Taking the Battle Against Patent Trolls To the Public 107
First time accepted submitter presspass writes "A group of technology and retail groups is beginning a national ad campaign targeting so-called patent trolls. The Internet Association, National Restaurant Association, National Retail Federation and Food Marketing Institute Patent trolls — a term known more among geeks than the general public — are about to be the target of a national ad campaign. Beginning Friday, a group of retail trade organizations is launching a radio and print campaign in 17 states. They want to raise awareness of a problem they say is draining resources from business and raising prices for consumers."
Re:They're not trolls (Score:5, Insightful)
Inventors are out of luck RIGHT NOW. Patent is just a piece of paper that gives you right to sue someone, but to sue someone big/important you need >$100K for lawyer fees.
Re: They're not trolls (Score:1, Insightful)
Software a special case (Score:3, Insightful)
If you accept that mathematics is not patentable then
you must accept that computer programs are not patentable.
Regardless of what lawyers would like to believe; computers are machines
that read and utter mathematical expressions.
This particular patent problem is just another denial of scientific fact!
You should be able to patent a process that contains a computer
program but the program itself is out of bounds.
so there!
Re:Just a thought (Score:5, Insightful)
Then, how do I, as a poor inventor without the means to implement my invention, how would I be rewarded for revealing my invention to the world?
I would normally just sell the patent to an entity with the resources to actually develop the patent. If I can't transfer the patent, then I hold an exclusive right that I don't even have the resources to protect. I'll never cash in. I'd probably just keep the invention secret and not tell anyone.
However, if patents are transferable, like they are right now, I would have incentive to publish my invention in a patent in exchange for the exclusive right to make, sell, or use it. Then, I'd sell that right to somebody else who could bring it to market or have the legal resources to run a proper licencing scheme. I'd get rewarded for my invention. The public would get the knowledge of the invention. And the invention may be more likely to reach market.
Re:They're not trolls (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes you think inventors who "don't have the mental and financial stamina to sue a big corporation for patent infringement" are going to get a good deal out of a patent troll company? They have the same characteristics as other corporations, except they're run by even more shady individuals than average.
The way the patent system is currently run makes it extremely hard for anyone but an expensive patent attorney to navigate too. Your fantasy inventor here is unlikely to get their patent in the first place. Instead it's big corporations who have the resources to file so many garbage patents that the rest of the world is bogged down navigating them, including the small scale inventors. Odds are the mythical lone wolf inventor will be sued into oblivion rather than sue someone else successfully.
Re:They're not trolls (Score:5, Insightful)
The language used in patent applications is extremely hard to decode. The idea that people might be mining for innovation by reading patents has to clear that hurdle. They need to make sense of that mess with less work than developing the same idea from scratch.
Back when patents were disclosing major technical advances, there was some evidence people were doing that. I re-read Portraits in Silicon [amazon.com] lately. One of the recurring themes among early computer researchers was the idea that they'd get a patent on some very fundamental and non-obvious technology. Could you reinvent the transistor faster than you could read about it its construction? Probably not.
But lately, there's a lot more evidence that people are concurrently discovering obvious advances that someone patented instead of that sort of thing. And even those old fundamental patents turn out to be not such a big deal after all. The actual history of the transistor [wikipedia.org] shows the concurrent development of its ideas as being really inevitable.
Concurrent discovery is far more likely than unique innovation. The patent system is burdening what turns out to be one of the most common situations seen in scientific advancement: that the next step to build on any innovation will be co-discovered by multiple researchers in parallel. This happens far more often than the fantasy of the lone inventor working in isolation to create something no one else thought of before.
Re:They're not trolls (Score:4, Insightful)
the rest of the world is bogged down navigating them
Yet at the same time we're incentivized not to navigate (research) the existing patents by the willful infringement rules. Not only does it make a mockery of the patent system as an avenue for "disclosure," but you're trapped between the rock of due diligence and the hard place of triple damages.