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Patent Chief Decries Continued Downward Spiral of Patent Quality
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Apr 21, 2008 11:27 AM
from the dudas-just-wants-his-rug-back dept.
from the dudas-just-wants-his-rug-back dept.
Techdirt is reporting that Jon Dudas, head of the US Patent Office, is lamenting the continuing quality drop in patent submissions. Unfortunately, while this problem is finally getting the attention it deserves, the changes being implemented don't seem to be offering the correct solution. "When you set up a system that rewards people for not actually innovating in the market (but just speculating on paper), then of course, you're going to get more of that activity. When you set up a system that rewards those people to massive levels, well out of proportion with their contribution to any product, then of course you're going to get more of that activity. When you set up a system that gives people a full monopoly right that can be used to set up a toll booth on the natural path of innovation, then of course you're going to get more of that activity. When the cost of getting a patent is so much smaller than the potential payoff of suing others with it, then of course you're going to get more of that activity. The fact that Dudas is just noticing this now, while still pushing for changes that will make the problem worse, is a real problem. Patents were only supposed to be used in special cases. The fact that they've become the norm, rather than the exception, is a problem, and it doesn't seem like anyone is seriously looking into fixing that."
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Also, dudas, 'chinaman' is not the preferred ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Also, dudas, 'chinaman' is not the preferred .. (Score:3, Funny)
He wanted compensation for the first rug. He wanted the second one back. The one that held sentimental value for Maude.
-Peter
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Jon Dudas? (Score:4, Funny)
DMCA, brought to you by: Jon Dudas! (Score:4, Interesting)
"He guided enactment of major patent, trademark, and copyright policy, including the 1999 American Inventors Protection Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
Most patent attorneys consider him unqualified because he had no previous patent experience prior to becoming head of the USPTO.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I've done my share / of workin' out...
That is my fault. (Score:4, Funny)
Why allow corporations to own patents? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why allow corporations to own patents? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Government is like beer.
You can only rent it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I understand that you're trying to be bitterly dark and sarcastic, maybe even a little but humorous, but the "express" purpose of our government is spelled out in that little Constitution thing we like to bandy about during election years.
You can argue that for the purpose of practical discussion we've fallen to a plutocracy; however, it is unfair to say that "fewer and bigger corporation own" the government - corporate lobbyists are a minority on K street. You're forgetting unions (AFL-CIO), old people
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That is a problem for sure. Can't have too many people owning too much money or everything gets screwed up. But there is a solution. The solution is to have the Federal Reserve print off a whole bunch more, then dole it out through the old boys network
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The Fed "old boys network" is a system of banks. When the Fed wants to lower the interest rates, they reduce the money supply by instructing their brokers to sell government bonds. Anybody can purchase these - the point is that there's less money in circulation (the Fed has it now and is sitting on it, while people have bonds.)
Likewise, when they want to "print more money" (that's what the Bureau of Engraving and Printing does, actually) they instruct their brokers to buy bonds. Anyone is free to sell
Re:Why allow corporations to own patents? (Score:5, Interesting)
It would also simply concentrate patents into the hands of wealthy individuals. As someone who's reasonably well educated and creative I have happened upon at least three or four ideas in my life that are worth a patent. Not silly stuff, I mean solid ideas with practical industrial benefit. Of course I cannot afford the $10,000+ to patent such ideas, and since publishing is no longer a protection against having these ideas misappropriated by persons in the USA I choose to keep them to myself. Those ideas will probably be thought of by someone else soon enough, I am nothing special, but for the time being they stay in my mind and may die with me. I have no desire to make money from them, but I cannot publish if I want the legitimate currency of recognition, nor can I patent them because it's not affordable. Does this sound like a system that is working to the benefit of mankind in promoting the arts and sciences?
After 10 or 15 years of following this subject I have reached the conclusion that patents are profoundly anti-science, beyond reform and there is no course of action left but their complete abolition. The same is possibly true of intellectual property generally, but there are certain aspects that might still be rescued and turned to the benefit of humanity.
If things carry on the way the are there will be a de facto abolition of patents anyway. WIPO will cease to be legitimately recognised as it loses credibility backing an unconsciable and broken process. The world will fragment (more than it is already) into camps which do not recognise one anothers intellectual property claims and trade agreements will collapse. We already have the situation where US and European companies cannot trade in each others respective territories. Like the RIAA/MPAA many IP organisations are unwilling to adapt, they are playing for broke and will ultimately lose the farm. Ultimately internet publication with verifiable timestamped accountability brought about by extensive traffic logging will replace all IP claims and the old institutions, but for those of us with ideas who are caught in this transition period it's not a happy state of affairs and I suspect many valuable ideas are simply being lost or held back.
Parent
Re:Why allow corporations to own patents? (Score:4, Informative)
Not anti-science; anti-technology. You can't patent a scientific discovery, And as you say, it shouldn't be that way. If a patent was twenty bucks you would have published.
Parent
Re:Why allow corporations to own patents? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, in the United States, the inventor must be listed on the patent as the inventor. If they are not, or if someone else is listed on the patent as an inventor (and they are not an inventor) then the patent is invalid.
[Aside: There is case law on what constitutes an inventor -- the basic concept is someone who actually came up with the patentable portions of the idea
Parent
really? what a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, when the benefits of owning dodgy patents can be into the tens of millions, it would be well worth sinking a few million into the right peoples pockets to make sure no change goes unchallanged.
All the while keeping any revision of the system on hold long enough for the rest of the world to overtake the US.
Yeah, there are places in the world where innovate is still a word with a real and exciting meaning, not just a tired and overused technology business buzzword. I do wish this would be realised by the people who are in a position to change this bizarre patent mess.
Patent fees? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Patent fees? (Score:5, Informative)
Already done. Usually about half price for the little guys.
Parent
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Re:Patent fees? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Isn't this easily solved (Score:4, Insightful)
"Memo: Hey, As of this morning we're going to raise the bar a bit as to what counts as 'novel.' So, clerk x, could you please deny the patent on your desk for Claratin E. Thanx, xoxo, your noble leader."
Re:Isn't this easily solved (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
In principle, yes (Score:3, Interesting)
I think patents are far too easy to get, for far too little technical contribution in return. Some prerequisites that need to be (re-)introduced:
-Patent must significantly improve the state of the art. Must also be non-obvious (on the latter, the US Supreme court shows some encouraging tendencies - more of that please))
-Patent applications must contain instructions on how to build the item, at a level where an average engineer can do it.
-No patents for
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Guess what? They usually get shafted.
The end result is that patent examiners are overworked due to understaffing and they are also vastly underpaid. There's a huge amount of churn at the USPTO (I know of two people that started there with a desire to become IP lawyers eventually a
increase the fees dramatically (Score:4, Interesting)
Even more radical would be to place limits on the collectible licensing fees based on the original filing fee. This would encourage some companies to pay more for their patents, in order to create a greater enforcement cap, but would cause them to do so only because they believed the patents to be defensible.
Screws the little guy (Score:5, Insightful)
This only screws the little guy over and ensures that bigger corporations will keep patenting. 300k to a Microsoft, IBM or pharmaceutical company is small fries. To a small business owner or full-time dreamer like me, it breaks the bank. It's an artificial barrier to entry that does not address the real problems.
The threshold should not be financial, it should be by virtue of technical merit. Set the bar higher, the terms shorter, etc. Have a maximum duration over which a patent owner must implement said patent, or forfeit it, similar to enforcement of trademarks (see trademark dilution). It's not precisely the same concept, but I think it's a virtuous idea.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Should we even care about small time dreamers anymore? Should the entire process of patent reform have to grind to a halt in order to allow "Joe Inventor", if he exists or indeed ever existed, to still play the patent lottery game? $300,000 dollars per patent seems just fine
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Slightly different than that. (Score:5, Insightful)
They were designed to create an environment where an inventor could create something and market it for a set number of years with our government providing protection from competition. In exchange for that, the invention would be free to be copied when the patent expired.
Now, patents are used to BLOCK development. Because you can get a broad patent on ANYTHING, just about EVERYTHING is being patented.
So Company-A is working on a new invention. Company-B hears about the work and rushes out to get a patent on a broad "process" that covers (but does not specify) the invention that Company-A is working on.
Now Company-A owes money to Company-B for an invention that Company-B never produced.
Fuck that. Just have the patent office require a WORKING, PHYSICAL model of the invention PRIOR to accepting the patent application. That's how is used to be.
Of course, this would kill all the software "patents" and "practices" patents and so forth. Which I think is a good thing(tm).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Patents were crafted by people who accept capitalism and competition as inviolate principles, and wish to prevent the sort of secret hoarding that defined the guilds of the Mercantile age.
There was once a time where if you wanted to learn secret knowledge, you had to join a secret society. If you were in the secret society, you couldn't leave and practice or share, because the law prevented you from doing so.
The point of patents was to force sec
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If the poor guy can't bring the idea to market, he shouldn't be in a position to prevent others.
If he comes up with the idea, he should still be able to patent it, and then he could sell it to someone that can implement it. Pricing him out of being able to patent it just ensure that he won't bother even publishing the idea in the first place, or even telling anyone about it since they'll probably just screw him over on it. Now I do think that if you own a patent, then you should have to bring a working implementation to market within a reasonable amount of time in order to keep that patent. If not
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
thing up for the typical case. It's thinking like this that creates such f*cked up
laws and policies in general. People fixate on some "important" boundary condition,
rush off to mutilate policies in order to address that and then end up hit in the
face with heinous unintended consequences.
It's probably well worth the risk and the likely consquences of ignoring the oddball
possibility like this to ensure that the system in general
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
possibility like this to ensure that the system in general isn't tragically broken.
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As to the actual subject, it already costs way too much for a patent. The world lost yet another device a couple of weeks ago when I had to keep my head down after a vitrectomy. If a patent was twenty bucks and fill in a form, the device would be on the
Overlooking Economic barriers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Any granted patent should be at least as valuable as the social
cost of that disruption.
They're not supposed to be about how expensive it was
to invent something but whether or not the invention
is suitably novel. It's not meant to be a cash cow or
a means to make up for R&D expenditures.
BS patents do far more harm than "lost R&D costs".
Ideally a patent isn't just the end of a marathon,
it's the end of a marathon where none of the other
contestants were able to even
The issued patents aren't the whole problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's an idea: reject them. Eventually, people will get the message.
If you keep accepting them, you'll keep getting more.
Hold on there josie (Score:3, Insightful)
Who the hell thinks it's really getting the attention it deserves? Not me. When 'what is your position on patent reform?' becomes a more important question than what color toilet paper Obama uses, or who wears a flag pin, or what happened on some reality tv show, THEN it's getting the attention it deserves.
The USPTO is broken. It's a system that worked quite well back when the phonograph was considered an expensive laboratory toy that would never be of use on the commercial market.
If only they would go to some kind of system like a social news aggregation site, whose patrons were engineers, scientists etc. and other professions and titles that exclude anyone selling ID as science. Then as a last step before granting the patent it would get sort of peer reviewed. IMO that would stop BS patents and trolls can be stopped by changing requirements of patent holders to something like radio spectrum licenses. If you don't use it, you lose it. If you sue someone with the patent and cannot show that you have done anything with it yourself: automatic jail time.
Redefine non-obvious to exclude anything that is a natural extension of another technology, and anything that is specifically in the public interest. (thinking of MS's patents on using a computer to connect to emergency services over a phone line)
sigh
Go back to the original idea? (Score:4, Insightful)
Patent comes from the latin patens, meaning "open" (notice our usage of the adverb, "patently": patently absurd, patently obvious). A patent is supposed to be you "opening" your product up so that other people can understand how it works. In return for increasing the greater good (by not making it difficult to reverse engineer) you got a brief monopoly. Using this metric, if something is obvious upon inspection, it doesn't deserve a patent, regardless of how innovative or original it is.
The key difference is that, today, patents are seen as a carrot to promote innovation. As originally conceived, the system assumed (correctly in my opinion) that innovation will always happen, and that what we really needed was a carrot to promote the "opening" of the technology (in the same sense that opensource is open).
First simple change (Score:3, Insightful)
Increasing patent fees is not the way forward, as this penalizes the real innovators: the little guys working out of their garage.
Here's a concept: (Score:3, Insightful)
Be a leader, quit whining and do your job.
An interesting market solution (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure there's holes in that simple proposal, but I'd be interested to see if that idea can be made workable.
Re:No Silver Bullet (Score:5, Interesting)
You've got kids dealing with really high-level stuff in a lot of cases. Optics, physics, biotech. No wonder it's easier for companies to push shitty applications through.
Parent
Fundamental fix: Stop widespread US gov corruption (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a fundamental improvement that could be made, however. The U.S. government is as corrupt as 8 years of selling favors to private interests can make it. We could stop the corruption.
Corrupt big companies with little creative ability want to make the patent system as complicated as possible for smaller companies. That's why not enough money is available for the patent office to do its job correctly; the corrupters have been deliberately starvi