USPTO Decides To Lower Obviousness Standards 129
ciaran_o_riordan writes "Anyone who feels that patent quality is just far too high nowadays
will be glad to hear that the USPTO has decided to ditch four of their
seven tests for obviousness. Whereas
the 2007
guidelines said that an idea is considered obvious if it consisted of
'[predictable] variations [...] based on design incentives or other
market forces' or if there was 'Use of a known technique [prior art]
to improve similar devices (methods, or products) in the same way,'
the new
guidelines do away with those tests. The classic
'teaching-suggestion-motivation' test is still there, with two others. For
software developers, silly patents
are not
the main problem, but they certainly aggravate the matter. As
described in one patent
lawyer's summary, this change will 'give applicants greater
opportunities to obtain allowance of claims.'"
I patent the "First Post" (Score:3, Funny)
Pay me!
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Contrary to what TFA seems to think, I'm pretty sure "First Post" is obvious under the 2010 KSR Guidelines.
Sorry bro, your patent just got rejected.
first post (Score:1, Troll)
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That was the point.
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first post...HA...how obvious is that?
Apparently, DevConcepts already has prior art!
trying to undo KSR? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:trying to undo KSR? (Score:5, Insightful)
They're a bureaucracy. Their funding, staff, and political power are based on their work actually mattering to someone. So are the bribes, perks, "business conferences", seminars with "concerned business leaders", political contributions for candidates friendly to their office, etc. So are their after government service careers as patent attorneys or consultants, and the jobs of their peers in industry.
This kind of thing is true of _all_ bureaucracies. It often takes a force from outside, such as a visionary leader or a defining test case, to serously alter such standards. We had some hopes that the "Bilski" case would improve the guidelines, but it merely created new layers of creative interpretation for patent submissions to provide.
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They aren't, but the universe doesn't care if you're playing games.
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He hasn't made a priority push to fix the patent system. Admittedly, there is a whole lot broken that he has pushed to fix. But still, he hasn't even talked about patent reform.
blamology (Score:2, Offtopic)
Bush started a war he didn't know how to finish, bungled Katrina, presided over the passing of the DMCA and Patriot acts, color-coded fear against Muslims, and was holding the wheel for eight long years when the economy drove off a cliff on the ideological experiment that greedy self-interest will self-regulate (a legitimate inheritance by birth and creed). If he got blamed for anything else, I was already past my saturation point. On the plus side, he galvanized.
Obama stabilized the banking sector, but n
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He capitulated to republican demands to prioritize a balanced budget over boosting employment.
[Citation Needed] [wikipedia.org]
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Bush started a war he didn't know how to finish, [...] Patriot acts, color-coded fear against Muslims,
Yep. It sure has been great now that Obama has ended the wars, repealed the patriot act and no longer uses Muslims as an excuse to further the police state.
presided over the passing of the DMCA
Wow. It's amazing that Bush presided over a bill that passed [wikimedia.org] more than two years before he came into office!
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He's also not offered evidence or first-hand experience to contradict the calims. I'm afraid my observations are founded on direct patent submmissions, working with patent attorneys to get patents submitted for work of my peers, and direct testimony in patent cases (both to confirm and revoke patents).
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These guidelines are just that, guidelines. They are not binding on the Examiners, the court rulings are. They are just fleshing out certain tests because they require very specific factual patterns and you had Examiners applying them without understanding them. The other tests outlined in the KSR decision are still available for use, and will be available until the Supreme Court says they are not.
As an Examiner I have to say this really won't change how people examine, unless they were applying obviousn
Re:trying to undo KSR? (Score:5, Informative)
TFA is wrong, you can see it pretty clearly by reading the 2010 KSR guidlines.
First off, they are administrative rules, and have no force of law and are not enforceable in any way.
Second, they mearly state that the KSR SCOTUS ruling does not replace the old methods of determining obviousness, it simply gives the PTO new lines of reasoning to use when rejecting a patent.
Third, it reminds patent officers that rejections must be based on the law, and that for whatever line of reasoning they follow (specifically talking about the seven rules in the 2007 guidelines here), "appropriate factual findings are required in order to apply the enumerated rationales properly."
I don't know where swpat.org got the idea that this eliminated any of the 2007 rationals, but it isn't in there at all. If anything this makes it easier for patent officers to reject a patent for obvious, because it makes it clear that the new standards (2007 guidelines) don't replace the old standards, they apply in addition to the old obviousness standards (pre-2007 guidelines).
Really, if they bothered to read it the wouldn't be making asses of themselves.
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TFA is wrong, you can see it pretty clearly by reading the 2010 KSR guidlines.
First off, they are administrative rules, and have no force of law and are not enforceable in any way.
Second, they mearly state that the KSR SCOTUS ruling does not replace the old methods of determining obviousness, it simply gives the PTO new lines of reasoning to use when rejecting a patent.
Third, it reminds patent officers that rejections must be based on the law, and that for whatever line of reasoning they follow (specifically talking about the seven rules in the 2007 guidelines here), "appropriate factual findings are required in order to apply the enumerated rationales properly."
I don't know where swpat.org got the idea that this eliminated any of the 2007 rationals, but it isn't in there at all. If anything this makes it easier for patent officers to reject a patent for obvious, because it makes it clear that the new standards (2007 guidelines) don't replace the old standards, they apply in addition to the old obviousness standards (pre-2007 guidelines).
Really, if they bothered to read it the wouldn't be making asses of themselves.
Please mod parent up. (I don't have mod points or I'd do it myself.)
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Third, it reminds patent officers that rejections must be based on the law, and that for whatever line of reasoning they follow (specifically talking about the seven rules in the 2007 guidelines here), "appropriate factual findings are required in order to apply the enumerated rationales properly."
Shouldn't approvals be based on the law? Rejections are a refusal to grant special status to an individual. Approvals curtail the freedoms of all other individuals. Shouldn't approvals be held to the higher sta
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Shouldn't approvals be based on the law? Rejections are a refusal to grant special status to an individual. Approvals curtail the freedoms of all other individuals. Shouldn't approvals be held to the higher standard?
How would you enumerate what patents should be allowed? You can't list every possible invention. If you could create a list of patentable inventions, they probably wouldn't be patentable, since you clearly already have someone (or more likely a large number of people on a committee) that has come up with the idea. The list of reasons for rejection is relatively short, so it's much easier to consider an invention patentable unless there's a specific reason to reject it.
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Third, it reminds patent officers that rejections must be based on the law, and that for whatever line of reasoning they follow (specifically talking about the seven rules in the 2007 guidelines here), "appropriate factual findings are required in order to apply the enumerated rationales properly."
Shouldn't approvals be based on the law? Rejections are a refusal to grant special status to an individual. Approvals curtail the freedoms of all other individuals. Shouldn't approvals be held to the higher standard?
Both are based on law. It's just that, the way the law is written, the Patent Office has the initial burden to make a case that the claims in the patent application should not be allowed.
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It'd be a pretty crazy world if the patent office could grant every patent Microsoft filed and deny everything Apple filed on a whim. It seems perfectly reasonable that all claims are valid unless they specifically fail to be in a patentable domain or any of the requirements to be a patentable invention, I don't see many other ways to get equality before the law. Not that I'm very fond of patent law in general and US law in particular...
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Gee, a slashdot article about patents that is clueless about how the patent system actually works! Whoda thunk?
So, why does ipeg.eu back up TFA? (Score:2)
So, why does ipeg.eu say:
and
?
Actually, these guidelines *do* affect examiners (Score:2)
Commenter says:
Ok, but do you know that they don't have to have force of law in order to change how examiners evaluate patents? This is confirmed by Dennis Crouch of Patently-O:
http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/09/uspto-guidelines-for-determining-obviousness.html [patentlyo.com]
Hope that helps.
wtf? (Score:3, Interesting)
So let me get this straight...
USPTO is already rubber stamping stupid patents a mile a minute, and now they're making it easier for even MORE crap to come out?
Or are they just making it *harder* for that crap to be shot down in court?
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They really need to hire some of those Robo-signers that the banks use. They could clear that back log in no time and push a whole tsunami of economy wrecking patents out the door.
Really nothing helpful is ever going to come out of the patent office. The only hope is that they tick the courts off so much they do some thing rash like making a reasonable decision or some thing.
Re:wtf? (Score:5, Insightful)
The courts are already too backlogged with everything else to have time to get ticked at patents specifically.
Face it, our *entire* government has been bought and paid for.
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Consequently they need to hire a huge number of people to handle the work load and probably raise the standards substantially. Perhaps fine companies that willfully
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Which is exactly why *lowering* the standards looks like someone got paid off.
It's such a batshit insane move that not even the feds could be incompetent enough to pull it off by accident.
And considering all the fuckups the feds have already managed to pull, that's really saying something.
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It's such a batshit insane move that not even the feds could be incompetent enough to pull it off by accident.
And considering all the fuckups the feds have already managed to pull, that's really saying something.
Two words.
Cloward & Piven.
Chaos, an overwhelmed government taking on ever more burdens, and an over-taxed, over-regulated, and under-employed citizenry losing faith in that government and becoming desperate enough to accept a "new world order" to "fix things" are the goals.
Welcome to your "hope and change" and "fundamental transformation".
Strat
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Classic case of a positive feedback loop in action.
Re:wtf? (Score:5, Informative)
USPTO is already rubber stamping stupid patents a mile a minute, and now they're making it easier for even MORE crap to come out?
It's more likely that they are trying to improve the quality of examiner rejections. Consider a claim for a widget comprising component A and B. The Examiner finds component A in reference Andy, and component B in reference Bob. The examiner then says without providing any rationale that it would have been obvious to combine Andy and Bob to make the claimed widget. A weak rejection like that encourages the applicant to appeal instead of amending the claim. This is bad news, especially if the claimed widget is obvious over Andy and Bob, but the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences or the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, not having any rationale to review, didn't recognize that the claimed widget was obvious.
Or are they just making it *harder* for that crap to be shot down in court?
Well, if the Examiner rejections are stronger, then allowed claims would probably be stronger and thus harder to shoot down in court. But ultimately, the Patent Office has no say in how the courts determine whether a claimed invention is obvious or not. These guidelines aren't even enforceable through appeal with the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences:
This 2010 KSR Guidelines Update does not constitute substantive rule making and hence does not have the force and effect of law. It has been developed as a matter of internal Office management and is not intended to create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable by any party against the Office. Rejections will continue to be based upon the substantive law, and it is these rejections that are appealable. Consequently, any failure by Office personnel to follow this 2010 KSR Guidelines Update is neither appealable nor petitionable.
A patent practitioner could use these new guidelines to try to persuade an examiner (or that examiner's supervisor) that a rejection wasn't good. But, if the practitioner is unconvincing, then there may not be much that the practitioner can do based solely on these guidelines.
Re:wtf? (Score:5, Insightful)
There can be no rationale for an obviousness test ... ultimately something is obvious just because.
Of course lawyers will never accept this ... having to take the word from experts without being able to weasel their way into the decision? No fucking way.
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Re:wtf? (Score:4, Insightful)
The point is that the fucking lawyer's job is to tie up the court system and take a third of the cash.
Lawyers can not accept the idea of other non-Lawyer people having any say-so, as it sort of ruins their scam.
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First, patent litigation frequently involves retaining experts. Both the plaintiff and the defendant will retain and expert (and sometimes even the Court retains one). That's one of the reasons patent litigation gets very expensive for defendants (which feeds in to the reason we have patent trolls (along with the pro-troll Eastern District of Texas, and the complete failure by the courts (especially the E.D.Tx.) to actually use Fed.R.Civ.Pro. Rule 11 sanctions as a deterrent). It may surprise you, but t
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No, I will blame the politicians, most of whom are lawyers, for crafting a system that benefits their clan.
Almost every one of the problems in America can be blamed on our professional political class, more than 80% of whom are lawyers. It really is that cut and dried.
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I'm not sure where you're getting the 80% figure from. From the numbers I've seen, about half of our senators are former lawyers, and around a third of the house of representatives are former lawyers. As a side note, a little under half of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence were lawyers. You can find that here [abanet.org]
Also, there is no lawyer 'clan'. There are multiple different types of lawyers, all of which have varying (and frequently diametrically opposed) professional interests. For inst
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the attorneys just attempt to represent the businessmen in the best fashion possible
Sorry, but being paid doesn't absolve lawyers of any ethical responsibility.
Lawyers love to claim this but it's simply not true. Just because a client sets a direction doesn't mean the attorneys aren't actually doing it.
And without the client wanting to bring the case in the first place, there wouldn't even be any litigation.
And without the attorney wanting to bring the case in the first place, there wouldn't even be any
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These two sentences are contradictory.
No. A lawyer is a person who does "lawyering".
How can you blame a tool for the way it is used? How can the tool itself be unethical?
A lawyer has volition and thus responsibility. They are not a tool themselves but use the tools of their trade.
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In general, the lawyer's ethical responsibility is to represent his/her client.
No, the lawyer has many ethical responsibilities. The client is just one that may be easily outweighed by other ethical responsibilities.
and can refuse to represent the client
You said it. Only if they are coerced would they have no ethical responsibility.
they can file on their own (known as filing "pro se")
And the client will then be responsible and the lawyer not.
Sorry, but however you try to spin it the lawyers have some
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I propose all patents get rubber stamped.
If it comes to litigation let courts decide the matter with independent (domain) experts. These are the only people who can truly judge obviousness any way.
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There can be no rationale for an obviousness test ... ultimately something is obvious just because.
That's the stupidest thing I have heard in at least a month.
If you can't answer the question "why is it obvious" then you have no business declaring something obvious. The fact that nobody else thought of it before is evidence that it is not obvious, so you'd better have a good reason for saying it is obvious.
That's basically what this ruling does. It doesn't eliminate anything, TFA is wrong. The whole thing boils down to "Make sure you have your facts straight and that your rational to reject a patent i
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If its well known that keeping butter cold preserves it, and well known that putting things in fridges keeps them c
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Forget about obviousness, butter isn't even novel (prior art).
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And how does a court know what is obvious? Which expert should they 'trust'? I can find an expert to say just about anything in a judgment case.
Oh, so maybe you want to create a panel of experts... appointed by whom? They can also be bought by companies, political affiliations...
They could be like the supreme court... which has its own set of problems.
Or maybe you want a group of self-selected scientists unaccountable to the public and we should just obey their 'expert' opinion. Surely nothing could go
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Ever heard of a jury? Judges don't make all the decisions on the law... for very good reason.
Even the top of the top judges on the supreme court can't agree and there's lots of issues.
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Ever heard of a jury? Judges don't make all the decisions on the law... for very good reason.
You are a little bit off in suggesting that jury makes some of the decisions on the law. Juries decide facts, not law. Often, the jury verdict forms will ask the jury to provide a conclusion based on applying the facts (which they jury implicitly finds) to the law (which the judge tells the jury.
The fact/law distinction is why jury instructions are often a basis for vacating a trial. If a judge gives an inaccurate description of what the obvious standard is, and the jury says that "X was obvious over the
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I'm not sure if you're trolling or not, but what the hey.
Many inventions, even some of the best, are only obvious after you've seen them. Hindsight is 20/20. How many times have you seen a new product and said to yourself or someone else: why didn't I think of that?!
Does that mean that none of these are inventions that are deserving of patent protection? The consensus among people who think about these things is: no, obvious in hindsight isn't a good reason to reject a patent. That's the rationale. So,
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Well, if the Examiner rejections are stronger, then allowed claims would probably be stronger and thus harder to shoot down in court.
I don't think your conclusion follows. If the examiner can reject a claim with a relatively vague reasoning, then the applicant would be forced to justify their claims better. On the other hand if the examiner's powers are limited and he/she has to find a stronger justification for rejecting a claim, then it is easier for the applicant to get claim through.
Basically, it is a question of the balance of power between the applicant and the examiner. The examiner is already at a relatively weak position sinc
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If the examiner can reject a claim with a relatively vague reasoning, then the applicant would be forced to justify their claims better.
Actually if the rejections are too vague the patent applicant simply appeals the decision and wins when the court says "why the heck is this ruled obvious?"
When the rejections are strong and grounded in facts with SCOTUS derived rationals behind them, it's really really hard to win on appeal, so the patent applicant amends their claims instead.
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Call me crazy but I smell someone getting paid off at the USPTO to fill someone's IP war chest.
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Call me but I smell a website that can't read the fucking 2010 Guidelines.
It doesn't say anything at all about removing any of the rationals. All it says is to be sure to have a solid rational for rejecting a patent on obviousness, and to be sure you have facts to back up that rational. This makes an appeal virtually impossible, and is a very good thing.
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I mean it, call me!
It gets so lonely... ;)
Obvious is different to different people (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see why someone might think patents are a good idea. You spent effort inventing something, so you don't want someone taking your idea and your customers (by offering it cheaply due to smaller R&D costs). In return for a temporary monopoly, you reveal how your invention works.
The thing is, these days, with so many high-tech specialized niches, anyone who wants to make use of your patented idea would need to be an expert anyway. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to understand any of the patents behind modern CPUs for instance, unless I spent an awful lot of time reacquainting myself with electronics. In other words, you need to invest in a form of R&D to be able to gain anything from reading a patent. Now, experts in various fields tend to know what is going on in those fields. They know what the hot research topics are, and what kinds of designs people are thinking about. In that sense, everything in that field is obvious to them. It's just a matter of time before someone actually gets xyz algorithm/design to work. Should we really be rewarding the firms with the fastest lawyers?
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Yes.
The law is made by the lawyers, for the lawyers.
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Should we really be rewarding the firms with the fastest lawyers?
When you think about who runs the country, you'll realize the answer to that question is irrelevant.
The same mistake... (Score:5, Insightful)
...over and over again. Remember: patents also block independent development.
So often your competition has arrived to the idea independently and hasn't had "smaller R&D costs" anyway.
This happens especially often in the software industry, where the ideas are a dime a dozen (I mean: Amazon one-click? Hello?). So it just becomes an instrument to block the smaller competitors out of the market. Or an instrument for otherwise useless lawyer firms to prey on innovation, costing us all more than it should.
Parasites, I'd say.
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This happens especially often in the software industry, where the ideas are a dime a dozen
With more than six billion people on Earth, I'd suspect there are exceedingly few truly original ideas. Seriously, think of some half baked invention you've been mulling over, and do a patent search. Most of the time someone has already filed one on it, whether explicitly or in a broadly-worded patent that covers anything a lawyer can contrive it to cover.
The problem is that such ideas are rarely being actively developed. So either a) there are unresolved issues that make it impractical (hence unworth
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Agreed. My compromise solution is to allow but fast-track granting of software patents, and then limit the term to 4 years from filing. Long enough in the internet age to make a tidy profit from your monopoly, short enough to allow competition to emerge in a relevant time frame.
Re:Obvious is different to different people (Score:4, Informative)
I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to understand any of the patents behind modern CPUs for instance, unless I spent an awful lot of time reacquainting myself with electronics.
This has always been true. The point of patents is not so that anyone can build the thing in the patent, the point of patents is so that a competent engineer in the same field could build the thing in the patent.
If you are a chip designer for AMD, you would definitely understand Intel's CPU patents. A transmission designer should be able to understand patents on transmissions. An aeronautical engineer should be able to understand a new airplane design.
That's the point of patents. It has always been the point of patents, it isn't something that has developed over the last 50 years. They are not there to tell you, specifically, how to do something new. They are there to tell anyone who has the required background knowledge how to do something new. If you don't have the required knowledge to understand it, then the patent was never intended for you to begin with.
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That's the point of patents. It has always been the point of patents, it isn't something that has developed over the last 50 years. They are not there to tell you, specifically, how to do something new. They are there to tell anyone who has the required background knowledge how to do something new. If you don't have the required knowledge to understand it, then the patent was never intended for you to begin with./quote?
Well, they don't work for that. So apparently they are useless, and companies that depend upon them are parasites. I really shouldn't claim that no patents work for that, as I've read very few of them. But it's certainly not required that patents "make patent" the invention they are purportedly revealing to "those skilled in the art", and common reports indicate that it is actively discouraged. This is reinforced because judges generally are not "skilled in the art" and so don't require that the invention actually be revealed. And the patent office no longer requires that a sample of the item patented be deposited. (For software, this should be the source code.)
Personally, I'm not convinced that the whole idea of patents is a bad idea, but I do believe that it's a quite dangerous one, and that the current implementation is considerably worse than not having any patent system at all, and depending on copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets.
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No, unless you know they've expired or have been licensed to you. Otherwise, you wouldn't dare look - if you blindly infringe on a patent in the course of your work, and sell a product based on it, you're potentially liable to damages. If you knowingly infringe on a patent in the course of your work, and sell a product based on it, you're potentially liable for treble damages for willful infringement.
Since it's highly lik
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and if you simply copy parts of the Core i7 design, you are breaching copyright law anyway.
Economists agree (Score:2)
I think Michele Boldrin agrees with you. His view is basically that the basic idea of patents is sound, but today's reality doesn't mesh well with that idea because of a radically different cost structure (i.e. the cost of starting a company and the cost of copying an idea is different from when patents where instituted).
Here's his discussion with economist Russ Roberts on the subject: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/05/boldrin_on_inte.html [econtalk.org] (which links to his book, Against Intellectual Property, whi
Here's a Better Article (Score:4, Informative)
Summary is incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
Abolish patents. (Score:1, Troll)
and no. it being a bureaucracy or controlled by government doesnt matter. private or public, SOMEone will have to control and grant patents. and, it will eventually end up like this. in fact, if it was private, the situation would be much worse by now, since private corporations are easily dominated by their relevant interest parties, as we have seen from the fi
Don't abolish all patents (Score:2)
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let me portray the situation with an analogy :
"i would not say that feudalism needs to be abolished, but rather we need the reform the feudalism system so that it best serves society"
extreme ? yes. in the same direction ? yes.
something that awards the ownership of thoughts and thought concepts to private individuals, is a system that is akin to granting the ownership of entire land swaths to individuals. every time you pass that bridge of thought, you wi
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geee (Score:2)
Couple things (Score:2)
This 2010 KSR Guidelines Update highlights case law developments on obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 since the 2007 decision by the United States Supreme Court (Supreme Court) in KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc.
and
Comments concerning this 2010 KSR Guidelines Update may be sent by electronic mail message over the Internet addressed to KSR_Guidance@uspto.gov, or submitted by mail addressed to: Mail Stop Comments–Patents, Commissioner for Patents, P.O. Box 1450, Alexandria, VA 223131450. Although comments may be submitted by mail, the Office prefers to receive comments via the Internet.
Although I don't think the typical slashdot response to patent law issues is going to do much to persuade anyone. Might want to brush up on your patent law before you comment. This article [erikjheels.com] might help a bit.
OMFG, where did you people learn to read?! (Score:5, Informative)
Although the other rationales discussed in the 2007 KSR Guidelines are not the focus of separate discussions in this 2010 KSR Guidelines Update, it will be noted that obviousness concepts such as applying known techniques, design choice, and market forces are addressed when they arise in the selected cases. The cases included in this 2010 KSR Guidelines Update reinforce the idea, presented in the 2007 KSR Guidelines, that there may be more than one line of reasoning that can properly be applied to a particular factual scenario. The selected decisions also illustrate the overlapping nature of the lines of reasoning that may be employed to establish a prima facie case of obviousness. Although the 2007 KSR Guidelines presented the rationales as discrete, self-contained lines of reasoning, and they may indeed be employed that way, it is useful to recognize that real-world situations may require analyses that may not be so readily pigeon-holed into distinct categories.
Not only do they not say that they're getting rid of the seven KSR rationales, they actually reinforce the idea that examiners don't even necessarily have to use one of the seven rationales when making an obviousness rejection, as long as they can express their rejection in a way commensurate with the Supreme Court's reasoning in KSR.
The only reason that the other four rationales aren't discussed in any great detail in these guidelines is because the Federal Circuit hasn't released any decisions invoking those rationales since KSR.
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Oops. Should be "getting rid of any of the seven KSR rationales".
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Damnit, you just had to go and ruin it didn't you?
What with your reading TFA and all. Punk.
Don't bring your stupid facts into this discussion, we don't want them!
Seriously, summary is absolutely incorrect (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only do they not say that they're getting rid of the seven KSR rationales, they actually reinforce the idea that examiners don't even necessarily have to use one of the seven rationales when making an obviousness rejection, as long as they can express their rejection in a way commensurate with the Supreme Court's reasoning in KSR.
Yep. I'm not sure if the article poster was simply freaked out because there was more than one paragraph in the 2010 guidelines, or what, but all of the same standards are in the 2010 guidelines. They're just clarifying and providing examples from case law for some of the most common rejections.
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Replying again, I know, but it looks like TFA really jumped the gun big time. I only skimmed it, but it seems pretty clear to me that the 2010 guidelines only frame what patent officers are supposed to do once they've chosen one of the seven rationals laid out in the 2007 guidelines. It's a set of guidelines for applying the 2007 guidelines, it isn't a change in the rules in any way that I could tell.
This is further made clear by the fact that the 2010 guidelines are completely, 100% unenforced. It's not
Here're some explanations (Score:2)
Here's why TFA summary seems to be correct:
From http://www.ipeg.eu/blog/?p=1742 [www.ipeg.eu]
And.
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Okay, the first IPEG quote is simply in error. As I mentioned above, the reason why not all of the obviousness rationales were discussed in the FR notice is because not all of the rationales have been invoked by the CAFC since KSR. Not only do all the rationales survive - they were indicated as valid by the Supreme Court, after all - but the FR notice expands upon that by calling attention to the fact that SCOTUS intended those rationales as exemplary rather than all-encompassing, meaning that other ratio
Well FINALLY (Score:1, Troll)
There are far too few idiotic patents submitted nowadays. These elitist barriers of entry have to stop!
Can't see how it will make any difference... (Score:1, Troll)
Stupid Article (Score:5, Informative)
The referenced article draws conclusions completely at odds with the actual USPTO notice.
I guess it's to be expected that anything appearing on Slashsdot regarding patents would be totally erroneous, but this is one of the worst examples ever. In fact the USPTO encourages examiners to use reasoning outside the examples, which would be considered a BROADENING of the obviousness guidelines.
This story is quite the howler. Well done Slashsdot; you have hit a new low here.
Ok, here's info supporting TFA (Score:2)
I'm a layperson, and you're a layperson, and we disagree. Fine.
But here are two articles by patent lawyers, and they support TFA's assertions:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Raising_examination_standards_won't_fix_much#Current_trend:_standards_getting_lower.3F [swpat.org]
Needs a "TFA is Wrong" tag (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, it seems pretty clear swpat.org didn't even bother to read the 2010 Guidelines, and they even posted them!
The new guidelines don't do anything the summary or TFA say. You can't even get mad at the summary, except for obviously not reading TFA either (at least not beyond the first few lines).
Operationalize obviousness (Score:1)
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What we really need (Score:2)
Is for the FSF or some other trustworthy organization to commit a patent spam atrocity that involves patenting all sorts concepts related to generating patent applications. Perhaps they can patent the abstract concept of a mental algorithm by which numerous obvious patents can be generated from a single thought. Maybe they should go all the way and patent the abstract concept of a mental algorithm -- just make thinking an activity that might cause expensive litigation while simultaneously making thinking
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give applicants greater opportunities to obtain allowance of claims.
WTF is that even supposed to mean?
More lawyers fees for everyone -- you pay more and the lawyers receive more.
Market stimulus in action.
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Ah, the American dream
Not only American...
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