Slashdot Log In
EFF Runs Patent-Busting Challenge
Posted by
michael
on Sat Jun 12, 2004 01:00 AM
from the one-click dept.
from the one-click dept.
markclong writes "Every year numerous illegitimate patent applications make their way through the United States patent examination process without adequate review. The problem is particularly acute in the software and Internet fields where the history of prior inventions (often called "prior art") is widely distributed and poorly documented. As a result, we have seen patents asserted on such simple technologies as One-click online shopping (U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411.), Online shopping carts (U.S. Patent No. 5,715,314.), The hyperlink (U.S. Patent No. 4,873,662.). The EFF is hosting a patent busting project to fight the most egregious abuses of the patent system."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Next challenge - the slashdot dupe. (Score:5, Funny)
However it's still being ignored.
So what's new? (Score:3)
Is this article a duplicate of an article from nearly two months ago [slashdot.org]? Or is there some specific news about this patent-busting project? The blurb didn't seem to help.
Re:So what's new? (Score:5, Informative)
the public call-for-submissions ("contest") part of the project was launched yesterday. the post wasn't very clear about that...
contest:
http://www.eff.org/patent/contest/ [eff.org]
press release:
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2004_06.php#0016
Parent
Re:So what's new? (Score:3, Informative)
Come up with a means to find dubious patents (Score:3, Funny)
An idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:An idea... (Score:4, Funny)
But then they'll retaliate by patenting Wiki's
Parent
Re:An idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
why not even go further and create a whole online community, that deals with patents and intellectual property, from a freedom and civil rights perspective.
this could be a site, with a wiki, as you mentioned, forums for people to discuss current issues, but also to organize teamwork to bust patents, search for previous art, etc.... the site could be financed by offering support to people who have run into trouble with patents.
also on offer would be an extensive resource collection, to assist researchers.
blogs, as 'groklaw' could be affiliated with the site. users could create their own blogs at the site, for patent/ip related matters.
slashdoters! any more ideas? comments?
Parent
An exelant idea (Score:3, Interesting)
It could just fix one problem this way. Without the type o
Re:An exelant idea (Score:4, Insightful)
let me explain. whenever we participate in political affairs, for this example, without any financial compensation, aren't we doing someone jobs, which would be located in the government?
another example. what about the people active in the eco movement? now looking especially at all those involved in research, collecting data, publishing reports, etc.., aren't they also doing the governments job?
what i am trying to demonstrate is, part of democracy involves copies of existing processes. this is a safty procedure, to ensure the legitamecy of current affairs. this does not mean, doing someones elses job, but controling that other people have done their job correctly.
just look at sience. every experiment needs to be repeated multiple times, to become validated. why not also apply this concept to patents. to make this seems to make a lot of sense.
regarding the previous posters comment concerning the popularcy of the project. well this may be so at the beginning, taking the general public into consideration.
this i see as a benefit.
at the beginning of such a project, if it turns out as promissing as we hope, the reputation will spread quickly amongst those involved and interested with the matters subject. a community of professional people will form, that hopefully will be able to establish a fairly extensive resource library, and develop information sources specially created for the lai person. having established this ground work, the general puplic WILL tale notice. as what has been established will certainly cause references in the public media, which again will attrack the general public to the community.
enough written.......
Parent
Re:An idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
A site like this could be used to coordinate this process in much the same way as conferences and journals coordinate the peer review of scientific publications. It would be in the interests of companies to get involved as they would have some say in the granting of patents in the fields that they operate in.
Combine this with a shorter term (say 3 years) and software patents wouldn't be such a bad thing...
Parent
Re:An idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
i only managed to compare the patent granting process, with the scientific process of replicating experiments.
The idea of coordinating peer review of patents to grant, organised by an online community could prove to be quite revolutionary.
as many
patents + open peer review + short term licence == fair compromise
with a system like this in place, we could all live.
just let me state: in general, i do not believe in the concept of intellectual property. to me this is a joke. a bad one, but never the less a joke. i won't go into this though. why do i then state the above? we live in a democratic organised society. most of believe, that the every human being on thie planet should have the right to live under such cirumstances. the cosequenzes of this is, we need to find compomises - all the time.
democracy is about finding an agreement, that all can live with. of course this is crap to a radical mind. then again.....just take a look at the alternatives.
i have written all this to underline the importance of a change in the patenting system, and elude to the possibilety, that our democratic future might be connected, or at least a part of our societies actions, in how we decide to deal with intellectual property.
will we erode our individual rights and liberties, for the benefit of a few corporations?
Parent
Re:An idea... (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously though, with the exception of a few scummy companies/people, patentees like to patent because they believe that their implementation is new, original, and unique. We would drop a patent application if some serious prior art was found (no one likes be to unoriginal).
Part of the problem is that a prior-art search is supposed to cover this. Lawyers will not be happy. Their clients will be unhappy that they spent money on both the lawyer and the fil
Take off every 'patent'... FOR GREAT JUSTICE !!! (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope every
Re:Take off every 'patent'... FOR GREAT JUSTICE !! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Take off every 'patent'... FOR GREAT JUSTICE !! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Take off every 'patent'... FOR GREAT JUSTICE !! (Score:3, Insightful)
In any case, the original poster was talking about a refund of the RE-examination fee. That's the fee you pay when you c
Distributed checking (Score:2)
I mean, most of us get a lot of email but maybe less than every day, how about a digest every week saying the same? Distributed patent-invalidation?
Re:Distributed checking (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem comes when these volunteers start submitting bad and misleading information, either unintentionally (by not understanding the patent) or intentionally (maliciously). For example, you are one of the volunteers. You are evaluating a patent of your competitor. So you might create a fake website with some "prior art" and point to it as an example.
The problem comes not in whether or not that fake prior art will be believed--it will be sorted out in the end, for sure--but rather that you've just created additional work for the patent examiner. Suppose everyone did this--submitted garbage that the examiners need to sort through. Some "prior art" might be valid, some invalid, some irrelevant. Notice on Slashdot how very few people RTFA? Well, consider how few people will RTFP. Much of the prior art suggested to be reviewed will be irrelevant. There are lots of people who will try to come up with something just to show how smart they are.
The net result will, unfortunately, be far more work for the patent examiner, not less.
This is not to say that your idea should be discounted entirely, but rather that implementing it would simply be a lot more complicated than your initial suggestion. It would probably have to be done more along the lines of an anonymous peer-review system like that which is used in academic journals. However, anyone who has had an article turned down for Physical Review Letters will tell you how well that works.
Indeed, it's a complicated problem.
Parent
Might this not rather support the patent system? (Score:5, Interesting)
It might remove the most harmful and obviously insane patents, thus making the idiocy of the current system less visible.
Re:Might this not rather support the patent system (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Might this not rather support the patent system (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that Congress won't give the USPTO the money it requires to do its job. This is on its way to changing with the new fee bill H.R. 1561 [house.gov], but it may take some time. It is still largely a step in the right direction.
Parent
Re:Might this not rather support the patent system (Score:4, Insightful)
It should be obviousness that prevents such patents, not so much prior-art. Most software prior art is in the form of trade secrets, not prior patents.
They should use the "graduate criteria". If at least 20% of computer-sci graduates with a B or better could implement the functionality being claimed for a patent, then it should be tossed.
Parent
Re:Might this not rather support the patent system (Score:3, Insightful)
An artificial intelligence system is an obvious idea these days, but its implementation is very difficult. On the other hand the proverbial "better rat trap" would be comparatively simple to implement, but unobvious.
Dealing with the obviousness property (Score:3, Insightful)
The federal government establishes scholarships for people who which to obtain a graduate degree in a particular field.
Once these people recieve their degree, however, they are required to review a small number of patent applications in their field for obviousness each year (perhaps for a certain number of years).
There are obviously a lot of rough edges and unresolved details -- what if people change fields? How do we deal with the larger number of
Re:Dealing with the obviousness property (Score:3, Insightful)
The subject matter sought to be patented must be sufficiently different from what has been used or described before that it may be said to be nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention. For example, the substitution of one color for another, or changes in size, are ordinarily not patentable.
I suppose what I take issue with, then, is the "having ordinary skill" bit. That might make sense for the (relatively) s
Confusion over one patent (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Confusion over one patent (Score:2)
An interesting Concept (Score:4, Insightful)
If only one or two of the folks in that office find themselves unemployed after an annual review, because to many of the patents they granted were overturned, it wont take long and the rest will actually take the couple hours required to document prior art on many of them.
An obvious next step, would be for the patent office itself to provide a public input period for feedback on various applications. Heck, if they posted new applications to /., they could save a lot of effort. At least half of the new applications would get responded to with a link documenting valid prior art within an hour of being posted, thereby saving the office the trouble of processing that application.
When they say fight... (Score:3, Interesting)
When they say fight the outrageous patents, are they referring to the ones that already exist, or future ones? Or both? How would you combat a patent that already exist? Show prior art? Anyway, I think it's rediculous that we have to go as far as to create an organization to stop what should be common sense. Come on, a patent for double click? Oi..
Then again, if life were perfect, I'd have better things to do than rant on slashdot at 2 am in the morning. Hehe =)
The EFF's a little late to the party. (Score:3, Informative)
Algorithm for generating stupid E-patents (Score:5, Funny)
h = openFile("regular_business_behavior.txt");
while (w = readNextWord(h)) {
if (random(0.0,1.0) > 0.96) {
w = w + " using a computer ";
}
print(w);
}
Fixing the patent system (Score:5, Insightful)
However, the person who must pay the fees is the person who wants the patent to be re-examined. Fees may start (for inter partes) at $8K, plus $12K for legal fees. Getting a patent accepted costs only about $1K. With legal fees and prior art searches (which I swear that a lot of these people don't do) that might get up to $8K or so.
This keeps the playing field quite tilted towards those that file patents -- there is little incentive not to file bogus patents.
I'd like to see this system modified to impose the fee (perhaps with some multiplier) on the *patent filer* if the reexamination finds that the patent is indeed invalid, rather than on the party requesting the reexamination.
If pro-bono legal work is available, or a simple walkthrough on how to do basic requests for review ("I wrote a program that already does this that was sold five years before the patent was applied for, and here it is"), the process could be made effectively zero-cost for organizations like the EFF that attempt to eliminate bogus patents.
I see few drawbacks. It does impose the difficulty of collecting fees on the USPTO, but besides being part of the federal government (and thus being in a good position to locate patent owners that refuse to pay), they can refuse to issue more patents to an individual until he pays his fees.
Old patents, many of which are quite bogus, will have to be grandfathered in. There's no other reasonable way to deal with them, but eventually they will expire, and this prevents future abuse of the system.
It also increases the potential cost of obtaining a patent (not good, if you want to protect the little guy). However, patent filers are *supposed* to do prior art searches ahead of time, and are *supposed* to only be submitting legitimate inventions. Thus, if a patent holder has performed his tasks as he should, there will be no additional cost added.
I don't think it's feasible (since the USPTO can't hire the best researchers in every field) to never let through an illegitimate patent. I do think that making the review process more oriented around discouraging people from filing bogus patents is possible. This also takes a lazy approach -- bad patents are only dealt with and the patent holder only imposed a penalty upon if an actual problem comes up -- otherwise, there's little reason for an organization to go after patents.
I would like to see review fees reduced if possible.
I would also like to see it be made possible for an inventor to freely invalidate a patent. This means that if a company (let's say Microsoft, or the FSF) discovers that someone is going after them with a patent, and they are able to produce prior art, it's easy for them to just send a letter to the patent holder noting that they have identified prior art, and unless the patent holder wants them to initiate a review, to mark his patent invalid within the next month.
That way, Microsoft or the FSF doesn't have to pay the legal fees associated with requesting a review (so it's in their interest to first send out a letter), review load on the USPTO is reduced, and the inventor is never hit with the fee associated with losing a review.
There are some details to be resolved -- how should invalidation of individual claims be resolved? Should a per-claim fee be increased, and fees for review on individual claims be lower?
I don't think any of them are showstopping issues, though.
I've brought this up once before on Slashdot and haven't gotten any idea-killing issues brought up -- I'd be interested in any feedback.
Re:Fixing the patent system (Score:3, Insightful)
It's $2500 for an ex parte reexamination, where you just request the re-exam, and $9000 to request a inter parte re-exam. Even if the the work is done pro bono, it quickly gets expensive to go after anything but the most injurious patents.
In addition, it generally can cost quite a bit to get a pantent approved. it cost about $1000 to do the initial filing. Most patents actualy get rejected the first time they get submitted. However, you can keep resubmitting it ad infin
Re:Fixing the patent system (Score:3, Insightful)
I rely on two points:
* First, that review fees are placed on the patent holder in the case of an invalidated patent.
* Second, that there will presumably be fewer bogus patents to deal with if there is no reason for folks not to invalidate patents that they know are invalid. Right now, huge numbers of bogus patents are issued because they aren't going to get shot down under the existing s
a patent for the wheel (Score:5, Interesting)
the lawyer patented the " circular transportation facilitation device". so that means anyone who ever produced car, bike, even unicycle in australia would have to pay royalities.
dont believe me, well check the BBC [bbc.co.uk] or CNN [cnn.com]
personally this is a prime example of intellectual rights gone amok. i would rather convert my car to square wheels before paying any damn royalites on a wheel. but i dont think it will be a problem. but just in case, im going to go patent the spherical rolling device. lets see MR. Keogh drive home without any ball bearings.
Try reading the articles you link to... (Score:4, Informative)
I just like to point out that Mr. Keogh applied for his patents to highlight the fact that so many bogus patents are allowed to stand.
Not to try and grab royalties from wheel users.
So show him the respect he deserves for standing up for common sense instead of trying to sound righteous about his nefarious act.
Parent
Speaking of bogus patents, here's some prior art (Score:3, Interesting)
I was so confident, I went with "feeling lucky". Sure 'nuff, the very first hit, automated TODO lists in 1999, From Tulane University.
Problem started in 91 (Score:4, Informative)
I got called for a job once when some friends had a patent and wanted me to dummy the technology in Flash - they already had the patent(?!), which I scrolled through, and some fun double talk about the technology. I said this was the 'Artist conception of flying car' patent. We haven't built it, but we want to sue you if you figure it out.
this is good news for small software companies (Score:3, Funny)
we are a small software company developing a new open instant messaging-based support application and i'm sure we are already "infringing" on many patents that would hold NO water if they were actually challenged.
http://www.qunu.com [qunu.com]
Use the force (of democracy) Luke (Score:5, Insightful)
This project might help an awful lot in proving that something is rotten in the state of patents.
Re:Use the force (of democracy) Luke (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, if only.
It has turned out to be simpler to block [usccr.gov] the people most likely from voting a certain way so they can't vote at all [uaw.org].
The legislators will really do anything for... a campaign contribution.
Unfortunately, most people can be counted upon to vote for the incumbent, or the slate from the same political party with which their parents identified themselves. And patent reform is too esoteric of a subject to capture the interest of most folks.
Democracy was great, in theory...
<grrr>
Parent
How to improve patents. (Score:4, Informative)
If your add to the page, remember to add a how not a just a what.
Knud
Peer review (Score:4, Interesting)
don't forget CAPS LOCK patent issued june 8 (Score:4, Interesting)
This patent always bugged me (Score:5, Interesting)
Prior Art (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is deliberate corruption. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
You are saying what I was saying. (Score:3, Insightful)
You are saying what I was saying. The government is starving the PTO of money.
How was what I said in the grandparent post a troll or flamebait? It is documented very well by links to articles at a university and at the Washington Post.
Was that a case of "I don't want to believe, so I will mod down?"
Re:Patent no. 4,873,662 (Score:3, Informative)
"covers", not "discovers".