Congress Tackles Patent Reform 261
nadamsieee writes "Wired's Luke O'Brian recently reported about Congress' latest attempt to reform the patent system. In the article O'Brian tells of how 'witnesses at Thursday's hearing painted a bleak picture of that system. Adam Jaffe, a Brandeis University professor and author of a book on the subject, described the system as 'out of whack.' Instead of 'the engine of innovation,' the patent has become 'the sand in the gears,' he said, citing widespread fears of litigation. The House Oversight Committee website has more details. How would you fix the patent system?"
I would devise some sort of patent-fixing hammer (Score:5, Funny)
slashdot feedback (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:slashdot feedback (Score:5, Insightful)
Things are easy to understand or figure an answer for some types of patents, but others present a much larger issue(s) with regard to patents. Does anyone remember how the recent cancer treatment was treated in the news because it couldn't be patented? Patents are driving businesses in directions that are not in the interest of the community. Peer review might well stop the onslaught of stupid patents leaving more room in the business roster for developing things that can't be patented in order to simply make some money and take bragging rights.
The current patent system has 'frozen' the business community into a position where many won't invent or improve if it can't be protected by patents. This destroys the value of patents rather than protects them. Company A may have patented an invention... fine. Now if company B wants to innovate on their products, they will have to fight company A's patent or take their chances in court. This is due to company A being given a stupid patent on obvious technological furtherance of prior technology.
Peer review would help to bring sense to this situation, even if at first it brings confusion IMO.
Re:slashdot feedback (Score:4, Insightful)
The first concern is time. A peer review period will increase the time it takes to get a patent. The USPTO already has a huge backlog of applications, and the average time to get a patent is two years. Increasing the wait time further would both increase the backlog and delays, which in turn would disincentivize people from applying for patents.
The second concern I have is ensuring fair peer review. The main problem with peer review is the significant risk that peers will abuse the nonobviousness requirement when judging a patent application.
First there is the problem of hindsight. Many improvements seem obvious with the benefit of hindsight. For example its very easy to sit back now and say that pipelined architecture CPU's were an obvious evolution from single instruction execution architectures, but that would be ignoring all of the time and effort put into designing and building one. An invention has two parts, the conception of the idea, and its reduction to a working model. A patent should reward both and the effort put into the latter is often lost in hindsight.
The second big issue I have is in the potential for peers to abuse the review process to deny patents specifically for commercial gain. If IBM, AMD, and Intel were in an arms race to invent some new processor technology and AMD built it first, should IBM and Intel be able to protest the nonobviousness of the invention merely because they were also developing it, but failed to come up with a working model? Or for that matter, would a company be willing to risk publicizing their invention through the patent process if it were likely to be struck down on peer review? They would be better off keeping it secret (if possible) and trying to utilize it secretly in order to recoup their investment. Part of the benefit of patent laws is that society gets the benefit of knowledge entering the public domain after the patent period expires. I'm not sure a system that potentially encourages secrecy of knowledge is in the best interest of society.
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Personally, I think the whole system has to be scrapped and replaced
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And above all, no "one click" business process patents.
If you're one of those people who're on the fence about software patents and think they should kept, then drop the term to seven years or so. Considering how fast the
Re:slashdot feedback (Score:4, Interesting)
You're onto something there: Different terms for different fields. Software would probably work well at 7 years, but something like a song would be longer, say somewhere around 50 to a 100 years. Let completely different industries be treated differently.
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And YOU CAN'T PATENT A SONG.
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Read my posting history.
Though, you must understand, I (and others, I am sure) will actively debate any statements you may make.
Read my posting history. The correctness of my opinion is not dependent upon my sunny disposition. To be perfectly blunt, I don't feel obliged to provide a cheerful, helpful crash course in a complicated topic when confronting people making statement analogous to "Lin
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Be careful, I think Slashdot beat you to the punch on that idea.
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http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/index.php [nyls.edu]
If congress is getting into it... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, yeah, tasteless. Mod me down if you must.
Re:If congress is getting into it... (Score:5, Funny)
Why just the other day I was talking to a friend who wanted to write, what would certainly be a very profitable, book for years to come. But, was leaning against it because he could only collect money for 50 stinking years after his death. I informed him of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act which upped that to 70 years after his death. He perked right up and started writing that same day!
Web presence of the Witness List (Score:5, Informative)
"Fixing" the Patent System? (Score:4, Insightful)
This issue, along with IP, Copyrighting, and DRM should ideally be tackled all at once. However, given that both Republicans and Democrats regularly side with big business, I would expect no change whatsoever to open up competition and innovation.
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These people have spent most of their adult lives, in the pursuit of power. The concept of: "the best thing they can do to help, is get out of the way." is near impossible for them to understand. We don't need legistators to make more laws, we need them to clean out the bloatware that is our legal system. 50% of the time congress is in session, the focus should be on removing old defunct laws/prog
How would I fix it? (Score:5, Funny)
The USPTO needs to assemble a panel of 4-year-olds. Each time a patent application comes in, the panel would be asked how they would implement the title of the patent (they do not see the content). If the panel comes up with a process resembling the original patent, it would be denied.
Simple...
Where to start.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Along with better criteria for awarding patents, there should be penalties for people who flood the PO with lots of stuff, hoping that something will stick. Make there be a sizeable penalty for submitting patents that gets rejected. Give a person/corporation a few freebies, a couple per year that can get rejected with no penalty, just to protect the little guys who aren't quite aware of what they're getting themselves into.
And don't make the patent office earn their budget through the number patents they grant. That's like funding a police department purely on how many crimes they solve per year, when we'd rather they find ways to prevent the crimes in the first place.
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So, keep your ignorant generalities to yourself.
By the way, for you spelling idiots that troll slashdot looking for mis-spelled words... Shut up!
By the way, I happen to agree that the system is screwed as it is currently. I opt for trade secrets and copyrights, and hope until it gets close enough to release. At that point
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Life gets tricky fast...
Does a corporation with 1000 engineers get more freebies than a company with 3? If so, how do you prevent them from focusing all of those freebies in one small and rapidly evolving technology sector, thereby locking out the smaller players even more so than with the current situation?
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Re:Where to start.. (Score:5, Informative)
The concept that people should not be able to seek patents while working on development is not really applicable as the USPTO does not require a working model anymore. If you show completeness of the concept and give strong evidence that it would work then you have done the job.
Applicants are required currently to pay for an RCE after every other rejection. The RCE is equivalent in cost to a full initial examination fee. They only get freebies if the examiner does not do a good job.
The USPTO does not get paid by the number of patents granted a year. The revenue is generated from examination fees, maintenance fees and other fees on applicants and patent holders. The money then goes to Congress who allocates the budget back to the PTO. Even if the PTO wanted to make money by just granting patents Congress would likely keep the excess anyway.
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So what you're saying is that the system penalizes individuals, who cannot afford to endlessly resubmit patents?
Except that the more bad patents the USPTO accepts, the more bad patents will be filed, which results in more examinati
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This is indeed ridiculous. But I do think compensation per review is a good incentive. Compensation, after all, makes for a speedier process. But while quantity increases, quality, however, suffers.
In truth, I don't think patent examiners should be determining the validity of patents at all. I think independent domain experts should be doing it. Categorize the patents my field of relevancy (patents should be able to fal
Punishing the wrong people... (Score:5, Informative)
The reason your idea would not work is that there is no duty to conduct a comprehensive search for a prior art before filing a patent application. The reason that there is no such duty is that a full search of every printed publication that is in existence would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Under Federal Rules (37 CFR 1.56), patent applicants are required to submit material art that they are aware of, and patent applicants commonly submit dozens of prior art references for consideration by the USPTO. If an applicant (or its attorneys) violate Rule 56, the patent can be invalidated for inequitable conduct.
Additionally, due to the billions of prior art references that exist, invalid patents are often granted without any fault whatsoever by anyone. Should my client in Arkansas be punished (for a sizable penalty as you suggest) for not being aware of a 1990 paper (written in Greek) that is only accessible by manually flipping through a card catalog in Athens? The 1990 Greek paper, indexed only in a physical card catalog in Athens, would be prior art that could invalidate my client's patent, why should he (or I) be punished for not finding it?
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Make patents non-transferrable. That way companies can't game the system by having their engineers filing patents individu
Require source code as enablement (Score:5, Interesting)
This gives us several benefits: 1) it's more analogous to a physical invention where all the parts have to be described in detail; 2) the source code to enable an invention would be free and public knowledge at the expiration of the patent; and 3) it's useful for others to understand exactly what the inventor is trying to claim as part of his patent. The public would benefit from a better description of the invention, competitors could determine exactly what a patent is supposed to do, and the patentor would not have to face the specter of business method or software patents being eliminated in their entirety (which I'm sure more than a few people will call for).
Re:Require source code as enablement (Score:4, Interesting)
My quick fix... (Score:5, Insightful)
Prohibit people from suing private citizens for patent infringement - or at least limit the damages/legal costs for them.
Make with-holding prior-art from the examiner an offense; have the people sign an affidavit or something, and enforce it.
Have a higher burden of proof for the non-obviousness. Have the people that apply show to the examiner how their idea is different from what's out there.
No patents on business methods, algorithms, living organisms and such. This is ridiculous and got out of whack due to some messed up court ruling ("anything useful under the sun [] should be patentable"). Make a law to reserse said court ruling.
Maybe a public review period where prior art can be submitted to the examiner?
More examiners. I read somewhere that they have only about an hour or so to search for prior art, due to the small number of examiners the USPTO has.
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But then if I can't afford to produce the product, I'm not going to be offered what it is worth, because anyone can copy the product and I cannot retaliate.
Of course, the corollary is that I can sell my prototype, then I can claim that the other business has taken over the market for my patented invention so even if I wanted to I couldn't run a business that produced t
Limit what can be patented (Score:3, Insightful)
Dangit! (Score:2)
Have multiple systems (Score:2)
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Engine of innovation...my ass (Score:5, Insightful)
The moment you work for a company that develops inventions and you meet their IP lawyer they tell you "if we knowingly violate someone else's patent then we're fined three times as much as if we didn't know. So under no circumstances read anyone else's patents.". So the whole thing is a complete scam and everyone involved is complicit. How come it needs a professor to say what everyone who works in IP has always known?
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Simple question to confirm your comment (Score:2)
- *How* would software and business patents encourage innovation?
Seriously. How many of you try to get ideas by looking at a patent database?
*crickets chirping*
Okay. I'm sure some of you have tried looking at published patent applications, just for kicks or because it's your job. Of the people who have, how would you describe the software/business patent application?
1) It's easy to understand and provides enough details to implement the patent.
2) It's ambi
Definitely! "Fix" the patent system. (Score:3, Funny)
Abolish the penalty for looking (Score:5, Insightful)
Related, allow a patent search that meets some reasonable criteria (e.g. done via the patent office) to be a defense against infringement.
Allow economic damages only. If you're not trying to get money out of your patent then you shouldn't get money out of infringers.
Patent office should keep some engineers, or maybe 10-year-olds, on staff. When an application comes in, these people are asked "how would you solve the underlying problem?" If they come up with the same answer as the patent application within a day, the application is thrown out for obviousness.
Two changes (Score:5, Interesting)
But courts still defer to the patent office unless the case is unambiguously bogus.
Move to something more like the copyright system, where having a copyright issued only proves that you had a claim as of a certain date and that your paperwork was in order.
The burden of proof would then be shifted to the patent holder to prove that their patent was valid as part of an infringement lawsuit, back where it belongs.
2. Get rid of or at least weaken submarine patents. The obvious way to do this is to make it so that no damages can be collected for actions before the patent holder files an infringement lawsuit.
Not gonna happen (Score:4, Insightful)
Ideas (Score:5, Interesting)
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Alternatively, the legal costs could be split between the patent enforcer and the government with the government picking up the tab if the enforcer went bankrupt. Though, that change risks the strong danger of the government not wanting to grant patents to people who didn't have the resources to defend them.
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Oh, and one more thing...
The working model requirement should be re-instituted. If you can't make a working device that demonstrates the patent, you shouldn't get the patent.
Also, a patent that can't be easily understood by a competent practitioner in the field in which the patent is granted should be consider void. Patents are there to spread knowledge, and ones that don't are useless. They should not be written in a special patent version of legalese like they are now. They should be written in the
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Patents should be held by the people that invented it and non-transferable. To be "exclusive", no contract should be enforceable placing restrictions on the inventors re: their patent -- even for 'works for hire'. A company could still enter into an agreement with the inventors to have use of the technology and even to sublicense it to others, but could not prevent the inv
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I would agree with software patents having a limit of 5 years, but 5 years certainly isn't right for everything, and I'm not sure I like the idea of having to categorize items, as every so often there is something so new and orig
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That's a good point. But there needs to be some feedback system that punishes the patent office for issuing bogus patents. It needs to be a feedback system that's hard to tamper with both from an exploitation of loopholes standpoint (which is what you pointed out), and from a political pressure standpoint.
How to fix it? Easy. Patent THINGS. (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy. Stop allowing patents for concepts, knowledge, ideas, methods, algorithms, etc.; and allow them only for things. Ideas are easy; it's implementation, marketable products, that are hard, and worthy of economic protections.
Patents are founded upon the concept that we all benefit as a society when those who develop products that make our lives better and/or easier are given a chance to benefit financially from those products, and hence have an incentive to undertake the often difficult development and production of them in the first place. Allowing patents on ideas, etc. has no such benefit, other than for the patent holder.
Hey, if I was a smart guy, I could sit around in my underwear, simply thinking up ideas and filing patents on those ideas, and possibly end up very rich someday; but what have I provided society as a whole? Squat. Less than squat, in fact, if I use my patent to club someone who decides to actually bring my idea to fruition, preventing, deterring or delaying that idea from implementation.
Which is exactly what's happening under the current system: anyone who actually wants to create a product, whether it's a next-generation power source, a ginchy playtoy, or a cure for cancer, first has to evaluate the risk of some "submarine patent" held by some patent troll robbing them of the fruits of their work -- the real work, that of actual implementation.
-- Thomas Edison
Quit letting lawyers and speculators control the 1%, and set the 99% free.
FOSS and Four Rules (Score:3, Interesting)
For commercial interes patents, this is what I'd do:
1) Patent gives grantee a monopoly for three years, then it expires and becomes public domain. You've got three years to make your killing, then you have to compete on a level field.
2) Be stricter about giving them out - patent really has to be for something professionals of the field hadn't already thought of.
3) Make it easier to challenge patents; if a challenger can produce prior art, patent is immediately voided, and grantee is barred from applying for new patents for ten years. If grantee had won any civil judgments regarding the patent while it was in force, any monetary judgments must be completely refunded, along with losers' legal fees.
4) No patents may be granted that could prevent other entities from implementing official industry (IEEE, IETF, ASME, NIST,
Predictions (Score:2)
Patent Reform Made Simple (Score:4, Interesting)
Disallow patenting an idea of how to do something. Proof of concept must exist. Limit software parents to 10 years and require that the source code and all source code for updates and/or patches be given to the USPO. After the 10 years expires the source code becomes public domain to be used by startups, students, and competitors.
Deny all patenting of genetic and biological technology.
If a company cannot make a profit off an idea that they have sole access to for a decade, then that idea or company is faulty to begin with anyways. Let somebody else have a chance to make the idea work.
Eliminate patents on... (Score:3, Insightful)
Barring that: Consider "doing X with a computer" - where doing X without a computer is a well-known process and the computerization is a straghtforward analog - to automatically be "obvious to a practitioner of the art", and unpatentable in it own right. (If "doing X without a computer" is patented, of course, "doing X on a computer" would similarly be "doing X" and
Software doesn't need patent protection.
- Copyright (even absent the crazy extensions in the last few decades) is adequate to avoid direct copying.
- The the time needed for the competition to recognize a profitable product, reverse-engineer it, write a replacement, and bring it to marketability is adequate to let innovators recover their investment plus profit and establish themselves in the market niche they create.
Most "business methods" have similar characteristics regarding payback of development costs. Further: Patenting them is so fundamentally anti-competitive that it makes no economic sense.
Keep patents restricted to things like physical inventions, manufacturing processes, drugs, and the like, which do have a big development cost that needs a significant time to recover.
Fix it (Score:2)
1. Patents expire X years after the invention, not X years after approval. Get rid of the incentive to drag the process out.
2. Add (or enforce) a requirement that a patent must describe the invention in a manner comprehensible to someone with expert skills in the field and in sufficient detail to allow that expert to implement the patent. A finding by a court that the applicant has failed either of these two duties is grounds for invalidating the patent in court.
3. Allow
patent holders must (Score:2)
this will prevent patent spam: a**holes just filing patent after patent with no intention of capitalizing on the invention, but every intention of suing if anyone else ever actually makes money off the idea
so it couples the state of holding a patent with the intent to move forward with it. you can hold a patent, but if you don't do anything with it, it ceases to protect your idea. "dead" patents, patents that are filed and just sit there unused, become e
My ideal patent reform (Score:5, Interesting)
(1) Every year, a patent recipient names the price of an unencumbered license, $X.
(2) Every year, to renew the patent, the patentor pays $X*(2^r) for r being the number of previous renewals.
(3) As soon as a patent is not renewed for a year, it ends.
What this means:
(a) It is not practical in the long term to use a patent to prevent something from being built -- a high $X means a high renewal fee.
(b) Patents that are genuinely useful get renewed; patents that are just so much legal cow-dung will not be profitable to renew for as long.
Problems with this scheme: The exponent constant might need to vary by field; the scheme would have to be revised for design patents and plant patents; might conflict with various treaties; might be preferable to restrict the ability to use a small X one year and a larger one the next year (require X to be non-increasing?).
Avoid "first to file." It is evil (Score:2)
Mark Twain said it. (Score:2)
Will Rogers said "Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for."and
"With Congress, every time they make a joke it's a law, and every time they make a law it's a joke.",
"This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer." -
Amen, Brother. Amen.
Read more Will Rogers here [mises.org]
Limit total # of patents (Score:2, Insightful)
Once you've got a strict limit on total # of patents valid (making them a fairly rare resource), then you can use a competitive process to play off the merits of each p
Software is Human Readable (Score:2)
Litle will happen, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
My first item is simple common sense, at least to anyone on /..
Second item would restore patents to individuals. The concept of patents was not designed or intended to foster large portfolios wielded by legal entities with mountains of cash and armies of lawyers. It was not even designed with Edison in mind. Restore patent holding to the actual living, breathing inventors, and let their employers have first refusal on any patentable item developed with company funds.
Third, business moves a lot faster than it did 50, 100, 200 years ago. Allowing patents to last 20 years is absurd in today's market.
Public Universities should not be allowed to be complicit with large corporations in holding patents hostage, especially in the science and medical fields. Actually, this could be made irrelevant by #2.
In general, reform the entire system to be oriented toward individual inventors, rather than Corporate innovation squatters.
If Congress does anything about this, it won't be caused by any domestic forces. The EU is gaining strength in these areas and pushing lots of reforms through. If the US wants to continue trading with Europe, many of America's draconian laws will have to be updated, including patents.
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Quick now, lock the door and hide a pack of hungry lawyers should after you in seconds.
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A quick note, in the US only individual persons can hold a patent. That person can then assign the pate
The cost should increase as you patent more (Score:2)
This plan will allow small companies to continue filing patents without paying more. It will also act as a disincentive for large companies (like IBM) to ask their employees to
How to fix the patent system... (Score:2)
software is not of patentable nature.... (Score:2)
Abstraction Physics [threeseas.net] is a perspective on software that shows software is in no way shape or form of a nature patentable. It actually falls into the three main things universally accepted as NOT patentable. Physical phenomenon, natural law and abstract ideas. The forth is math algorithms as many claim software is that, but math is a subset of abstractions.
As a thing to do, take any software patent and re-w
Without Patents We'd Never Inovate! (Score:2)
If problems come up I'm sure we can make laws to deal with them. Maybe I'm just a small town fool, but I think everything would continue better and faster than normal. This is not the 90's
Make 'obfuscation' grounds for rejecting a patent (Score:4, Interesting)
A patent shall be rejected if it either
- fails to use standard terminology where appropriate, in a way that makes reading of the patent more difficult
- describes aspects of the invention which are minor or irrelevant but not novel in excessive and unnecessary detail, or
- is in any other obfuscated, in the opinion of the examiner.
The typical patent is a very long description using precise but completely non-standard terms. Patents spell out in detail things that a person in the field would use one or two words for, and as a result, patents are hard to read, hard to search and hard to judge. Bad patents slip through the cracks not because the patent examiners don't know what they're doing, but because the patents themselves are extremely difficult to read.
Re:Make 'obfuscation' grounds for rejecting a pate (Score:2)
"Patent Rejected: Judgment Call"
Yeah, I know. There are problems with that. Let's make a list of them.
Patent Reform? Perhaps Legal Reform first? (Score:2)
A medical solution (Score:2)
Tax 'em! (Score:2)
I'd suggest say $5000 per year per patent but I'm sure it could be adjusted depending on what kind of patent it might be. For instance a "software" patent might attract a high tax load same as a highly desirable view lot attracts a higher tax load. Fair is fair eh?
In the case of a company with a patent portfolio of say 10,000 patents this might generate $50,000,000 in t
Length or easy of obtaining? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem has never been how long a patent lasts. The 20 year period is actually quite reasonable. The problem is how easy some really stupid shit can be patented, and how much of a pain it is to get a bad patent revoked.
Unfortunately, I'll bet money that Congress will do to patents what they did to copyright, make a bad situation worse. (bad for the little guy, wonderful for the megacorps).
Limit Royalty Percents (Score:2)
I would limit the total royalty fee. That way you could develop a product without fear of getting slapped out of the blue with a huge show-stopping royalty.
As far as how to divie up the fixed chunk, that can get a little sticky and has led to endless debates. Perhaps have the patent claimants fight over who gets a stake and how much rather than the manufacturer. This shifts the burden away from the manufacturer. The Mfr pay their fixed max percentage, and let the patent
How to make the patent system self-regulating (Score:4, Insightful)
The following addresses the US patent system, which for all its myriad faults, is in many ways the best in the world (at least as far as creating incentives for progress.) I don't address foreign patent systems here because, 1) I don't know them well, and 2) the ones that I do know a bit about all too often serve only the interests of large corporations with deep pockets.
How to Fix Patents Easily ("Dub Dublin's Proposal for Patent Reform"):
Part One: Instead of the current fixed length term of patents (20 years, in the US), make the term of patents adjustable on a sliding scale that is inversely proportional to the number of patents *issued* in that category in the trailing twelve months.
Part Two: Keep the reasonable cost of patent filings, but after a relatively low threshold of filings (say, 50 or so), make subsequent filing fees rapidly accelerate with the number of patent applications filed (also figured over the trailing twelve months). This has many benefits:
kill the whole patent shenannigans (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole patent farce has long since past its use-by date so let's just terminate it by repealling these unjust laws and treaties.
It was created to boost invention and innovation, by giving a defined monopoly for a set period in exchange for the publication of pretty precise specifications of the invention. It did what it was supposed to do for quite a few years, while the things patented were relatively simple manufactured objects. That was then, now the patent system gives the inventor an absolute monopoly for a set - imho excessively long - duration in return for the publication of totally obfuscated plans. Thus, in effect, depriving society as a whole from full exploitation of the ideas behind the patent for 20 years. Two items which come to mind immediately are the cavity magnetron, as used in microwave ovens, and xerographic copying. Neither of these really flourished until the original patents ran out. I'm sure there are 'hundreds', i.e. millions, of similar examples. I believe that commercial success from the implementation of ideas should stand on on its own. In my not so humble opinion it's morally wrong for the State to prevent improvement of manufactured things by competitors, but that is what is happening now-a-days. In practice patents make it impossible to make a better mousetrap. While that's merely wrong, using trade treaties to impose the whole crooked and corrupt mess on other societies, well that's just Satanic. But that's what is happening today and is the root reason why the US is seemingly loathed by the second and third tiers of the world's population. To put it simply, that's what caused 9/11. Now, USA: Please fix it and rejoin the Family of Nations.
Abolish it (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, more succinctly, all solutions are obvious in the context of the problem.
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Re:How would you fix the patent system? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How would you fix the patent system? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How would you fix the patent system? (Score:4, Informative)
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Creating something requires money. Raw materials for production aside, R&D has expenses. It's not code, and even coding something requires time. If you can't make money to survive using that time spent writing that code, why write it in the first place. Yes, there is personal gratification or charity. But this comes only after you can meet the daily needs of food, clothing, and shelter.
Re:How would you fix the patent system? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is pure undiluted horse shit. Code is covered by copyright not patents. Method patents (of which software patents are a subset) should be abolished! If you have a patent on software, you should be required to relinquish any and all copyright claims to that code. Why should software methods be protected by both copyright and patents?
And that is how I would "fix" the patent system. Abolish all future method patents and give current holders the choice of continuing their current patents with no copyright protections after expiration or simply converting them to copyright where they belong. The choice would be theirs to make.
While I'm on a roll here, if you can also remove the assumption of validity of patents, that alone would go a long way to stopping the patent trolls.
B.
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Unfortunately, most people aren't wealthy enough to take this option. For most independent inventors, the choice comes down to
1. Spend a year developing an invention, while rapidly going into debt, and hope that at the end of the year it will possible to patent the invention and pay off the year's expenses, or
2. Forget about building a better mousetrap, and get a normal job instead.
Aside from a very small subset
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Then what incentive is there to innovate? Why invent? 3M or some other big company will just take your idea and mass produce it cheaper than you could.
This is no time to be entirely reasonable!
Now having made the obvious joke, they're still right, but the counterargument is of course all of the shenanigans we've seen so far with abuse of the system. The problems with obvious patents is much easier IMO since all that is required is a better review system so that these are identified and denied both quickly and publicly. This is the easy part because it doesn't require any essential re-think of the existing system, merely cleaning up a lot of the crap.
Th
You obviously do not work in patents in a small .. (Score:5, Interesting)
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The system, as it exists now, benefits big companies who can afford the legal wranglings necessary to get a patent, and harms individuals and small businesses. It's gotten completely turned on it's head.
Abolishing p
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Unless they are dumb, their next step will be to hire that inventor and put his brains to use. The big companies will certainly keep innovating, not to be outdone by other big companies. It is an arms race where the consumer always wins.
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Exactly, and having no patents will just make it even more of an arms race. Companies will
be forced to innovate constantly to survive. Getting rid of patents would be a huge win
for innovation and advances in technology.
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Well, I don't know if it would be that much better. I suspect that the total effect of patents on innovation is very small. A mind experiment, if you will: AMD vs. Intel, no patents. What are they going to do? Agree to stop innovating and dismantle their R&D departments? The very next day all researchers will be re-hired in China to design a better, cheaper CPU.
If you let researchers go, you cannot really catch up to your new rival, because you do not have anyone who understands the technology anymore
Re:How would you fix the patent system? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Aren't we all judging the state of the patent system by reference to its treatment in the press?
Here on slashdot, the anti-establishment anti-government anti-Capitalism anti-big-anything memes are perilously strong. And so we aren't going to hear much about the other half of the story -- namely, the ways in which the patent system does in fact enable investment and innovation.
I personally have no clue whether the patent system is broken, or whether it is simply coughing and sputtering a bit under the del
YES! Fix it by killing it (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank you, and thank God somebody said that. The patent system has never worked, not even in the age of steam engines, where better designs were held back over a decade. Not even in the industrial era where patents became such a mess, they had to make "interface" patents illegal to keep the whole factory system from falling apart. Not even with Edison, the later years of his life wasting away on patent lawsuits. One of the engineers who created CDMA nearly quit electronics in disgust because of pa
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