Lawmakers Take Another Shot At Patent Reform 154
narramissic writes "Patent reform legislation was introduced yesterday (PDF), which, if it passes, would be the first major overhaul of US patent law in more than 50 years. (It should be noted that the new legislation is very similar to the Patent Reform Act of 2007, which died on the Senate floor last year.) The legislation would bring US patent law in line with global laws, and introduce 'reasonable royalty' provisions, which change the way damages are calculated and would reduce the likelihood of massive payouts for some patent holders. Representatives from Google, HP and Intel were quick to say that the changes would cut down on frivolous patent lawsuits. But the Innovation Alliance, a group representing patent-holders that oppose the legislation, said that it would 'devalue all patents, invite infringement — including from companies in China, India and other countries — and generate more litigation that will further strain the courts.'"
changes (Score:3, Interesting)
0. Any patent not being sold in a current product line shall pass into public domain.
Might as well add this to copyright reform too.
A good first step, but . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a good first step. The US *should* be on a first to file system. Venue for patent suits *should* be restricted to venues that make sense (rarely ED TX).
But some provisions go too far. Damages should be linked to some market definition - NOT what the trial court thinks is reasonable. Also, we need a change to the laws that provide incentive for innovation in regulated industries. Patents are most valuable in the life sciences. We need reform here. We need to better align value with innovation. We've still a long way to go.
NO, Faster-issued, shorter lifetime patents. (Score:3, Interesting)
So overall, I'm not sure this is the right direction that we want to go.
Patent Fairness? more like Large Corporate Bullies (Score:1, Interesting)
Two of the large proponents of this so-called Patent Fairness are Google and Microsoft. Let's take a look at these companies financial situations:
Google:
-Profit margin=20%
-Profits=$8billion per year
-Cash=$15billion
Microsoft:
-Profit margin=28%
-Profits=$20billion per year
-Cash=$20billion
Seems that the large software companies have had very little problems competing in today's environment. How much more profitable do they need to be? Or is this more a result of soul-less corporations relentless search of increasing their profits?
These same large corporations love to throw around the term "patent trolls" but it is difficult buy their story that the small inventor is hurting or impeding them.
In fact, the last time they tried patent reform many small inventors spoke up AGAINST such a reform citing that the world is already tilted against them - and such reforms would only increase the leverage the large companies already have. Many small inventors are unable to get any traction when approaching the large software companies in selling their innovation.
In fact - small software inventors have found that their only chance to introduce their innovations to the marketplace is by trying to get a license deal rather than compete with a Google or Microsoft or even much smaller corporations. Many inventors ask for a small fee of almost always less than 1% but we don't hear Google's or Microsoft's point out how little the innovations actually cost.
There is plenty of proof that innovation occurs at the small companies (in fact, the Google's of 10 years ago, and the Microsoft's of 30 years ago).
Large companies would love nothing more than get rid of patents and then simply monitor competitors for the best innovations and then incorporate those into the next service pack or website update.
Interesting how large companies like Google have the resources for people like Michelle Lee and "Head of Patent Strategy". You think the small inventor has time or resources for this?
Re:NO, Faster-issued, shorter lifetime patents. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oftentimes there are patents that cover several technologies - a patent in medical imaging can cover the field of medicine, engineering and sometimes even natural sciences. There will always be an uncertainty in deciding the shelf life of any technology and even more difficult in determining how long before it gets obsolete in a given discipline.
The duration of a given patent is an issue best left alone. However it would be nice if we make the process a little faster and have some way to filter out patents that are in no way innovative.
Re:NO, Faster-issued, shorter lifetime patents. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What? No Child Porn & Terrorism? (Score:3, Interesting)
That comment was soooo 2002ish. Child porn, drugs, gambling, and prostitution ARE terrorism these days, Bob - get with the program.
Parallel development is a poor use of resources (Score:4, Interesting)
Patents should reward putting your invention out in the open. Having a huge period in which to do secret development is the anti-thesis to what patents should reward.
The only problem with first to file is that there is no grace period.
Lawyers hate grace periods, because if a paper without a million of legalese claims holds any value in court that diminishes their contribution to patents ... they see the exact wording of those legalese claims as somehow more important than the subject covered. Which is ridiculous ... in the areas I'm an expert I can recognize the innovative parts of a paper better than a lawyer can capture it in claims.
I think the first to file vs first to invent difference is just being played up by lawyers to disguise the fact that the real thing they want to get rid of is the grace period.
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:4, Interesting)
And you are showing your naivete. China knows there is no way to enforce this.
Examples, you ask? Sure.
Here is the family of devices I worked on. [actron.com]
Here is an absolutely infringing device being sold. [dhgate.com] It is as blatant of a ripoff as you could possibly get. They didn't even change the freaking color of the unit.
They reverse engineered our unit and built clones. We know this because we bought one and used it. It duplicates subtle bugs in our unit. It is absolutely 100% certainly an illegal copy. And the patent space in the OBD2 market is carved up VERY tightly, so they are certainly breaking patent law by selling this unit. Not to mention the whole "theft of IP" issues.
And you'll notice that nobody is kicking down any doors to get these people to stop.
Face it - this sort of thing is absolutely unenforceable. It's naive to think otherwise.
if only it was that easy. (Score:3, Interesting)
This whole thread has a lot of assumptions about how easy it is to define, delineate, and value so-called intellectual property. If it was so easy to do all that, as easy as marking the boundaries of a bit of land, then the patent system could be patched up. It's not that easy, and the patent system needs serious rolling back, starting with at the very least no more patents on software or "business methods".
As things stand, the system has led to very expensive and endless arguing and litigation about whether an idea is novel enough to warrant patenting, or is too broad and basic a concept of nature to be patentable, or whether two or more ideas are really the same idea, or even what exactly a particular patent covers. These questions are extremely difficult, and largely beside the point, which is to encourage innovation. It's guaranteed income for lawyers, without any clear net benefit to society. It's led to an informal truce where all the players spend to stockpile patents in the same way hostile nations expend resources to stockpile weapons. This is the "Tragedy of the Blood Sport" so to speak where the manner of the competition does such damage in finding out who's the most righteous that when it's all over the issue is likely moot because no one is left fit enough to be any good. The players would have been better off not playing. And they know it, and that's why the informal truce and cross licensing deals. In ancient Rome, a big point of blood sports was to have a bit of "fun" killing off the condemned, but in today's patent system, that is most definitely not the point. Why carry on maintaining this blood sport gig? And it is a blood sport, with the patent office issuing weapons as fast as they're allowed, and the courts dragged into officiating. There's a certain horror in seeing the Joe Theismann of the patent wars, RIM, taken for an incredible $612 million in damages. Innovators have little choice but to go ahead and hope they aren't sued by too many trolls, aren't called out to go fight in the Colosseum. You can't write a program without violating not just 1 or 2 patents, but hundreds of patents.
In your drug example, we can't know which version of two nearly identical drugs is better. It may be that one version is better for some people, and the other is better for the rest of the population. Or it may be that it depends on the environment, with one drug being better at sea level, or in winter time, or who knows? It can takes years to gather enough data to spot such trends. It may even take years to think to look for such correlations and discover that they were there all along, in decades old data. Patents interfere with this process of discovery, motivating companies to hold back data, or bury old generics so they won't compete with new patent protected drugs. Doctors are subtly and unsubtly pushed to use the new regardless of whether an old generic might actually be better.