US Patent Regime Is Absurd 202
An anonymous reader writes in with an opinion piece in the Economist
about the the effects
of patent trolling on the US economy. The author argues that the
U.S. patent regime is causing the U.S. essentially to harm itself. Things
have gotten so bad that paying for
protection is par for the course.
Stole my idea (Score:5, Funny)
The idea of patents being bad for the economy is MY intellectual property.
I'm suing the author, the poster (meaning everyone who has ever posted as anon), and Slashdot.
Re:Stole my idea (Score:4, Funny)
Then you might want to send a cease and desist to President Obama. In his remarks to the press today, he mentioned "patent reform" as part of his agenda for the next 14 months.
We'll see what comes of it, but I've got the feeling we're going to be seeing hearing a little more media coverage of the issue of patent reform, at least until the next celebrity overdose or semi-attractive white woman on trial for murder.
It'll be interesting to see how the anti-US government Fox News covers the story. Patents seem to be the very definition of "big government" and all "intellectual property" is "anti-free market".
I say, "Get the government out of our business and do away with all patents, copyrights and trademarks. We don't need no stinkin' Big Government to be involved with their job-killing regulations and picking winners and losers by giving patents.
We'll see if FreedomWorks and the Chamber of Commerce gets behind THAT anti-government message.
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Then you might want to send a cease and desist to President Obama. In his remarks to the press today, he mentioned "patent reform" as part of his agenda for the next 14 months.
Patent reform from Obama, with the R's in the house? Right... I'm skeptical, but if we get a bill it will go something like this. Obama says "We need to remove patents from certain areas like software, and we need to shorten the length of time for other areas." The R's will say no we need "To extend the lifetimes of patents indefinite
Re:The Toe (Score:4, Funny)
There is no problem with having multiple patents covering the same idea.
Guess again! I have a patent on multiple patents covering the same idea.
Pay up bitches!
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I have a patent on ideas coming from you. Give me all of your money, and don't even think of trying to get out of it.
Regime (Score:2, Funny)
Anything that is a regime is absurd!
Just make things free and democratic okay? Otherwise it's gonna be regime-change time!
Re:Regime (Score:5, Funny)
Those Fascists who run the Patent office are a bunch of Commies...
In closely related news ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Human genes [acs.org] can be legally patented, according to a Federal Appeals court.
Now, the difference here is that the genes are isolated from the body as a whole, but it seems like we're not too far from being in breach of patent every time we get it on.
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I'm still waiting for them to do to human genes what seed companies do to their patented crops: Render them sterile so they can't reproduce. That might actually make gene patents worth it.
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I believe the justification for this is that they don't want genetically modified crops escaping to the wild in case they have some adverse effects. It's a happy coincidence for the companies that make the seeds, but there is some non-evil logic to it as well. .
Actually no, making plants grown from hybrid seed sterile has been used long before there was genetic modification*. Seed companies been seeking that trait to protect their patented seed lines since the 30s.
* Genetic modification has been going on via the much slower means since human kind started in agriculture.
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The problem comes in when the pollen from those crops renders grain in neighboring fields sterile as well.
The terminator gene is dormant until germination. At that point it becomes active and kills the plant.
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That's actually not necesarily GM work. Lots of crops work based on a breeding stock, and a yield stock. You need to grow enough of the breeding stock to get seeds to plant for the yield stock, but due to the selective breeding, the yield stock is often sterile.
Not that Monsanto isn't 95% evil or anything (I gotta give 'em some credit for Golden Rice), but sterile yield crops isn't necessarily due to them.
-Rick
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Now, the difference here is that the genes are isolated from the body as a whole, but it seems like we're not too far from being in breach of patent every time we get it on.
No we're not, but the company is already charging thousands of dollars [blogspot.com] for you to know if YOUR copy of the relevant gene is mutated and if you should be more vigilant about breast or ovarian cancer*, which is of course criminal by any sane standards.
(* to those two women who are reading slashdot, this applies. For everyone else, well, it still raises your health insurance)
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Here's the really ugly part
A doctor receives a patient. The patient has cancer, and to the amazement of the doctor the man survives and is discovered to have extraordinary traits of interest to the doctor. The doctor patents the cell line he develops from the man, keeping him coming to his office for years after he has been cured on threat of relapse and death, all for the purpose of furthering his personal research. The doctor can make the argument that this ones man's year perhaps even decades of sufferin
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On a similar note, I suppose you have never heard of Henrietta Lacks [hamptonroads.com] and how pharmaceutical companies patented her cancer cells, the strain which makes them billions of dollars and responsible for causing her untimely demise.
In other news (Score:2, Insightful)
Water is wet, the sky is blue, and I didn't RTFA.
Podcast about this (Score:5, Informative)
The often-wonderful This American Life show covered this topic quite recently. They tried to find out what the deal was with Intellectual Ventures and their ilk, and made some surprising discoveries. (I don't want to give away any spoilers.)
You can listen to a podcast of the show here:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack [thisamericanlife.org]
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The Economist, Public Radio... we might be reaching a tipping point regarding patent trolls. When CNBC starts covering the idiocy of patent trolls, I'll know that the end of the insanity is near.
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The piece on This American Life is basically the same as the Planet Money piece mentioned in the Economist article - the same Planet Money people did both. When TAL did their award-winning show on sub-prime mortgages [thisamericanlife.org], it was a compilation of Planet Money shows from the foregoing months.
They're the go-to guys when it comes to clarifying these financial issues. I've been listening to them for years, and can highly recommend them. I mean, how many other journalists actually went out and bought a toxic asset [thisamericanlife.org]?
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Very fascinating podcast. If I were the reporters, I would follow the transaction from Intellectual Ventures to Oasis Research and other companies that it sells its patents to...
I'm thinking that the companies that paid the protection money are still not sued by the new patent owners... thus still receive the 'benefits' of the protection. I would also think that the sales are designed to isolate I.V. from being "evil" and open the opportunity for predatory enforcement/collection (to promote settlement re
The Economist? (Score:2)
Re:The Economist? (Score:5, Informative)
Copyright isn't absurd the way software patents are.
Pretty much everyone, including OSS software developers, desire the benefits of copyright. The way that the MPAA/RIAA goes about enforcement is definitely out of control, but the fundamental issue is okay.
Software patents, on the other hand, are (at least) well in the the grey area surrounding "what should be patentable". A business process, a mathematical formula, a procedure, an idea? How ethereal can something be and still be someone's property?
The MAFIAA are trying to change the rules to suit their own interests. Patent trolls, on the other hand, are functioning just fine with the rules the way they are.
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Don't confuse the use of copyright with wanting copyright. A good number of open source developers use licenses to prevent their code from getting into copyrighted corporate products, but wouldn't object to just doing away with the whole system. I am one of them.
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One of the interesting points they bring up is the inherent fallacy in the "defensive patent". Since patents are by definition supposed to be
It can be fixed (Score:2, Offtopic)
The solutions are simple, but not easy, for political reasons. End software and genetic patents, reduce the length of remaining valid patents. It's clear that the vast majority of businesses that have a stake in producing imaginary property wish for nothing to ever enter the public domain ever again--these same corporations are also the most effective lobbyists in the debate and have controlled the message for years, or decades depending on which specific industry you look at.
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Which is why the patent protection time limit needs to be shortened. Absent patent protection, a firm will simply keep their advancements as trade secrets for as long as they are able to keep it hidden. The trade off with a patent is that in exchange for telling the world how you did something clever, you get exclusive rights to make economic use of that invention for a time, and then when the patent expires anyone gets to use it and improve on it.
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The problem with many patents, especially software patents, is that they do not tell you enough to 'tell the world how you did it'. They are just vague handwaving descriptions of usually pretty obvious methods. They are overly broad, unremarkable and of little inherent value.
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Yup, which is why they should be banned outright.
enablement (Score:2)
If there is not enough information for one of ordinary skill in the art to make or use the invention, then the Examiner should be making an enablement rejection. If the examiner makes a successful rejection, the patent applicant would need to file a continuation in part to disclose the relevant missing information.
Note, in the software world, this doesn't mean you have to include code. There merely has to be enough disclosure that one familiar with the subject matter would know how to write the code corresp
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Huh?
When you file for a patent, your application is generally published 18 months after filing. This lets others improve upon your process. Likewise if you make an improvement to an existing patented process, which was not claimed in an existing patent your application may be considered novel and not infringe on the other patent.
Learn from History (Score:3, Insightful)
The exact extent of how much this can impact an Empire's economy can easily be seen by looking back a little bit into history. A couple of hundred years ago a major world-spanning power had quite restrictive and onerous patent and copyright laws (to the point where certain types of boats could only be constructed in particular home ports), and one of their upstart colonies took advantage of that with much more open and innovation-friendly rules.
The countries in question of course are England and the USA.
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The Rise and Fall of the British Empire has absolutely nothing to do with it's patent regulations.
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I mostly think it was a piece of the puzzle. And I don't believe it was a major influence in the why of the split. But it did provide a major benefit after the split that the USA didn't have to abide by England's patent system any longer. In certain industries, (notably shipbuilding) this had major impacts, and basically revived US industries. I think it correlated more closely to the decline of the economic power of the British Empire than anything else, probably as a part of a self-feedback loop like
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The exact extent of how much this can impact an Empire's economy can easily be seen by looking back a little bit into history. A long time ago a major galaxy-spanning power had quite restrictive and onerous patent and copyright laws (to the point where certain types of ships could only be constructed in particular space ports), and a few of their upstart colonies took advantage of that with much more open and innovation-friendly rules.
The groups in question of course are the Empire and the Rebel Alliance.
FTFY, and it still has just as much applicability as what you said!
Sorry, not enough graft (Score:2)
There just isn't any interest among politicians in changing the patent system (or copyright either) until they get nice fat juicy campaign contributions from the people who are screwed by the current "intellectual property" regime.
They should call it the "Wright-Effect" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They should call it the "Wright-Effect" (Score:4, Interesting)
And no current airplanes are direct decedents of the Wright brother's planes. All current planes are derived from competing models that didn't violate the Wright brother's patents.
Or not (Score:2)
The Wright brothers may have been the first to build airplanes that could be adequately controlled and sure they patented it. However, the Americans were the only nation who didn't have operational airplanes during WWI because the patent protection basically prevented improvements of the flaws in the Wright brother's patent protected design. They ended up buying French airplanes instead.
This is wrong in almost every way. The Wright brothers had patents in France. And the Americans had operational airplanes during WWI both from the Wright brothers and from the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company. Now, sure, the Americans bought airplanes in France for WWI... because, y'know, the war was in France, and they didn't exactly have transatlantic aircraft carriers or flights then.
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Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_brothers_patent_war [wikipedia.org]
The Wrights' preoccupation with the legal issue hindered their development of new aircraft designs, and by 1911 Wright aircraft were inferior to those made by other firms in Europe.[9] Indeed, aviation development in the US was suppressed to such an extent that when the U.S. entered World War I no acceptable American-designed aircraft were available, and the U.S. forces were compelled to use French machines.
Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
The US government plainly does not care whether their policies make sense, or help the people they ostensibly intend to. All that matters is that the right people get kickbacks and that politicians get reelected.
See the War on Drug Users. This has always been an absurd effort. There has never been an honest argument in favor of criminalizing drugs, and every effort to define a rational policy(from LaGuardia in 1939 to the present day) has recommended decriminalization. Still, the US has waged war on its own citizens for decades, refusing to even allow serious discussion on alternative policies.
You can expect to see the same here. There will be a war on patent infringers and a war on copyright infringers. They will be devastating to individual liberties, and they will be a drag on our economy. Still, the US will not consider alternatives, and will even put the full force of the US propaganda machine against those who do.
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War on drugs is different. America is puritan and most politicians are afraid to take a stance that the electorate could see as not being morally pure. But with patents, majority of people either wouldn't care or would favor the little guy. So if a compelling case is made and an anti-software-patent lobby starts pushing (led by Google maybe?), things may change.
Time for a Benevolent Dictator? (Score:2)
So how exactly is the US going to fix these problems, given its current political, economical structure and corporate culture? Is there any hope of fixing all the big problems from within the system?
No such thing. (Score:2)
There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator. The concept is self-contradictory.
Can we "fix" the system from within? Sure, as long as we don't resort to stupid solutions like setting up dictators.
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I refuse to accept any benevolent dictator! Unless I get to be the dictator of course...
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I think you're trying to "fix" too much here. It's not that any one organization has more influence than the government, it's that the organizations which benefit from the status quo are more focused on defending it than the ones who are inconvenienced by it. There are strong lobbying groups that support the ridiculous draconian measures that we have seen to protect intellectual property. But those who oppose those measures are not as focused, and so the Congress doesn't see the need to move in their direct
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My take on this:
I always thought that it would be a good idea to not pay politicians until AFTER their term was finished. Provide them with a car and driver, a fully stocked apartment/house, sets of suits or clothes that will be needed in the course of their work, and basically make it so they do not need cash while they are in office. Also, do not allow them to receive any gifts over a certain amount (like $100) from any one entity (person or corporation) for the duration of their term in office.
They work
good and bad are relative (Score:3)
the patent system is good for lawyers, who are disproportionately represented in the pools of elected officials, lobbyists, and political contributors. The current system is extremely good for them, and mildly good for politicians in generals as it helps finance the whole lobbying/contributions rigmarole.
since both parties benefit, and have no balls anyway... things will stay that way.
Too much rhetoric over the wrong things. (Score:4, Insightful)
But aside from the bad decision of allowing software patents, the big problem has been the apparent incompetence of the Patent Office itself: issuing patents for things it never should have (because of things like prior art for example).
If we want to have rational debate about the matter, we have to distinguish between bad laws (software patents), and bad administration of good laws (just about all the rest).
Other than the software patent ruling, the system per se isn't flawed. It has just been badly administered, and in some cases abused. Those are not the same things.
If you're playing poker, and somebody cheats (or fumbles while dealing the cards), that is not a flaw in the rules of poker. Similarly, the fact that our "patent system" is currently being abused in some cases and badly implemented in others is not a flaw in "the system", per se. It's just failure of the responsible parties to do it properly. There is a rather big difference.
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But aside from the bad decision of allowing software patents, the big problem has been the apparent incompetence of the Patent Office itself: issuing patents for things it never should have (because of things like prior art for example).
History [wikipedia.org] paints a slightly different story. The Patent Office initially refused to allow software patents and the total number of patents granted per year was fairly small. After being overruled by the supreme court in Diamond v. Diehr, the Patent Office was forced to change its policies. From the wikipedia article:
In the 1981 case of Diamond v. Diehr, the United States Supreme Court upheld the CCPA's reversal of the USPTO, and ordered the grant of a patent on an invention, a substantial part of which involved use of a computer program which used a well-known formula (the Arrhenius Equation) for calculating the time when rubber was cured and the mold could therefore be opened. The Supreme Court stated that in this case, the invention was not merely a mathematical algorithm, but a process for molding rubber, which was therefore patentable. In the Diehr case, there was no concession that the implementation was conventional, and the process did effectuate a transformation of substances (from uncured rubber to cured rubber). After this point, more patents on software began to be granted, albeit with conflicting and confusing results. After its creation in 1982, the CAFC charted a course that tried to follow the Diehr precedent. Patents were allowed only if the claim included some sort of apparatus, even rather nominal apparatus at times, such as an analog-to-digital converter front end, or in one case a scratch-pad memory for storing intermediate data. A representative decision from this period is In re Schrader, in which the CAFC set forth probably its best and most detailed formulation of the rule it was attempting to follow. Dissatisfaction with the perceived artificiality of this rule erupted, however, in rulings beginning with the en banc 1994 decision in In re Alappat, in which the CAFC majority held that a novel algorithm combined with a trivial physical step constitutes a novel physical device. Therefore, a computing device on which is loaded a mathematical algorithm is a "new machine", which is patentable. This ruling was followed up in In re Lowry, which held that a data structure representing information on a computer's hard drive or memory is similarly to be treated as a patent-eligible physical device. Finally, in State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group, the CAFC ruled that a numerical calculation that produces a "useful, concrete and tangible result", such as a price, is patent-eligible.
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"History [wikipedia.org] paints a slightly different story. The Patent Office initially refused to allow software patents and the total number of patents granted per year was fairly small. After being overruled by the supreme court in Diamond v. Diehr, the Patent Office was forced to change its policies. From the wikipedia article:"
You must have misunderstood me or gotten my context wrong, because I do not (and did not) disagree with any of this.
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You must have misunderstood me or gotten my context wrong, because I do not (and did not) disagree with any of this.
Sorry, I should have clarified my point after the except. Basically, what I was trying to point out is that, per the new policy, the addition of an 'apparatus' makes an idea novel. Thus, adding the word 'the internet' to another patent already granted is technically a valid, patentable idea. While anyone with common sense can see its not novel or can think of similar things that have already been done, the fact is the USPTO must follow these ridiculous policies and blaming them for this mess when there is
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That was simply a bad decision. For something like 80-100 years prior, software was unpatentable (but copyrightable), regardless of whether it controlled some "apparatus". That was the famous ruling in regard to player pianos. The courts reasoned (correct
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I'd love for you to explain in detail with real world examples what makes software patents so much worse than regular patents. With brothers in both chemical and mechanical engineering, they deal with the same crap we do.
The problem is not with the patent office itself. Its 'easy' for us to decide what is and is not a valid patent in hindsight looking back on history and dealing with abstracts.
It's much harder to figure out what a patent is when reading the claims section of an actual patent when an indus
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"I'd love for you to explain in detail with real world examples what makes software patents so much worse than regular patents. With brothers in both chemical and mechanical engineering, they deal with the same crap we do."
And I'd love to take a couple of hours to explain it all to you. But I have done so here on Slashdot about 5 different times in the past, when this subject has come up, and I really don't feel like doing it again, even if I had the time to do it.
But I will briefly summarize, and you can look it up for yourself:
Software is fundamentally nothing more than a collection of very simple instructions, slung together into different combinations, in order to produce an effect. Guess what else is like that? Wri
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Even if you were to end software patents, you would still have methods as a statutory class of invention. I must say that I am unsure what additional protection simply claiming a computer readable medium on which is stored software that preforms the same steps that the applicant claimed in a separate method claim actually provides.
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"And no, I absolutely don't think you should ever separate the laws from the administration of said laws. I think this is one of the absolute WORST things you can do as a public official."
No, I did not say that public officials should separate the administration of laws from the laws themselves. What I wrote was that in discussing what the problems are, we need to recognize that sometimes the problem is the law, and sometimes the problem is bad administration of the law.
Johnson was not exactly my favorite President, but he hit that right on the head:
"You [should] not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs
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The flaw in your logic is the same as all centrally planned things. It is easy to describe something in a law or paper but impossible to administer in the real world. It stems from the fact lawyers write laws to be confusing because it gives politicians mo power since you never know if you are violating one.
Engineers deal with this all of the time with project requirements. A real requirement needs a way to verify it has been met. So a requirement that an assembly machine should run quickly and scrap a mini
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"The flaw in your logic is the same as all centrally planned things."
The flaw in MY logic? I think you may have gotten a couple of things backward.
First off, that's basically what I was saying: we have to recognize that at least sometimes it is bad administration of the law, rather than the law itself.
But secondly, patents have absolutely nothing to do with "central planning". Quite the contrary. Apples and oranges.
By law, patents are granted to inventors based on the merits of the invention. The government itself (theoretically) has no control over that. According
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Other than the software patent ruling, the system per se isn't flawed.
Why do you think software is fundamentally different to, say, electronics? Or design patents? Should someone really be able to patent a phone with a "flat glass screen and rounded edges", or any one of the other patents that the cell phone industry is currently tearing itself apart with?
Maybe software patents only seem ridiculous because we are all familiar with how software is written? Maybe a patent on wood bonding techniques seems equally ridiculous to a carpenter. Perhaps patents on circuit designs ar
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Patents are supposed to be non-obvious to an expert in the field. If that were actually enforced, I suspect 99% of patents would cease to exist.
It's not supposed to be non-obvious to an expert, rather to one of ordinary skill in the art. In some fields that might require PHd knowledge, others a high school education. Now that being said, how would you meet that standard? The examiner might say its obvious, but that is based on opinion. The applicant will say no its not, and bring a 1.132 declaration by a to
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How do you propose that the USPTO become expert in all non-software endeavors? This isn't purely a question of just administration.
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I don't know why that would not work. It used to.
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It seems to me that software patents aren't all that great, but I'm no expert on that and can't easily say whether reforms or just better enforcement of the existing rules are needed. There are other issues with the patent system, though, that aren't purely mismanagement.
Patent trolls have found a loophole in patent law. Namely, that someone other than the inventor can claim ownership of an invention they have no intention of producing. I think something along the lines of the rules below could help solv
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Get rid of software patents, and you would probably eliminate about 80% of patent trolling at the same time.
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It's not just software patents, that's bullshit. Patents are bad in all fields of technology, full stop.
Just look at Edison's patent trolling. Or how US patents of Wright brothers [wikimedia.org] made the US the only side of WW1 without planes usable in war. Or the effects of patents on medicine.
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"Patents not only cause harm, they don't cause good. Let's start with the main argument FOR patents, which is that they create a supply of inventors/producers/artists/etc. This argument is unproven, and clearly (as we agree with software patent) circumstantial at best."
No theory can ever be proven, they can only be disproven. But regardless: the evidence may be circumstantial but that circumstantial evidence is very strong.
Look at the areas of the world where the ability to profit from your own research / inventions did not exist. A couple of good examples are behind the iron curtain during the cold war, and China, even today (although that is changing). Russia simply could not keep up technologically or economically. To illustrate the profit motive: even peoples' back
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"Not only does it cause the monopoly issue on the consumer end, patents are also the absence of collaboration. If you patent the cup, and I patent the ball, our society can never invent the cup-and-ball game. This notion is very prevalent in software, but it certainly isn't limited to software, it's just a bit more of a glaringly obvious example."
Actually you could patent it. The use of a cup and ball together is something new and may be considered a non-obvious variation and therefore patentable. Just add
Case in point (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's look at two areas of technology: video quality and JavaScript performance.
With video quality, the relevant technologies for modern techniques are patented. This means that competing products are of a poorer quality or are artificially restricted. The companies that hold the patents are less likely to innovate and build on their existing work (except to create more patents), so the state of the art gets held back and is slow to advance.
Now with JavaScript performance, take a look at the competition between Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer. All these products are competing against each other without resorting to patents. The net result is that you end up with faster JavaScript on all products, allowing for more advanced and interactive websites to be used. It also makes the competitors (Firefox and Internet Explorer) to improve and advance as the other products compete for user share. The net result is that the users of all web browsers benefit and the technology advances rapidly.
So which one is better for innovation?
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With video quality, the relevant technologies for modern techniques are patented. This means...
...competing companies have incentive to innovate and build on their existing work to compete with the patented technologies, so the state of the art is fast to advance.
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With video quality, the relevant technologies for modern techniques are patented. This means...
...competing companies have incentive to innovate and build on their existing work to compete with the patented technologies, so the state of the art is fast to advance.
The key part of your sentence is "build on their existing work". They can't build on the existing work of the patented standard. They can only duplicate effort. And if, by chance, the patent in question covers a mathematical algorithm that is provably the most efficient, then it is inevitable that they will come to the same result (the patent), either intentionally or accidentally, and be unable to continue. Meanwhile, the owner of the patent knows this, and takes his jolly good time improving the paten
Double standard (Score:2)
A big company or even a ghost company can blow up your proyect because it looks like the application of a concept they patented but never developed. On the other hand, China is allowed to mass produce copies of western products and never face the consequences.
Adopting the Business Model (Score:3)
Maybe thats the new paradigm, grant a Troll say 20% of future revenue of any patent in exchange for them defending it. Not much different from insurance. Such an arrangement might make someone else think harder before infringing.
And sorry for using the word 'paradigm' in an open forum.
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Why would patent troll settle for 20%, when a patent is becoming useless to the inventor, and they're expected to take the risk of losing in court? They might give you 20%, if the patents are especially exploitable. Likely you could only use them as a means to exact revenge, giving all financial gain (and risk) to the patent troll.
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Stagnation (Score:2)
Is /. so stagnated now that they've resorted to just reporting basic facts!?
and the other side AKA china is just as bad where (Score:2)
and the other side AKA china is just as bad where any thing can get ripped off with little to no recourse.
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Citation needed that it actually causes significant harm?
Will Wilkinson (Score:2)
The author of the linked blog post is Will Wilkinson [willwilkinson.net]. That wasn't immediately obvious to me when I clicked through, so I thought I'd share it. Wikipedia describes his approach [wikipedia.org] as libertarian and "a mixture of John Rawls's principles and Friedrich von Hayek's methods".
Interesting guy and a good writer.
Lets get real... (Score:2)
My darlings... the people that have ever greater control over the very atoms of modern life, from our government to our choice of breakfast cereal, have been busy reshaping the world in their own interest. Whatever purpose the patent system might have served when it was created, it now exists to bludgeon the common man into shutting up and doing what corporations tell him to do. IP has been collected and packaged like so many bad home loans, and now the laws are bent to give corporations dominion over what
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You're missing the point. It's not that the patent system in the US is absurd...almost everyone here will acknowledge that. The story here is that a major publication like the Economist is taking that stance. When it's a bunch of nerds in an online forum whining about it, nothing will ever change. When it hits the mainstream, the politicians have to take notice.
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The linked planet Money story is well worth a listen, though it's a bit long. The This American Life [thisamericanlife.org] that the Planet Money story is based on is even longer, but again fairly entertaining. I actually drove around for an extra 15 minutes Saturday afternoon to continue listening to the whole thing.
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The story here is that a major publication like the Economist is taking that stance. When it's a bunch of nerds in an online forum whining about it, nothing will ever change. When it hits the mainstream, the politicians have to take notice.
Interestingly enough, the DOJ is sticking its nose into the patent trolling arena [ecommercetimes.com]. Some press reports indicate that the DOJ is asking explicitly if the patent portfolios are going to be used to go after Android. Others suggest the DOJ already realizes the arms race in acquiring huge patent arsenals to challenge virtually ANY emerging technology is counter productive to the very reason patents were created in the first place, and may be contemplating anti-trust action.
If true, or even if it appears to be t
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Abolish patents outright. It would be better than what we have today. If you discover something first, your reward is being first to market.
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unless they steal the source code of your implementation then I think all patents are shit for humanity as the only people who benefit are blood sucking parasite lawyers who should be working on assault and fraud cases rather than taxing the working people of the world. Death is too good for them. Chopping them into little pieces and jumping up and down on them should be a civic duty.
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"And we should be denying patents on the vast majority of the most important inventions, since most seem to involve near-simultaneous invention."
How the hell do we do that?
For starters, if another application comes in for essentially the same invention during the period between the first patent application and publication, it should produce the rebuttable presumption that the invention is obvious to one versed in the art, invalidate both, and be recorded as prior art to invalidate future applications. Rebu
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I have four issued software patents myself, all in areas where the existing technology didn't work but mine did.
So your software did ONLY new things, and did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that someone else did before?
You invented a completely new data storage system, display system, input system, processing system, operating system, help system, feedback system, purchasing system, and so on, and you still only managed to get 4 patents?
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Inventions that are "completely new" are virtually non-existent. Virtually all progress is incremental improvements over what already exists.
Microsoft Office was hardly an "original". Excel took most of its ideas from Lotus 1-2-3 which took its ideas from Visicalc which took its ideas from paper spreadsheets. Other Office products have similar histories. The NCSA web server started as a clone of the CERN http web server.
The patent system operates from a fundamentally improper idea of how invention takes pla
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Spotify, which is yet another streaming music service.
They're being sued the original streaming service, right? The one that had the original idea, original implementation, based on never-before seen algorithms, data structures and math? Right?
Hulu,
See above.
Rovio,
See above.
Come up with something new, and you have far fewer patent problems.
Wrong. Come up with something new, and hope that you have deeper pockets than anyone threatened by your patent.
I have four issued software patents myself, all in areas where the existing technology didn't work but mine did.
Unless you used new math, you copied many, many ideas while creating your software. The only reason no one has sued you over those patents is because they're either not used, not in areas any
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So protection only for the rich. Basically the same as the current system then?
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The news is that mainstream publications are reporting on it. That hasn't happened before.
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... wait, I couldn't produce a more obvious article than this...
The point of the shashdot article is not the obvious problems with the current patent system.
The point is the news about this information finally becoming visible to, and absorbed by, the policy makers.
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Move to China, that's where you can truly benefit from the fruits of your own labor. Ironic eh?
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I think the problem that most people have with the status quo is that there is a privileged layer of parasites in the US system who leach off of entrepreneurship and contribute nothing to society except for an unfair tax - people are sick of the default wealth redistribution system that grants $ to the parasites who damage the western economy. The lawyers should be a service to the economy not the rulers of it. If the lawyers are running your society then you can bet your bottom dollar that another society