace and love, y'all
Patents had nothing to do with the creation of wavelet compression or of fractal image compression. If anything, it has dramatically held back progress in fractal image compression, by creating a bottleneck.
Wavelet compression is a class of sub-band coding. People were already using sub-band coding for audio and images before any of the wavelet coding patents came out; wavelets are a cleaner and more efficient way to do subband coding but that's what it is. There's been truly innovating work in wavelets, notably by people like Ingrid Daubechies, leading to fast wavelet transforms, but most of these folks were motivated by getting publications and tenure, not patents.
Fractal image compression has been held back by patents; they've just created a huge bottleneck. The theory behind the patents is and has been fairly mainstream, so if the patent holders were never born it wouldn't have set progress back much.
Patents only make a difference in cases where substantial investment is needed to produce the invention, that is, it's so expensive that no one would bother to try unless they had some means of getting substantial returns. Nothing in math is ever like that: your expense is pencil, paper, and maybe coffee. Similarly for anything one person can code up on a PC.
New drugs cost millions to bring to market. Semiconductor fabs cost even more (around a billion dollars, no not a typo). Patents in those areas promote progress, by helping people recover their investments.
This is a description of the bill from CRS - Congressional Research Service. Note that it was passed on November 19, 1999 as an attachment to another bill.
American Inventors Protection Act of 1999
November 29, 1999
Michael V. Seitzinger
Legislative Attorney
American Law Division
Congressional Research Service
Summary
After several years of consideration, on Friday, November 19, 1999, Congress gave final approval to a bill which makes major changes to the patent laws. On this day the Senate passed the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999 as part of the Intellectual Property and Communications Omnibus Reform Act of 1999, attached by reference to the Consolidated Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2000. Major provisions of the bill include provisions to protect inventors from unscrupulous invention marketing services, reducing certain patent fees, allow an infringement defense for one who first develops and commercially uses the subject matter, extend patent terms in cases of administrative delay by the Patent and Trademark Office, provide for publication of the patent after a certain period of time, provide for optional inter partes reexamination procedures, and transform the Patent and Trademark Office into an independent agency under the policy direction of the Secretary of Commerce.
After several years of consideration, on Friday, November 19, 1999, Congress gave final approval to a bill which makes major changes to the patent laws. On this day the Senate passed the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999 as part of the Intellectual Property and Communications Omnibus Reform Act of 1999, attached by reference to the Consolidated Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2000.(1) This report summarizes major provisions of the patent reform bill.
Subtitle A: Inventors' Rights Act of 1999
This subtitle requires an invention promoter to disclose certain information to a customer in writing before entering into a contract for invention promotion services. This information includes the total number of inventions evaluated by the invention promoter for commercial potential in the past five years and how many of these received positive and negative evaluations, the total number of customers who have contracted with the invention promoter in the past five years, the total number of customers known by the invention promoter to have received a net financial profit as a result of his services, the total number of customers known by the invention promoter to have received license agreements as a result of his services, and the names and addresses of all previous invention promotion companies with which the invention promoter has been affiliated in the past ten years.
A customer of an invention promoter injured by any material false or fraudulent statement, omission, or disclosure of required information may recover in a civil action, in addition to reasonable costs and attorneys' fees, actual damages or damages not exceeding $5000. In certain circumstances treble damages may be awarded.
Complaints made against invention promoters are to be made available to the public.
Subtitle B: Patent and Trademark Fee Fairness
This subtitle reduces certain specified patent fees. Additional authority allows adjustments in trademark fees with respect to fluctuations in the Consumer Price Index. A study on alternative fees is authorized. Trademark fees are required to be spent on trademark-related operations.
Subtitle C: First Inventor Defense
This subtitle allows an infringement defense for one who actually reduced the subject matter to practice at least one year before the effective filing date of the patent and commercially used the subject matter before the effective filing date of the patent.
The sale of a useful end product produced by a patented method shall exhaust the patent owner's rights to the extent that the rights would have been exhausted if the sale had been made by the patent owner.
The defense to infringement is subject to a number of limitations and qualifications. For example, a person may not assert the defense unless the invention is for a business method. A person asserting the defense has the burden of establishing the defense by clear and convincing evidence.
The earlier inventor defense is apparently important to many small and large businesses, especially in light of the 1998 opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in State Street Bank and Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group,(2) which held that methods of doing business are patentable.
Subtitle D: Patent Term Guarantee
This subtitle would extend patent terms in instances in which there have been administrative delays by the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). In most instances the patent shall be extended one day for each day of delay after the end of a specified period.
If the issue of an original patent were delayed because of the failure of PTO to issue a patent within three years of the actual filing date of the application in the United States, the term of the patent shall be extended one day for each day after the end of that three-year period until the patent had been issued.
The period of adjustment of the term of a patent would have to be reduced by a period equal to the period of time during which the applicant failed to engage in reasonable efforts to conclude prosecution of the application. An applicant would be deemed to have failed to engage in reasonable efforts to conclude processing or examination of an application if he had not responded within three months to PTO requests.
Patent term adjustment requests would be appealable to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
Subtitle E: Domestic Publication of Patent Applications Published Abroad
Applications for patents filed only in the United States shall be kept confidential by PTO.
An application for a patent shall in most cases be published promptly after the expiration of eighteen months from the earliest filing date for which a benefit is sought.
An application shall not be published if it is for a design patent.
A patent would include the right to obtain a reasonable royalty from any person who during the publication period had used the invention.
Subtitle F: Optional Inter Partes Reexamination Procedure
A new chapter 31, entitled "Optional Inter Partes Reexamination Procedures," is added to title 35 of the United States Code. Under this new chapter any person at any time could file a request for inter partes reexamination of a patent on the basis of cited prior art.
Not later than three months after the filing of a request for inter partes reexamination, the Director of PTO is required to determine whether a substantial new question of patentability affecting any claim of the patent is raised by the request. The Director may at any time determine whether a substantial new question of patentability is raised. A determination by the Director is final and nonappealable.
If the Director finds that a substantial new question of patentability has been raised, the determination must include an order for inter partes reexamination of the patent for resolution of the patentability. The order may be accompanied by the initial action of PTO on the merits of the inter partes reexamination.
Reexamination must be conducted according to procedures established for initial examination, subject to certain exceptions. The patent owner is permitted to propose any amendment to the patent, except that no proposed amended or new claim enlarging the scope of the claims of the patent is permitted.
The patent owner involved in an inter partes reexamination may appeal concerning any decision adverse to the patentability of any original or proposed amended or new claim of the patent and may be a party to an appeal taken by a third party requester. A third party requester may appeal concerning any final decision favorable to the patentability of any original or proposed amended or new claim of the patent or be a party to any appeal taken by the patent owner.
When the time for appeal has expired or any appeal proceeding has terminated, the Director shall publish a certificate canceling any claim of the patent finally determined to be unpatentable, confirming any claim of the patent determined to be patentable, and incorporating in the patent any proposed amended or new claim determined to be patentable.
Once an order for inter partes reexamination has been issued, neither the patent owner nor the third party requester may file a subsequent request for inter partes reexamination until an inter partes reexamination certificate is issued and published, unless authorized by the Director.
Once a final decision has been entered against a party in a civil action that the party has not sustained its burden of proving the invalidity of any patent claim or if a final decision in an inter partes reexamination proceeding instituted by a third party requester is favorable, that party may not later request inter partes reexamination of any patent claim on the basis of issues which that party raised or could have raised. This does not prevent the assertion of invalidity based on newly discovered art unavailable to the third party requester and PTO at the time of the inter partes reexamination proceedings.
Third parties can appeal a PTO determination that a reexamined patent is valid to the PTO Board of Appeals and Interferences but not to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Subtitle G: Patent and Trademark Office
This subtitle would establish the Patent and Trademark Office as an independent agency within the Department of Commerce. It would be subject to the policy direction of the Secretary of Commerce but would retain responsibility for decisions concerning the management and administration of its operations.
This subtitle would also establish a Patent Public Advisory Committee and a Trademark Public Advisory Committee. Each committee would have nine voting members appointed by the Secretary of Commerce for a term of three years. Members of each committee would be required to be citizens of the United States, would include members representing small and large entity applicants in proportion to the number of applications filed by these members but in no cases would small entity members constitute less than 25 percent of the members, and would include persons with achievement in finance, management, labor relations, science, technology, and office automation. Each committee would include a nonvoting representative of each labor organization recognized by PTO. The duties of each committee would include reviewing the policies, goals, performance, budget, and user fees of PTO and advise the Director on these matters.
All fees authorized or established could be used by PTO in carrying out its duties.
Subtitle H: Miscellaneous Patent Provisions
Miscellaneous provisions include the treating of the abandonment of provisional patent applications, international applications, electronic filing, a study and report on biological deposits in support of biotechnology, and prior art exclusion for certain commonly assigned patents.
Footnotes
1. Patent reform provisions in the 106th Congress passed the House on August 4, 1999 (H.R. 1907) and the Senate on November 2, 1999 (S. 1798). The House-Senate Conference Committee incorporated patent reform in Title IV of H.R. 1554 (See H.Rept. 106-464). Congress approved the Intellectual Property and Communications Omnibus Reform Act of 1999 (S. 1948) on November 19, 1999. The Act is attached to the Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2000 (H.R. 3194; H.Rept. 106-479).
2. 149 F.3d 1368 (Fed. Cir. 1998).
Look at wavelet or fractal image compression. I would hardly call those "obvious."
Yes it is not obvious. But it was discovered. You can not grant patents for SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY.
Meyer, Gabor, Daubechies, Donoho and other scientists that made this methods possible do not own any patents on these discoveries. Why should some jerk be able to rip off their hard work, package it nicely and get a monopoly on a useful method? Greatly delaying its widespread use?
Patents are useful - they force to disclose trade sectrets - in exchange for monopoly of course.
Nothing that can be discovered may be a trade secret for long. Thus there is no use for this trade off. Software patents should be banned for good.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Patents can not be granted for discovery - only for non-obvious invention. Look it up.
There was no discovery in noticing a sticking plant. It was known. The usage of this knowledge that was inventive. With wavelet data compression, there was nothing inventive - only careful implementation of a scientific knowledge.
Copyright protects implementations - not patents.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
...commercial funding for software research
;o)
would be reduced, as the potential of making back the investment would be greatly diminished.
"Patently" untrue (ahem...)
Businesses will still need technologies to sell and to enhance their own efficiency. Do you imagine that in the absence of patents they'd all just close up shop? Would they bollocks. No, all that would happen is that instead of licensing other firms' technologies they'd either get them for free if they were out in the open (and I'm sure those able to do so would *not* be moaning about the loss of the patent system)...or else they'd happily re-invent what others have but are keeping secret.
Second, what research there was would largely result in work which would remain trade secrets, which impede progress as much as overbroad, overlong patents do.
I don't see any evidence for such a conclusion.
Under the current patent system, you are not allowed to reinvent and if the owner of the patent doesn't want to licence to you then you are stuffed. If we abandon the patents system then anyone is free to invent or re-invent whatever they want. Isn't that a more natural system for a free market economy?
The current patent system only preserves monopolies, it doesn't facilitate progress at all.
The only possible downside is the cost of reinvention. But in that case, who is the loser anyway? The company doing the reinventing only pays for its own R&D instead of stumping up royalties to the firm that could afford the most expensive lawyers. So the overall costs to such companies probably don't change much. But *even if* more money is being spent overall, then this money still isn't going into a black hole. It's being spent in the form of salaries to the scientists and engineers doing that R&D. IOW, the money is still circulating, but it's circulating through salaries to the extra R&D workers rather than through dividend payments to Acme Corp's stockholders. Do you have a problem with that?
In other words abandoning the patent system would result in no net effect upon the economy, but in the training and employment of more scientists and engineers, less idle rich parasite investors lounging around... and much less employment of Intellectual Property lawyers
(As I wrote that I just had a beautiful vision of thousands of redundant IP lawyers begging for a job at Macdonalds.)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Naw, it *is* simple really. The only complication is that the words invent and discover are almost synonymous etymologically speaking (Latin word for "to discover" was "invenire", IIRC). But we use he words in different contexts today and patent law is based on the same interpretation.
Allow me to attempt a suitable pair of definitions to illustrate the difference (this is certainly how these words *should* be used IMHO):
A "discovery" is the invention of a fundamental truth that holds independently of invention, i.e. would exist anyway even if man did not (OK, you know what I mean by this and so does everybody else so DON'T start on about philosophy again). The courts are not about to entertain notions about trees falling silently in deserted forests).
An "invention" is the discovery of a process or mechanism that requires man for its construction and operation.
PS. FWIW I agree with you about the youngsters and their obsession with nihilism. Kids today, huh? Actually I have to admit I too read Sartre and Nietzche as an angst-ridden teenager...and thus it ever was, probably.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I've never even suggested that commercial organisations are in business to do R&D for the sake of it. If there are any, they are ignored for the purpose of this discussion.
But a business will weigh the risks and potential rewards for any project. With the risk of patent lawsuits removed, and the knowledge that careful protection of one's trade secrets will still protect one's investment, the only new risk to a business contemplating the development of a new product is that of a competitor paying for their own research, taking the same risks and competing fairly in the same market. This happens all the time anyway; the proportion of cases where a patent prevents any entry to the same market is fairly small.
I see no indication that allowing companies to re-invent a particular technology - which is all this is about - would harm companies in any way. And since it would enable competition in those markets where one company *does* have a lock on a particular technology, the consumer would certainly benefit.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Patents are not necessary to ensure compensation for R&D. If some company really invested that much in R&D then they obviously have experts on hand who know how to make use of the technique. They don't need a government-granted monopoly to get their product to market.
Patents are nothing more than a legal tool used by big business to keep up their market's barrier to entry, and browbeat any and all of their competitors out of the market.
The sooner the whole system is dead and buried, the better it will be for anyone who wants to develop and market a product (regardless of whether it is software).
________________________________
Plato would agree. You raise an intersting point (as well as one of the modern uses for good philosophy, as oppsosed to all the Nietzche, Sarte crap that seems to be so popular with the kids these days): what is the difference between a discovery and an invenction? Did velco exist before it was discovered/invented?
"Inventions can be patented but discoveries cannot" seems like a really simple guideline, but it isn't so simple.
So are any patends valid? It seems that it would take much more than a law degree to answer that question.
Here's the pdf of HR 1907 from the GPO.
Most interesting things in it I've found so far are:
1. Better regulation of the "invention promotion services" industry (ie. the "Do you have an idea?" TV spot guys).
2. Any 3rd party can request the reexamination of a patent based on prior art. (this IS DEFINITELY a step in the right direction...)
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
Perhaps the US should establish an Intellectual Property Review Board, similar in spirit to the Federal Reserve. Instead of adjusting interest rates to stimulate or check the economy, they would adjust time periods of copyright and patent laws, perhaps adjusting terms independently for different categories of items.
For example, one year electronics patents would be determined to last 15 years, and software patents for 5 years. The next year, they might adjust electronics patents to 13 years and software patents to 3 years.
They would make these determinations on the basis of the economy. If the purpose of IP restrictions is to promote invention, then they should measure the rate of invention and creativity in our society. Then they could determine what the ideal lengths of coverage should be. They will need to balance the incentives to the creators against the freedom of dissemination and usage of the technologies (which exists when terms are short).
By following a set of established rules, this Review Board would not be bullied around by the likes of Disney, as occurred in the recent Copyright Term Extension Act. When this act was passed, it appeared that only the potential profits of creators was considered. This should be weighed against the potential wealth of the public domain.
Well, we're still working on that with Open Source too. RedHat and VALinux may provide one solution. O'Reilly may provide another. Musicians sharing MP3's on the net may provide yet another. But I think there's got to be something fundamentally new in the economics to make it work. Maybe something like slashdot ratings - a recognition of the contribution by the "community" who benefits from it, with some monetary reward tied to it. Science probably ought to work that way too - science has been going with the direct government subsidy approach for a while and I think it's been corrosive.
Intellectual content has always been more limited than it seems was needed under capitalism, at least where it is treated as property to be owned. It has so much greater value when shared and unlike real property, intellectual property can be shared without any limits. Can we create a new economic system capable of achieving this? Maybe we already have?
Energy: time to change the picture.
Well, what's a government? Certainly doing something like this requires an organization - but membership in that organization could be purely voluntary - and could become something of a marketing ploy perhaps - "Boycott GM - they refuse to join the Free & Open Foundation!", "Buy from Ford, proud supporters of Free & Open(TM)".
Then anybody who's a support donates 10% of profits or 1% of revenues (whichever's more) related to products that couldn't have been developed without Free&Open ides to the foundation and the foundation distributes it according to an established significance rating system. There has to be some objectivity in the system or else I agree it could be just a popularity contest. But if voluntary it's better than a government - another foundation like this could come along and do a better job.
It's not exactly a blueprint, but at a vague level I think this actually might be workable...
Arthur
Energy: time to change the picture.
Thinking about Bruce Sterling's recent Viridian Manifesto, it seems that we really need something new regarding intellectual property rights for the networked age. Surely the success of the open source movement in software could extend to any area of intellectual property - why not the design of hardware and processes too? Maybe we can start with Lego Mindstorm design :-) But I think it's time for a new model - something which rewards creators yes, but also which does NOT keep things secret or proprietary in such a way that the use of new creations is in any way limited. I don't know how to do this yet, but I think there's a glimmering of a more general idea in there. Lets replace patents with something better!
Energy: time to change the picture.
Why aren't these companies getting punished for their abuse of the patents system? When their patents are shown to be invalid, they should have to compensate the companies who lost out because they couldn't use the technology.
This kind of law (or test case) would protect the competitiveness of the marketplace just like anti-trust and anti-dumping laws.
Since software has just recently become patentable, it should have a short-lived patent system, say a 3 year patent on all software
innovations. Later, say in 10 years, congress could then extend the length of patents for longer. This is because software is a new and
quickly emerging field, without 17-year business cycles.
The purpose of a patent is to encourage the inventor to disclose the details of his invention in exchange for a grant of exclusive use from the government. The alternative is to maintain the inventions as a trade secret; that is no disclosure. If you drastically shorten the effective period of a patent, few inventors will be interested in such a worthless bargain - they get nothing in exchange for their making their work public. In addition it will be very difficult to attract capital for commercial development of inventions that have only a three year exclusivity period.
I think that the result of your proposal will be a significant decrease in the rate of innovation in fields where the highest potential for growth exists - exactly the wrong economic result. People will not fund research in these fields, nor will they invest capital in whatever inventions do occur, and the tendency will be to try to keep the inventions as secret as possible.
As far as Microsoft goes, I really doubt that any of its OS monopoly is derived from a patent position. If you recal, Microsoft purchased MS-DOS from another company, and they did not have an exclusive license to sell it. There were at least two other unlimited licenses. MS-DOS is a copyrighted product, which is a completely different area of law from patents.
Flaw: why are companies such as Merck Sharp and Dohme, Glaxo-Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham some of the world's largest, and yet still "MegaResearchPharmaCorp"s?
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
It seems to me that this rant is much more about anti-Japanese sentiments than real worries about the American patent system. Otherwise, he would not have kept silent on the fact that this change will bring the American patent system more or less in line with European ones as well. In Europe you have two flavours of systems. The French approach: almost anything is patentable, but your patent won't last very long, about ten years, and it is up to the courts to decide whether a patent can be uphold or not. Which resembles the American system, but the duration of a patent is seriously limited. The German approach: your patent application will be scrutinised very thoroughly for being non-obvious by the patent office, but if you get past this stage you are well protected for quite a long period. The approach on the EU level is a mixture of both: almost anything can be patented for a short period (five years or something in that order) and after a serious investigation it can be extended.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
I couldn't agree more.
I work in a genetics research lab and have had the pleasure of doing a little bit of work for Francis Collins, the current head of the NHGRI and the Human Genome Project at the NIH.
I believe that the patenting of genes is extremely dangerous. However, we really don't need to wait for patent reform. All we need to do is support the HGP and make the info public before it can be patented.
Meyer, Gabor, Daubechies, Donoho and other scientists that made this methods possible do not own any patents on these discoveries. Why should some jerk be able to rip off their hard work, package it nicely and get a monopoly on a useful method? Greatly delaying its widespread use?
Well, they shouldn't, but those that *Did* make the breakthrough should have been able to get patents if they wanted to.
every idea is a scientific discovery or a mathimatical equasion at some level, no matter what. Take the example of a steam engine. It can be reduced to a mathimatical equasion, or it could be said that it was a sciantific discovery that you could use steam to create mechanical engergy. The real question is simply where to draw the line, I belive that drawing the line inside the relm of computers is valid.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I mean if you read Trudel's stuff he gives almost no facts at all, he makes statments like "Copy the Japanese Patent System -- known as one of the world's worst, most
abusive and unfair -- and just as it does, publish all American patent applications
within 18 months of filing -- even if a patent has not been issued and the technology
protected. That is guaranteed to make patent flooding and theft easier and will
eliminate the need to worry about industrial espionage. Early publication is
industrial espionage -- disclosing a company's new technologies to every thief and
brigand in the world." and then says "Don't admit that you are copying the Japanese Patent System, as H.R. 3460 co-author Rep. Pat Schroeder did, inadvertently, on the floor of the House of
Representatives last year. She said; "This bill [H.R. 3460] is about making our patent system uniform with both the one in Europe and the one in Japan..." which is not proof of anything. Nor does it explain why the Japanease system is bad, we have to take his word for it.
Also this guys does not seem to really understand that some patents are good and some like the way the software industry is using them today is really bad. He just makes a blanket protectionist case against the bill and gives no real proof or reasons why it is bad and that is when you can figure out what he is saying.
I'm looking at the text of the bill right now - and I think some of the ranting has to do with the section on First Inventor Defense.
Looks like the gist of it is to establish that if *you*, the little guy, invented and actually built it one year before the patent filing, or sold it ("used it commercially") anytime before the patent filing - then you can use that as your defense in a patent suit. It looks like it excludes companies - it's just for the garage tinkerer it seems - but the nastiest part is paragraph numbered (9) [page 23 of my copy].
That paragraph says that even successfully using this defense only acquits the one using it - it doesn't invalidate the patent. This looks real bad - a big monkey-wrench to invalidating bad patents.
I can just bet that was put in there so big companies can lean on little guys, let them off the hook by not challenging the First Inventor Defense, and still hold onto an invalid patent and use it to extort licensing fees from any company using that patented technology. Oh, yeah, and prevent the little guy who actually invented the thing first from selling it to any company (or any customers?).
I sure hope I'm wrong - is there a lawyer in the house who can make better sense of this &%#$%@! ?
The problem with this argument is that it assumes the creation of the technology in question. Once a technique such as wavelet compression (or RSA public-key encryption, something I am more familiar with) is created, it is most beneficial to the world as a whole that it be promulgated without restrictions. That is, without a patent.
The question is: which of these technologies would have been created without the promise of a patent, and which would not? Would the team of R, S, and A (I don't remember the names offhand) have bothered to make their public-key algorithm, and then to publish it so that the rest of us could check for weaknesses, if they didn't have the promise of profit by license royalties?
That I don't know the answer to. But I know that there are a lot of technologies that exist solely due to patent protection, and I also know that there are a lot of technologies that would exist with or without patent protection. The trick is categorizing technologies to these two types, and making the second type unpatentable.
--The basis of all love is respect
The intellectual property industry these days typically uses the argument that intellectual property law helps innovation, because without the rewards that they can get through being granted a monopoly, the creators of intellectual property would have no incentive to create.
.us, those arguments were made over 200 years ago, when a group of men who had risked their lives and wealth (I suspect that the former is often easier to risk than the latter) for freedom decided that these restricitons were worth the benefit. I doubt that many of those here, including those of us who have served in the military, have risked as much for freedom. Given that, very strong arguments will be needed to convince me that patents no longer have any use.
Like most absolutes, that's not entirely true, but there is a degree of truth in it. Some creators might have less of an incentive, but the [Open Source|Free Software] community demonstrates that financial reward isn't the only source of incentive.
I am usually sceptical of this claim, because I think that if there is an incentive to use an invention, then there is an incentive for potential users to pay for its creation. At least there certainly is when the costs of creation are relatively low. Perhaps in cases where the up front costs of the invention are high and the potential users are widely dispersed (eg pharmaceuticals) then this argument might hold. (Actually I'm still not convinced. Many people would have applied it in this form to such things as operating systems just a few years ago). However, in most instances I don't think the argument holds very well at all.
Creative individuals will create, but, like developers being paid to develop open source, creative people can create more if they don't have to meet their basic needs by doing less creative things. Business owners will do what is necessary to make more money, and if that is to pay creative people to create, that's what they will do. What patents are intended to do is to tilt the profit balance further toward creating new things, rather than reproducing old things, which makes businesses more likely to hire more creative people. Has this balance gotten wildly out of whack? Sure. As communications have improved, the cycles of one person learning of another's invention and building upon it have gotten shorter and shorter, but patent law hasn't adjusted to that.
Along those lines, I can believe that the costs of pharmecutical research are greater than most others, but that's not because of any exception that research has from the speedup in general, but because of the artificial (and, IMNSHO, necessary) inflation in costs caused by government regulation. Call me cynical, but I suspect that the only way to get pharmacutical companies to perform adequate safety testing otherwise would be for them to be hit with multi-billion dollar lawsuits (and evn that isn't always sufficient).
By granting monopolies on ideas and inventions and what I can do with them, patent laws are placing restrictions on my freedom.
Like most laws.
Very strong arguments are needed to justify this.
In
"Patently" untrue (ahem...)
Businesses will still need technologies to sell and to enhance their own efficiency. Do you imagine that in the absence of patents they'd all just close up shop?
Did I say that? No. I said that funding would be diminished, and much of what would be developed would be protected as "trade secrets". Businesses only exist to do one thing - make a profit. If something is high risk, like most research, there needs to be a high potential for return. Otherwise, they'll accept the lower returns of the low risk avenue of producing known quantities. Take away the protection of patents, and the risk stays high while the return lessens, probably to unacceptably low levels. In that environment, most businesses will wait for someone with a higher tolerance for risk to gamble that they can develop something new and make enough of a profit off of it before everyone else duplicates it.
No, all that would happen is that instead of licensing other firms' technologies they'd either get them for free if they were out in the open (and I'm sure those able to do so would *not* be moaning about the loss of the patent system)...or else they'd happily re-invent what others have but are keeping secret.
I don't see any evidence for such a conclusion.
I've heard estimates that anywhere from 80% to 95% of software is developed internally by companies which do not publish software. How much of that is "out in the open"? Pitifully little. Why? Not because they have any desire to make a direct profit off of the software, but because there is no reason to release it, and perceived reason not to - perhaps their software gives them an advantage over their competitors, so keep it a "trade secret".
Under the current patent system, you are not allowed to reinvent and if the owner of the patent doesn't want to licence to you then you are stuffed. If we abandon the patents system then anyone is free to invent or re-invent whatever they want. Isn't that a more natural system for a free market economy?
Perhaps, but the free market economy has nothing to do with the purpose of the patent system.
The current patent system only preserves monopolies, it doesn't facilitate progress at all.
I think that that statement is overbroad, but I agree with the essence - the current patent system preserves monopolies, and does little to facilitate progress.
The only possible downside is the cost of reinvention. But in that case, who is the loser anyway? The company doing the reinventing only pays for its own R&D instead of stumping up royalties to the firm that could afford the most expensive lawyers. So the overall costs to such companies probably don't change much. But *even if* more money is being spent overall, then this money still isn't going into a black hole. It's being spent in the form of salaries to the scientists and engineers doing that R&D. IOW, the money is still circulating, but it's circulating through salaries to the extra R&D workers rather than through dividend payments to Acme Corp's stockholders. Do you have a problem with that?
No, if that would be what would happen. It isn't. Let's go back to the issue of internal software. Who is the loser in the current situation? Arguably, every business is, because in most cases they've paid programmers to reimplement something that someone else has implemented, possibly better. Unfortunately, there's a prisoner's dilemma here, because unless every company opens their internal software, those who don't have the benefits of their own labor plus everything those who have opened it have.
But lets suppose that every business did open their code. Would that lead to increased employment for programmers? Hardly. Instead of having a team of programmers to develop something to do X, and another to develop one to do Y, and..., they would have a team to modify application A to do exactly X, then to modify application B to do exactly Y, and..., or perhaps it would be a set of smaller teams to do all of them in parallel. Would these non-software companies suddenly develop more varied software to keep their old programmers employed? Nope, they'd be in the unemployment lines, just like...
In other words abandoning the patent system would result in no net effect upon the economy, but in the training and employment of more scientists and engineers, less idle rich parasite investors lounging around... and much less employment of Intellectual Property lawyers
No, there would be fewer scientists and engineers being employed, as most businesses would only be employing the bare minimum necessary to reproduce the advances made by the rare adventurous business. The idle rich would find something else to invest in, but you're right about one thing - there would probably be fewer IP lawyers - unless they all got work fighting "trade secret" suits.
You seem to have the idea that businesses exist to do research. If so, you're wrong. Businesses exist to make a profit. If research makes a profit, they'll do research. If copying what others have researched makes more of a profit, they'll copy what others have researched. Right now, the patent system makes patents too valuable for too long, thereby impeding progress, but by scrapping patents entirely, you would be impeding (or failing to encourage) progress by removing the corporate incentive to fund research. Sure, there will be some research done, which the company will do its best to keep secret - that doesn't facilitate progress. There will be some people who will do research for their own pleasure, or in educational settings, but it won't be anything close to what we have today, and it definitely won't be your nirvana of increased research. We need to find some middle ground, where patents are valid long enough to encourage businesses to fund research, but not so long as to choke off research which builds on other patents.
The point is that there is a difference between inventions which can be used without disclosure, and those which are useless without disclosure. The latter group are disclosed, and thus "promote progress in the useful arts", the instant anyone starts using them; the reverse-auction and one-click shopping are examples.
Can you give me an example of a patent which can be used in a product without disclosure as you mean it?
I'm looking at a Kensington MemoryLock, which has a patent associated with it for a "stud or lock bolting device". Both "what you can do" and "how you do it" are both disclosed by the device.
Contrast this with the one-click shopping patent, where "what you can do" is definitely disclosed, but "how you do it" is only partially disclosed, as you can certainly see any cookies deposited, but you can only make intelligent guesses as to exactly how they are used.
With these two examples, we already know that you consider the one-click shopping patent disclosed, and shgouldn't be (easily) patentable. Would you find the locking device similarly (or more) disclosed, and likewise unpatentable? If not, why not? I have to say that, having seen the MemoryLock, that the concept seems obvious (run a case screw through a block, and seat a removable lock into opening), but was it really an obvious way of securing a screw when it was introduced? Was it really obvious that a cookie could be used to charge someone's credit card with one click, and noone else was crazy enough to gamble credit card charges on the security of their customers' cookie files? (I'm assuming that one-click shopping doesn't require you to log in each time, as I don't use Amazon. I have visions of someone's one-click cookie getting snarfed, and caseloads of $OBJECTIONABLE_TO_THEM books showing up on their doorstep.)
Come on. Sure, virtually everyone wants some kind of patent reform with regard to software, but we aren't all a bunch of IP-haters. Some of us just want a reasonable system, where someone doesn't grab "2+2=", but where something really novel can get patented by the inventor.
This is a the key point - though there are other issues related.
The purpose of the patent system is to encourage the advance of technology by trading a limited-time monopoly for a disclosure by the inventor of the guts of the invention. This gives the inventor time to get his invention into production, profit from it, and become established. Later it lets everybody else play - by which time the inventor is likely the established market leader.
Now that's appropriate for a hardware invention - both classic and modern electronic. Such devices require a fabrication facility and production design, which means a big up-front investment which must be amortized over a significant period, and exposure of the invention to many designers and laborers. Giving the inventor (or his partners or the patent-right purchaser) a limited-period monopoly lets him expose the design with the assurance that his work will be protected from competition for that period. This lets him employ enough people to begin high-volume production (with its economy of scale) and take out long-term loans (spreading the cost over many years production). Thus the unit costs are kept low and early volume production is encouraged - to the benefit of the consumer.
But production of proprietary software doesn't require such an investment. A new "killer ap" can be developed in secret by one person or a small number of people. When it's ready, the distribution media are utterly cheap and the unit costs are vanishingly small. A good app provides the user with significant value added. With vanishingly small unit cost and high unit value, profit margins are enormous. So investments can be made back very quickly, and a large pile of money accumulated before the software is cloned - after which the originator is established, a market leader, and a defacto standard, with no help from patents.
The software market was enormously profitable before software patents. (In fact it was enormously profitable even before copyright protection was extended to software.) There's plenty of incentive to volume-market a software product without patentability. And software life cycles are measured in single-digits of years, not decades.
On the other hand, a software patent locks up an invention (or a bogus claim of one) for a couple decades. If the idea is useful beyond the product (if any) that the patent holder choses to market, we all get to sit on our thumbs for a dozen life cycles before these other applications can be written. Bummer!
Thus, unlike hardware patents, software patents RETARD software innovation and REDUCE the availability of new products to the citizen consumer. This is exactly the reverse of what patents are supposed to do.
Software copyright, on the other hand, seems entirely appropriate. (Excluding distortions such as "look and feel", which seek to turn it into another form of patent by misinterpreting user interfaces as if they were movies or plays, or "copyright" of application interfaces and the like.)
Copyright protects the author of proprietary software against unscrupulous "pirates" who would just sell unauthorized copies of his work (at no development cost), without blocking others from designing a competing product using some of the same basic ideas and algorithms (but with development costs and lead time), and without blocking the use of the ideas and algorithms for other, innovative products.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I had some trouble getting the document so I've put a copy here.
I remember reading about this back around 1994, 5, or 6. I thought the bill had been killed in Congress, but clearly I was wrong. From what I recall it is a very bad bill, but I haven't read it in over a year. If I can I will submit a review or an annotated version to TECHNOCRAT.NET or SlashDot. Of course, I have no idea if it will go through on either site.
Then Ken (not Cliff, sorry again about that), shouldn't presume to speak for *All* Slashdotters.
Adam
I agree, patents are necessary. Even software patents. If you spend every minute of your spare time working on something amazing, say some super compression that doesn't use up much CPU time, or some amazing encryption, or what have you, and after a couple of years of work, you finally finished it, you would probably want to be paid back for your effort.
Now, if you get a patent, then you're set. No one can copy and sell your encryption method without your consent. However, if you can't, and you attempt to sell it to a large corporation, maybe they buy into it at the beginning, but then they could easily steal your idea, saying it was theirs in the first place, and you have no way to prove it. Besides, it doesn't matter, since there are no patents to protect it. Then big corporation makes tons of money off of *your* work, and you end up with nothing.
Patents are necessary, whether you like them or not. We need them to protect the ones who created the things in the first place. People like you and me. Sure, then can go wrong, but generally they're a good thing. Sure, we all want everything to be open source and free, but we have to feed ourselves. Cola, beer, pizza, chips, etc. isn't exactly free, and I for one wouldn't want to be a poor OS developer working at McDonalds to pay for my food. So think it from other points of view when you think of patents.
Look at the other types of protest going on. Do you thinks it's terribly plesant to wade through a hundred or so psychotic protesters who both attempt physical assault AND call you 'Murderer' every morning on the way into work? (Anti-abortion activists) I'd imagine the same thing happens to non-union employees when the union strikes, to every member of the American World Worker's party, etc. Bricks are just extremly annoying.
/. collective can fund.
Personally, I'm afraid a huge letter campaign wouldn't have much effect at all. The USPTO throws away the letters; They're far more worried about the opinions of the judges and lawmakers that can regulate them and or cut their budget. Letters written to to the federal judges that decide patent cases wouldn't have any effect either; They've got jobs for life, the public can go screw themselves. Writing to Congress, especially to the more powerful, established members, fails because they're too terribly interested in SIG money and the latest public opinion polls. Both changing public opinion through the media outlets and 'paying' Congresspeople to like our proposals cost far more money than the
Or, mabye it isn't. The WTO protesters made headlines even before the Anarchists showed; Many of us paid attention and now know why the WTO is 'evil'. How many of us have seen the latest Greenpeace 'chain yourslf to a tree' effort in the news? Do you think Greenpeace would even be a blip on our radar without thirty-odd years of it? I doubt it.
What we need to do is something so out-of-the-ordinary that the popular media picks it up and disseminates it, pre-chewed and dumbified, to the Joe and Sally Apathy's of the US. When public opinion shifts, so does Congress.
Send 'em bricks, and lots of them.
Any one interested please send mail to either the address listed above! Any organization of effort is better none, be it bricks, letters, or code.
.sig: Now legally binding!
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Has anyone thought to contact Trudel on the phone to get his opinion. I can't right now since I'm at work. But there is a number on his web site. I'm just curious who will answer the phone: a receptionist, John Trudel, or a cheap analog answering machine.
The Trudel Group
33470 Chinook PL
Scappoose, OR 97056
503-638-8644
I also have a question for the guy that sumbitted this to Ask Slashdot. What is your relationship to John Trudel? Have you heard of him before? If not, what led you to his web site?
numb
If I'm not mistaken, the US is leaving the 20th century.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
The page didn't even render right in NS4.7. Text was covered with graphics. Does anyeone have a link to the actual text of H.R.1907, or a discussion by someone who doesn't make Principia Discordia look like a serious work of literature?
--Kevin
Does this change much? Not really. As far as I can tell, he's upset about public release of the patent after 18 months. It reads like xenophobic propeganda. How will this give an edge to Japan? Don't other US companies get to see it as well?
Why didn't the patent system save US corporations from Japan in the 70's and 80s? As I recall TV's, VCR's and other similar technology were developed mainly in the US, but Japan got a hold of the technology and created a better consumer product, and blew away US corporations in the consumer electronics market. There is a lot more to the issue than patents. One piece of legislation, destroying our entire economy? He gets the instat label of crackpot with that line.
From Joe Average's point of view nothing is really happening here. This isn't going to stop patent abuses. Patents still benefit individuals, for good or bad. Usually bad as far as the current system is set up. They're not changing the application or approval process (as far as I can tell...I couldn't get much of any real information out of his site, other than a lot of ranting). If there is anything of true substance to this bill, he hasn't told me what it is.
Horrible web page design as well.
Yes, this is true. You need a good chunk o' change, and a lawyer to do a patent search for you. The law has deemed that only patent attorneys are qualified to do this work.
So unfortunately, while patents are SUPPOSED to protect the little guy, in practice, the little guy is lucky to have the resources to even file for one (let alone get it approved).
This is a serious problem with the current system and bears examination. The status quo simply encourages more abuse by corporations.
Best regards,
SEAL
[Look at wavelet or fractal image compression. I would hardly call those "obvious."] ... Yes it is not obvious. But it was discovered. You can not grant patents for SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY.
Er, that's exactly what patents are. You could use exactly the same argument for the Cotton Gin. It was "discovered" by Eli Whitney, and thus can't be patented because it's "scientific discovery".
An even better one is the guy who "discovered" Velcro by noticing a certain plant stuck to his clothes.
---
> I believe that the RSA team published their
;)
> mathematics before they filed for a
> patent (perhaps even before they thought of
> filing for a patent). [There was a huge furor
> when the spooks tried to suppress the RSA
> algorithm, but it had already spread too wide
> before they woke up to it
This could have been a shrewd move on their part
too. AFAIK the NSA has the ability to Mark any
patent they wish Classified. This would mean that
the patent would be issued, but would be useless
to the owners, since it would be classified. No
publishing or licencing. Talk about a raw deal.
The NSA, I hear, often does this with encryption
technology. Now...look at it this way, you have a
full year AFTER publishing to file for a patent.
So...if you publish first, then file, the NSA
can't very well gain anything by classifing the
patent.
Very well played if you ask me.(even if I despise
the entire concept of patents and espcially
cryptography and other math patents...I still
apreciate the manuvering -whether it was
intantional or not)
> You might also want to check out some of Bruce
> Schneier's work to see if he's patented his
> encryption algorithms.
His work is excellent. I am reading Applied
Cryptography now...excellent book.
> A quick check of counterpane.com turns up this
> page on Blowfish, indicating that it is now part
> of OpenBSD
Its an algorythm...it is part of OpenBSD's
OpenSSH. It is AFAIK not an integral part of the
OS. (unless they have encrypted filesystems)
>(and almost certainly not patented).
AFAIK (according to the book) its is not.
> Even if RSA did patent theirs, it doesn't mean
> that they set the standard.
Well as far as public key systems go, they did
set the standard. RSA has to be the most widely
used Public Key system I can think of.
FWIW, Blowfish is a block cipher not a public
key system
Tho there are unpatented public key systems...
um El Gamel I think???
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Patents are currently justified becuase they are alleged to promote progress in the useful arts. I would like to argue that this is, to put it bluntly, complete hogswash.
Progress occurs spontaneously in the minds of individuals. This may happen in universities or research centres, but more often than not it is just a lateral thinking person who sees a good way to solve a problem. Businesses solve problems like this all the time, and I think it is no coincidence that some of the greatest progress we have seen in the twentieth century are due to fiercely competitive markets in various commodity technologies.
Patent monopolies are the antithesis of progress - they remove most incentives for further innovation and create unnaceptable barriers of entry to innovative competitors. They create a hugely costly system of IP law which is a pretty impassable obstacle for small players in any case. Additionally, the beaurocracy and royalties imposed on companies needing to use a patented idea inevitably means that the invention is never used as much as it should have been.
You see, all inventions will be discovered ultimately. Real science will be done by people who are eternally curious and love their subject. Practical innovations will arise naturally as people need them. Business ideas will be created by businessmen, that is their job after all.
So why are we still enslaved by this idea of patents? I'll admit that some inventions may occur slightly sooner because of financial incentives, and biotech may fall into this category. But even then, the benefits of these inventions are less than they would otherwise have been because the high price of patented products limits their usage.
Furthermore, it is not clear that mankind is fully ready to handle the implications of some discoveries. Patents tend to encourage an unquestioning headlong rush into ideas such as GM food, designer babies, cloning humans and growing body parts. Not that these are necessarily bad, but I for one can see the advantage of actually slowing down progress until some of the ethical issues are properly sorted out. Without patents, we wouldn't have the problem of a self-interested lobby pushing these ideas before mankind is mature enough to handle them.
Aside from the fact that I am morally offened at the thought that anyone could "own" an abstract idea, I think it is clear that patents of all kinds impose a huge burden on society. Without patents, products would be cheaper, the economy would be far more competitive and progress would *still* happen as companies fight to keep a step ahead. Any country that dumped patents right now would start to see the benefits of a *real* free market.
Actually - it should be $2.30 for a two day delivery if you use the 'FLAT' two day envelop. You would get a slight argument from the postal guy - but then you would not be able to put a brick into the package - Maybe a couple of pieces of 'Sh*t' mixed in with some gravel/rock to the point that it weighed around 5#. It would also mean that they would have a 'clean up cost' for it. That is if you really want your taxes to go up.
To find the truth, you must look beyond what you see.
A few things,
How many Years? I recall a lot more than 10-20. Also, here is the deal with that. He is much older, spent years worth of lawyers fee's and in the end he still got a fraction of what the patent really was worth.
The point is that you really cannot challenge The system, if you cannot afford too.
Recently, an aquaintance of mine, *who will go nameless for use as an example* has a patent on a product he makes. A larger company currently is producing the EXACT same thing.
He calls them, complains, they tell him to sue him and by the time he gets any money outta it, the product will be useless by then anyways.
The company flat out told him to sue, even though they KNEW they were in violation.
Patent's don't protect the small, they are only used so you can sell your invention to a larger company and at least make some money (less than what they would pay the lawyers).
Patent law is obviously in disrepair. Consider the Cold Fusion hoax. Without knowing the cold fusion was false, several friends initiated a "Patent" on the cold fusion. You know what? I bet they would have gotten it, but they dropped it when they found out it was crap.
Welcome to big business.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
"As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between genetic code and computer software (in this context) is that one program is run by biological mechanisms and the other by electronic ones."
There's a difference there, with software someone had to go to the trouble of thinking it up and writing the code, Genetic code is a natural occurance, these companies are just going to the trouble of finding it. An analogy would be an astronomer finding a new comet and then putting a patent on it. If a company comes up with a specific use of a particualr gene then maybe a patente might be justified, but only for that specific use, not a general one such as "use in treatment of cancer" more like "use in treatment of *foo* cancer by *bar* process".
Hmm - I read the rant and rave - but to someone who's not an American citizen, and not living in America, it's just another amusing example of people (and we have them here too - so I'm not US bashing) who don't understand that the future is a GLOBAL interest and the time for countries has passed - the internet is finally allowing us a global society, and in my mind at least, that is a good thing!
However as to patents themselves. I agree in principle - John Smith comes up with a great design for a new type of shelving - he investigates, tries to set up his own production - talks to a few plastic companies - no one is interested. Two weeks later one of those companies is producing a radical new design of shelving - I think we can agree that we want some protection for the small inventor..
However, we can see immediately two major exceptions -
1) SoftwareThere are two problems with software, and to a lesser extent, hardware, that should rule them out of patent-ability completely -
a) the first thing is the pace of development - there are thousands of people all over the world working on every particular thing. When it comes down to it, 99.99999% of ideas aren't "original" - they are a case of putting facts together - someone says something, someone hears it, and manages to connect it with another fact - and an idea is born. That is why, if you look through history, so many amazing ideas (like calculus) were invented simultaneously by unrelated groups - its not that people have some marvelous genius to produce the idea, its just that the idea was "ready" - ie all the bits leading to the idea were out there, it just took someone to put them together - In the software industry, the technology is moving so fast, and the information is moving so smoothly that I refuse to believe that anyone can come up with an idea and get it to market before tens, even hundreds of other people have also independently come up with exactly the same idea - so do they really deserve anything for "getting there first?" - or even worse, for thinking of patenting it, whereas the majority of people actually do something wonderful, and post their idea on a newsgroup or in IRC or something.
b) the second problem with a software patent is that there are NO barriers to entry (whatever you may believe about Microsoft) - when it comes down to it, if you think of an idea - you are free to implement it with no cost (other than time) to yourself whatsoever - this is very different from the traditional small inventor picture, where they have to approach others to build their product, or invest an absurd amount of money into making a factory or business themselves. I am a developer who earns his livelihood from shareware, so I have a right to say this - I have even written (with a friend) a complete operating system - and believe that there literally aren't ANY barriers to entry - people use Microsoft/Adobe products and others because they are currently the best - not because they are made to - I used to run linux on my server, but changed to Win 2000 because it has a truly transparent proxy - if linux comes out with something better, or BEOS - I will change - and even though a large percentage of the industry aren't like that - ie they won't change products, even operating systems, at a days notice - the people who are driving the industry - ie us - the developers, the hackers, the techies (the little guys in the corner who everyone in the office asks for advice on their purchasing agreements) make all difference to the direction of the industry.
and think about it - when people start developing things themselves - they try to develop the idea as fast as possible because they know someone else is going to come up with it! Doesn't that mean that it shouldn't really be patented?! - ie it wasn't much of an achievement if they are fully aware that many other people are gunna have the same idea!
2) the human genomeI think we can all agree that there is no way that the human genome should be patent-able (and this argument also applies in the computer industry) - the reason? no one is INVENTING anything - they are just discovering something intrinsic - even that discovery would possibly have value - but with the genome, it's not a question of discovering something that others wouldn't discover for a while, its only a question of discovering something FIRST. There is a block of information out there owned by the universe - there are separate groups of people racing to learn about it - it's an absurd notion to believe that someone who gets there a day, month or year before someone else has any more rights to use the results than the others??!!!
It's like saying that if I read a self-help book on carpentry, before anyone else, then I can charge anyone for use of the information - because that is exactly what is happening - the genome is a book, written by god, or the universe, or the inherent structure of the system - and I don't thin any brownie points should accrue for being the first to read any part of it! Sure, patent the TECHNIQUES that allowed you to get there first, but patenting the code itself is just ridiclous
I code therefore I am
The only thing I can think of is that this would reduce the effective confidentiality period of an application from 30 months to 18. You see, when you file for a patent in one country, you have a one year grace period to file in the rest of the world, but still get the same effective filing date (known as the "priority date") as on that first application.
Now, the priority date applies for the purposes of patent protection, as well as first-to-file claims in other countries, but it is the actual filing date which determines the date of publication. So, a common tactic is to file in the U.S., wait a year, then file in the rest of the world. This way, you get all the benefits of the U.S. filing date around the world, but the application is not published until 30 months after the U.S. filing date. This would prevent this tactic and require all applications to be published 18 months after the true filing date.
So you can see why corporations might not like this--things they want to keep secret are now revealed a year earlier than they would be otherwise--but it is important to note this is not an issue only to U.S. inventors/corporations. Foreign inventors can and do use this tactic just as well as U.S. inventors, as there is no rule that your first application must be filed in your home country.
I made my comment as a constructive piece of criticism to be worked with, not a catch-all.
My belief is that it takes less resources to secure an equivalent revelation in software systems than in, say, tractor parts. Therefore, the reward (in government supported monopoly over a number of years) should be lower. Exactly how many years should be determined by the how many years the industry can tolerate being without key technologies.
But there is another problem lurking behind the current patent system. Besides the fact that these patent "clerks" get payed nothing and hit with sh*t from lawyers making their annual salary in a week. Besides the fact that Congress has made "business processes" patentable, in violation of the spirit of patent law. Besides the fact that Intelectual property is itself a dubious notion (remember when your ten year-old friends used to say when an idea worked "I thought of it first!").
The real problems stem from truth, logic, and lack thereof in the system of obtaining, enforcing, and repealing patents. Each of these are insanely expensive, abusable, and all too human processes. I mean, there is better logic in playgrounds and Nurseries than in the lawyer's technical arguments over why X should pay Y several billion dollars of hard-earned money.
Submarine patents are obvious abuses, and should not be valid. Ever played boggle? Two people look for words in any direction on a small letter board, and hide their sheets. The most, best words win, and the rule is if two people come up with the same word from the board neither player gets the points. Patents should work like that. If two people independantly come up with an idea, obviously it wasn't patentable to begin with.
-Ben
Some patents are granted for inventions that cannot be used without being disclosed (look-and-feel patents, anyone?). ... Since the progress in the useful arts is brought about by disclosure, schemes such as the above which cannot be used without being disclosed should be held to a very high level of scrutiny before any patent is granted.
I'm afraid I don't get you here. Every patent has to be disclosed (aside from some patents with "National Security" implications), when the patent is granted.
Most of the benefits of many inventions is not in the sales, but in the use. (See open-source software.) Techniques such as wavelet compression are far more useful if they are not patented, because the requirement to negotiate use rights is a barrier to their use, and their value is increased by ubiquity; the promise of "progress in the useful arts" is taken back by the barriers to entry.
And it always has been. The purpose of the patent system is not to "promote use of the useful arts", but, as you pointed out, to "promote progress of the useful arts". While the current system, especially the length of the patents and the inability of the PTO to recognize obviousness and intependently research prior art, impedes progress, so would eliminating software patents, as two things would happen. First, commercial funding for software research would be reduced, as the potential of making back the investment would be greatly diminished. Second, what research there was would largely result in work which would remain trade secrets, which impede progress as much as overbroad, overlong patents do.
I think the best solution is to greatly reduce the patent period for software patents to 3 years after award or 5 years after application, and to increase funding for the PTO to adequately research patents. Perhaps the funding could come from a sliding scale for patent application fees based on the applicant's annual revenues, with an additional fee for patents transferred within 1 year of issue (the additional fee being the difference between what the fee would be for the company gaining the patent, minus the amount paid to the original recipient of the patent.
This is really very old news. H.R. 1907 and its Senate counterparts were adopted at the end of the last session, folded into the appropriations bill and passed by a substantial majority of both houses.
The only problems with the provisions are that they didn't go far enough. Patent "reform" is far closer to the position of most Slashdot readers than the strong-IP, "patentee must always win, and anything that weaken's a patentee's rights is bad for America" views espoused by the bill's critics.
The key provisions provided for early publication (which gives companies and programmers a timely heads up of claims for software patents when international patent protection is sought), limited prior user rights for programmers and their employers who had used programs written and in use prior to the issue date of a method of doing business or process patent and a number of administrative changes.
Most significantly, it started to provide greater access to third parties who bring prior art to the patent office to seek reexamination of an issued patent. Reexamination is substantially less expensive, and sometimes far less risky, than litigating the validity of the patent in court. I recently posted in Slashdot concerning the virtues of liberalized reexamination for software inventions.
The subject of this news story represents a faction of so-called "independent inventors" who take a radical, pro-patent stance, arguing that virtually anything that weakens a patent owner's rights compromises the rights of all citizens. I have found advocates from this camp to adopt a "take-all-prisoners" stance, relying on ad hominem attacks and jingoism in lieu of debates on the merits.
While it is true that much of the movement for patent reform is associated with "harmonization" of U.S. patent law with most foreign nations to simpify the process of filing world-wide applications, I will note that even that does not equate to ceding rights of American inventors to foreign entities. Moreover, I will observe that Slashdot critics of software patents have frequently cited to patent policy in Japan and the E.C. as more enlightened than that in the U.S.
Having checked with the company shipping clerk, FedEx, Airborne, UPS and USPS should take a brick wrapped in plain brown paper or in a largish envelope. To send the largish 4 lb, 14 oz brick I rescued from its role as doorstop would cost me $5.81 with Airborne (overnight), $6.60 wih Fedex (2-day), or $6.50 with the USPS. I dare say a thousand bricks/day would grind the USPTO mail room to a halt. It would be even better if none of us included contact information until the last brick. Not only would it leave the USPTO worried, the press would grapple onto it faster because of the 'mystery' angle.
.sig: Now legally binding!
But how many people could we get to participate? Say we get 10,000. That's 14,000 letters per day on average, and at a half ounce each, is 3.5 tons of mail.
Perhaps we should Airborne Express them a brick along with a letter that reads 'Judging from your decisions lately, everyone at the USPTO must be as dumb as a brick. Here's some company!/Now you're twice as smart' Our cost would soar to around $25, but they'd have to tolerate almost forty tons of insulting real-world spam. It's sure to make the news as one of the most inventive protests of all time.
.sig: Now legally binding!
You might also want to check out some of Bruce Schneier's work to see if he's patented his encryption algorithms. A quick check of counterpane.com turns up this page on Blowfish, indicating that it is now part of OpenBSD (and almost certainly not patented). Even if RSA did patent theirs, it doesn't mean that they set the standard.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I have a better idea, how about we DOS the patent office in meatspace, that is, use a modification of Milkman Dan's milk-a-pult to hurl burned-out software engineers at the US Patent Office building until they surrender?
--- Dirtside | "Spirituality" is the irrational belief in the supernatural
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
The flaw in your argument as stated: you are assuming that without a patent, inventors of things will get no compensation. But, many software companies make money from much unpatented software. Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft BASIC and DOS, Oracle, etc., these things were not patented, and their inventors got plenty of compensation.
To sharpen your argument, I think you mean to say that you feel
Not that I agree with you, but if I'm to argue against the idea I'd at least like it to make sense first ;)
IIRC, Celera is using a different process than HGP, that Celera believes would result in a MUCH faster mapping of the genome. Further, Celera has tried in vain to get the government to fund their approach, and so have whipped out the "we'll patent everything we find first" threat.
Now, whether or not Celera's claims are true, this opens up a whole can of worms:
If discoveries yield patents (either directly or by patenting the means of discovery or means of use), is publicly-funded research competing with potential commercial enterprise? Or are commercial enterprises using public research to gain exclusive advantage? (Note that researchers/universities can obtain patents for the fruits of publicly-funded work.)
Is market incentive or public policy the best way to determine how research is funded? Both have their faults, and both can be biased.
Are patents that claim rights to future/unproven technologies (e.g. cancer cure based on a discovered gene) invalid on the basis of being obvious? (After all, the applicant came up with the idea without even having the expertise or providing the details to make it work). Is the PTO also failing to enforce the necessary level of detail in such patents?
If Celera could really use the discovered genes to cure cancer, doesn't that provide a likely monetary reward, regardless of exclusivity?
Do Celera's tactics demonstrate that patents are only useful as a weapon to keep others away from an innovation? Or are patents the best protection for a small player versus the government or a large player?
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
I apologise for not including this in my original submission but I was forced to disconnect for a brief while.
Celera Genomics have been running a massively expensive mapping of the human genome, and in doing so have been in competition with another state-run mapping.
A little over a month ago, they applied for patent rights on 6500 sections of DNA which they had discovered, which was a very controversial application for the reasons pointed out by other responses. It also should be mentioned that Celera plan to release gene sequences which they discover only to paying subscribers.
Tellingly, one Israeli newspaper has described Celera as 'The New Microsoft'.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between genetic code and computer software (in this context) is that one program is run by biological mechanisms and the other by electronic ones.
Lots of people have been clammoring for the complete abolishment of all software patents, which I don't fully agree with. I think that this system needs a lot of work, and the number of software patents issued needs to be limited (at least) to truly unique, novel algorithms, not silly UI "innovations." Someone mentioned wavelets as an example of what I would consider patentable.
Genetic code should share these limitations, with the additional protection against genetic code found in nature. Of course then what happens when somebody develops a cool checksum/redundancy technique to resist mutation, they receive a patent, and then later on someone else discovers that technique being used elsewhere in nature? Is the patent revoked? Limited? Have there already been discussions or precedents relating to this?
My general impression (which hasn't changed (I'm on page 45 of 116) much since I started reading is that this is a bill by lawyers for lawyers.
The first section (17 pages) deals with "invention promoters", and on the surface, looks good because it creates a disclosure requirement and makes it easier for an inventor to end a contract with a promoter. But (rereading now) I didn't see a whole lot of legal teeth other than the right to sue (which we already had) for damages, and if the promoter was guilty of fraud, it was only a misdemeanor offense. Secondarily, if I'm reading correctly, the inventor only has five days to rescind the contract -- which is not long enough to find out whether or not the promoter can even provide value added service to the inventor.
Pg 19 -- has a definition sentence that is one paragraph long, and I'm still not sure I understand the legal ramifications of it. Pg. 20: requires that a process be reduced to "practice" at least a year prior to the filing of a patent in order to be a defense. Seems dangerous. What if I have developed a process in my business, but haven't documented it to a practice -- and some bozo tries to patent that same process and I don't get word of it. Did I just lose my "prior art" defense against infringement? Sure looks like it.
Pg. 20, bottom: correct me if I'm wrong, but current patent law allows infringement defense based on "substantial improvements" to an item, even if the new item was derived from an earlier patented item. My reading of the text is that this clause is ambiguous and could remove that protection. Pg: 21==>Burden of proof: So far my worst finding... It puts the burden of proof for infringment on the "alleged" infringer. 'xcuse me. I thought under US law a person was innocent until proven guilty. Pg:23==>A successful infringement defense does not necessarily invalidate the patent. Oh yeah? Isn't a successful defense somewhat a proof of "prior art".
Well, enough of that. I'll keep reading, but on first look this is bad.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I read Mr. Trudel's article in Analog about a month ago; I must say that I thought at the very least it was filled with a lot of historical distortions and inaccuracies.
For example, he credited the authors of the Constitution with developing the first useful patent system, and that this system was responsible for the genesis of rapid technical progress and technology world leadership in the US.
Well, there are some very severe problems with this account. One is that the first effective patent system was devised in England, not the US. A second is that up until at least 1850 or so the US was hardly a world technological power.
Another problem I have with Mr. Trudell is his rant about the US patent system becoming like the Japanese system. In one respect I agree with him - the Japanese system is terrible. It is in fact a corrupt arm of the Keiretsu that use it to maintain their grip on the Japanese economy. HOWEVER, most of the changes that are working their way through the US patent system are actually inspired by standardization that occurred in Europe with the WPO and EPO. These changes, from my point of view are generally beneficial, and solve a number of problems with the US system.
Many people feel that the problems with the Japanese patent system are very detrimental to their development of new technologies. One thing is certain; basic research in Japan is a mess.
If you compare the three systems, you will find that the historical tendency has been in Japan to grant a patent for very small inventions - things I have seen patented there would not make it through the US Patent Office. There are other problems as well; for example the company filing a patent has control of the examining process, and can delay examination for many years.
On the other hand, European patents are generally tougher to get, and require demonstration of a larger step in innovation - something I would like to see in the US process.
I have not read HR 1907 in detail, but if it is directed towards making the US system more compatable with the WPO (and the WPO does publish 18 months after filing) I am all in favor of it.
Geeks should want not just software patents, but also "business process patents" (such as Priceline's reverse auction) to be banned. The spirit of the current patent law seems to already say that "algorithms and laws of nature should not be patentable." But, even though it is clear to each of us that all software programs are long copywritable collections of algorithms, there is such cluelessness in Washington D.C. that they were willing to listen to money rather than to law.
In fact, my humble opinion is that the whole judicial system in America is broken. Perhaps it is also broken elsewhere in the world and never worked at all. But when a judge can take the word a man who makes about $20,000 a year and has to deal with perhaps thousands of patent cases... and hold that over billion dollar industries...
My point is this. In our increasingly litigious society, people are flocking to building whatever fodder for lawsuits and protection from lawsuits they can find. The real heart of the problem is the breakdown of logic, facts, and truth in the judicial system in favor of patents, stories, allegations, and the threat of a lawsuit!
-Ben
I have always believed the simplest way is this:
Since software has just recently become patentable, it should have a short-lived patent system, say a 3 year patent on all software innovations. Later, say in 10 years, congress could then extend the length of patents for longer. This is because software is a new and quickly emerging field, without 17-year business cycles.
Also, any new field (such as bio-technology and quantum computing) should have these same short patent lifetimes, followed by extensions as the market is ready for it. The times could be universally agreed upon by the (patent and non-patent holding) people in the industry.
This is my most reasonable thought on the subject, and it would have, if instigated earlier, quite nicely have kept microsoft from being able to hold its government-enforced software monopoly for its 20 year stranglehold. The old dos technology would have been quickly giving to third parties who would have helped the entire market, like the IBM-compatable computers.
-Ben
(p.s. check out http://www.overlawyered.com)
While I agree that some patents are idiotic (IE the amazon.com one), others are not. There are real advances in computer sciance, and I think that the people thinking them up should get some compensation. Look at wavelet or fractal image compression. I would hardly call those "obvious."
:(
As for hardware patents, well that's the very purpose of patents. I mean, if we had no software patents, or hardware patents, then what the hell would we be able to patent?
I agree that the patent process needs to be reformed, but as far as I can tell those wanting its complete removal from the software feild is mostly from people to stupid to come up with there own cool stuff.
Sorry for my spelling errors, I'm away from a spellchecker
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Some of the idiotic software patents are giving patents overall a bad name. The point of patents is protect the little guy, not the mega corporation that everyone seems to think.
Let's say Joe invents the Great Widget in his garage. He begins to start trying to manufacture it (with micro money), but Big Corp sees it, ramps up production and marketing, and takes it over. However, if he gets a patent, he is protected.
Now, the cynical person might be tempted to say, "oh yeah, sure, like Joe can compete with the Big Corp's lawyers." Well, it happens every day, folks. If Joe has a clear patent, and it's a clear violation, Joe makes a lot of money licensing the patent. This means he can get attorneys on contingency.
Now, as for software patents, my thought is that since software engineering is such a new science, the "wheels" so to speak are still being invented. I say we should set an arbitrary date, say 2029, where we say "OK! All the obvious software algorithms have been invented. After that point, clearly it was not obvious and someone deserves to own it." Note that after that date any undiscovered algorithm is going to be extremely complicated (like the recipe for intelligence or something).
Some might argue that software is a mathematical formula, and thus shouldn't be patented. I reject that argument. A hardware machine is a pattern of matter that is organizied in a novel way to do useful work. A software machine is a pattern of electrons that is organized in a novel way to do useful work. What's the difference? Both are patterns; one happens to organize atoms, the other organizes electrons.
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Although Dry it does have some interesting points>
1) The only sign of patent reform is sec. 705 Which pretty much says the the Patent and Trademark Commisioner has to come up with a study 6 months from passage about why American Biotech interests need to be able to file patents. (Bad thing)
2) Sec 311, "Any person, at any time" we request reexamination. Provide you pay 1) pay the fee, 2) disclose the real parties interested. (Generally a good thing) The director makes a ruling if a new quesiton has been raised. This decision is final. If it is reject they "may" refund the fee.
3) This is the part the Irks me. In sec. 709, National Security and sec. 304, technical clarification there are many claus to how a patent could be kept confidential. This can be at the request of the applicant or under the terms described in sec. 181. Sec. 181 is not published in the text of the bill. (Generally BAD)
4) No where is there any technical reform. Beyond a better appeals process this really is counter productive.
One way in which the patenting system ought to be reformed is to completely and indisputably outrule patenting of sections of the genetic code. Some companies, most notably Celera, have applied for patents on sections of the human genome and if these were passed such actions could be destructive to life-saving research because of the cost of licencing.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
It's 116 pages in the PDF form from the Government Printing Office, but the letters are big and it's a quick read.
Title I - Inventors' Rights
Basically protects inventors from those shady late-night TV commercials promoting "invention" services, where you sign your inventions over to them for the purposes of "evaluating" and "promoting" it, and they keep the patents, royalties, etc.
This is a good thing.
Title II - First Inventor Defense
Protects an inventor from patent infringement charges if the original inventor brought the subject matter to practical use at least a year before the filing of the other guy's patent and used the patent commercially at some point prior to the filing.
It seems to me like this kinda matches my own interpretation of what "prior art" was, but maybe not. Maybe this just makes it more explicit.
Title III - Patent Term Guarantee
Very basically, if the patent office is butt-slow in getting your patent approved, your patent term is adjusted accordingly.
I'm not sure if I'm reading this right, but I guess in the past your patent term began when you filed the patent? So I guess here you get extra days for every day the patent office is unnecessarily slow in getting it processed. Maybe someone has a better analysis.
Title IV - United States Publication of Patent Applications Published Abroad
Presumably this is where all of the fuss occurs. Unfortunately, it's very hard to read for me, and makes extensive references to the various patent treaties.
My understanding is this: Patents are generally published/made available to foreign countries after 18 months. You can request that it be made available earlier, or, if you're not filing patents in a different country, you can request that it not be published at all. If you do file patents in other countries, presumably treaties require these patent applications to be shared between member countries after 18 months.
I think this is what some people are angry about. I don't know the rationale behind the sharing of applications, so maybe somebody else can step up and elaborate for us? I guess by publishing these patent applications, anyone in another country where the patent holder isn't planning on applying for a patent could then in turn patent it himself. Anybody in a country where the US patent wouldn't be legal could use the information in the patent for his own good. I may be totally off-base here, but that's how I read it. Corrections are welcome.
Title V - Patent Litigation Reduction Act (I like it already)
Anybody can write the patent office with a request for re-examination, citing examples of prior art. Their letter will become an official part of the patent, and the patent office must make a determination (whether or not to re-examine) within 3 months. The requester gets copies of the progress.
Title VI - Patent and Trademark Office
This takes up about half of the actual bill. Since I'm not totally familiar with the current structure of the PTO, this could either be a lot of re-wording, or (more likely) a complete restructuring of the office itself. Note that this seems to only apply to the PTO office/organization. It doesn't have anything to do with the types of patents issued, but how they do their day-to-day business, how they evaluate their staff, and pick their work force.
But most importantly, the bill includes wording to bring the PTO out of the dark ages. They're given permission to make use of whatever equipment and technology they need (like broadband) and lets them hire their examiners more competitively.
From the U.S. Legal Code here
-CITE-
35 USC Sec. 101 01/26/98
-EXPCITE-
TITLE 35 - PATENTS
PART II - PATENTABILITY OF INVENTIONS AND GRANT OF PATENTS
CHAPTER 10 - PATENTABILITY OF INVENTIONS
-HEAD-
Sec. 101. Inventions patentable
-STATUTE-
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine,
manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful
improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the
conditions and requirements of this title.
-SOURCE-
(July 19, 1952, ch. 950, 66 Stat. 797.)
Go here to find more. I searched for 'discover' in title 35.
I do not believe that discoveries should be patentable, but the current law allows it. Also recall that the US governemnt's web pages are not always up to date, i.e. H.R. 1907 may have changed this in some way.
There are a number of problems with the patent system today. To list a few:
- Some patents are granted for inventions that cannot be used without being disclosed (look-and-feel patents, anyone?). Amazon's one-button patent falls into this category. Since the progress in the useful arts is brought about by disclosure, schemes such as the above which cannot be used without being disclosed should be held to a very high level of scrutiny before any patent is granted. This is certainly not true today.
- Most of the benefits of many inventions is not in the sales, but in the use. (See open-source software.) Techniques such as wavelet compression are far more useful if they are not patented, because the requirement to negotiate use rights is a barrier to their use, and their value is increased by ubiquity; the promise of "progress in the useful arts" is taken back by the barriers to entry.
- The USPTO considers "prior art" to be that which has been previously granted a patent, and precious little else. 'nuff said.
I've got my name on three, count 'em, three software patents. I'd like to see every last one of them invalidated, because I think that everyone should be able to build better stuff without having to jump through hoops to do it or worry about stepping on a legal land mine when they are trying to do engineering.--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.