Big Tech is Suing the Patent Office (axios.com) 27
Apple, Google, Cisco and Intel this week sued the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, challenging the agency's recent rule that it can refuse to adjudicate patent claims while litigation about them is pending in court. From a report: The companies say the rule hurts innovation and their legal rights, letting invalid patents stay on the books while lawsuits slowly wend their way through court. The rule, which was introduced by the USPTO in March and became final in May, deals with the agency's obligations around inter partes review (IPR) -- a sort of expert-court process for assessing whether patent claims are valid. USPTO says deferring to an ongoing court case is more efficient than setting up a parallel review internally. District courts are costly and have less expertise in patent law, Cisco general counsel Mark Chandler told Axios. Cisco owns 16,000 U.S. patents, but the agency is undermining its ability to invalidate unworthy ones, he said.
Its all bullshit anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
The entire idea of patents and copyrights is anathema to any progress we could have.
Does that mean people shouldn't get compensated for invention? Of course not.
It doesn't mean the entire planet should be held hostage to corporate and government invented constructs either.
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the patent office needs a rule that if no one cares if you try and keep it secret, then no patent
This is exactly how Pfizer lost their Viagra patent in Canada. [edrugstore.com]
Once again, the US could learn a thing or quintillion from Canada.
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> Patents are fine, the problem is when you can get a patent for something obvious.
The hardest part of most problem solving is asking the right question. Often the answer then becomes obvious.
Clearly some patents are obvious to everybody, so we can ignore them, but the answer to the more interesting cases of "what is obvious?" is, well, non-obvious.
The bigger issue of IP is that it directly obliterates private property rights. Reductively, if I have a pile of wood, may I assemble it in any way of my ch
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It sounds like you're a real deep thinker. You think the "entire idea of patents" is an anathema to progress? It's one thing to recognize problems, it's another to be in denial over the entire justification.
“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
Re:Its all bullshit anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
If only that was how they patent system were being used today. Now it's massive war chests of hundreds of thousands of patents on ridiculousness like "adding a curved corner to a box on a display screen" to stifle competition and hamper disruptive startups.
What we need is for patents and copyrights to be returned to their original very short lifespans (innovation moves faster now than ever) and for patents owned by corporations to be licensed automatically through the patent office, with scalable rates so small competitors can get reasonably priced access.
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It sounds like you're a real deep thinker.
Aww, thanks -- good of you to recognize.
Sadly it takes half a second to look anywhere and realize your idealism isn't reality.
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The practical intent of patents is two-fold. First, to encourage R&D effort by allowing rewards for obtaining a patent; and second, to create a repository of ideas (patents) so manufacturers know about them.
However, it appears to cause more problems than it solves, at least for software. Most software patents come from incidental ideas during specific implementations, not formal research labs. Thus, software patents don't encourage anybody to "invent" software ideas more than they normally would in the
"hurts innovation" (Score:1)
You know what really hurts innovation? Awarding patents for the most ridiculously trivial things, such as computing the absolute value of an integer [stanford.edu].
You know what else really hurts innovation? Awarding patents for ideas which:
1) are not inventions;
2) are barely discoveries;
3) are obvious to those skilled in the art; and
4) have at least 10 years of prior art in the public domain.
For example, why was Microsoft awarded a patent for the concept known as a futex [wikipedia.org]?
... futexes have been part of the Linux kernel ... since ... December 2003 ...
In 2013 Microsoft patented futexes and the patent was granted in 2014.
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You didn't link to a patent nor did you represent what you linked to accurately. It's a bad start for you.
Computing an absolute value WITHOUT branching may be considered non-obvious and could have merit as a patent, not because "computing the absolute value of an integer" isn't a "trivial thing", but because the technique used might be novel and lead to an improvement in a system. That's how it works.
Of your 4 bullet points, items 3 and 4 are already explicitly disqualified, item 1 is meaningless since in
Patent attorneys don't make enough money (Score:2)
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Attorneys don't fight one another during prosecution so there's no such thing as a "losing attorney" in the awarding of patents.
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Easy fix. (Score:2)
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All patents have already been declared valid by the government. The burden is on the challenger to prove otherwise. Considering that basic fact, how can you justify a policy damaging to the defendant? Is that how you'd like the legal system to work when you're the defendant?
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i call bullshit (Score:2)
really.
the likes of microsoft and apple have never been convicted of lying.
cheating
and stealing.
really
Slow courts are the real problem (Score:2)
Trial processes need to be sped up in all types of courts.
USPTO is missing the point (Score:5, Informative)
USPTO says deferring to an ongoing court case is more efficient than setting up a parallel review internally.
The whole point of the IPR process was to provide a faster, more cost-effective alternative, thus allowing patent trolls to be dealt with quickly and cheaply, rather than needing to waste time going through lengthy, expensive trials and the appeals that inevitably follow.
Saying it's more efficient to let the court case proceed means that the USPTO is missing the entire point of why that process exists in the first place. It's actually more efficient for the USPTO to proceed, thus eliminating the need to waste the court's time in the first place, but they're only considering themselves.
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Sure, but the IPR process is paid for by the patent office. And the patent office is self-funded, so funds for the IPS process means that they need to skimp on other processes. So the IPR process, while it saves the government and the taxpayers a lot of money, costs the patent office. So it is in their best interest to close it down.
This is why it is ludicrous to make government services "self-funding", like the patent and post offices. Or should we make the armed forces self-funding? The police? Roa
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Just let the patent examiners do the IPR review in their free time.
A lot of them just happen to get jobs for the big companies who benefit from the reviews any way, so they might just happen to find the review socially important enough to volunteer their time ... problem solved.
Yes and No (Score:2)
Patents don't really work - scrap them all (Score:4, Insightful)
I should get excited when something in my field is patented and want to read it.. My name is on a couple of patents. I can't even read them, the patents make no sense to me at all. There was a big drug patent invalidated in Canada recently because the patent didn't actually contain the formula of the drug. So the quality of what gets patented is zero. Companies like BF Goodrich (tire maker) only patent what someone buying the product could reverse engineer. The actual manufacturing processes are kept secret. Large companies use overly broad patents to bully smaller companies, trolls patent the obvious and "tax" anyone who uses the obvious idea with a tax that is always a bit lower than litigating the patent and small inventors don't have the money to defend their patents. So in most cases there is zero benefit to the existing patent system and lots of harm.
The only place patents sort of work is for medical drugs where the cost of developing the drug is extremely high but I would argue that this case is an example of a broken system. The high costs of new drugs is the cost of the certification of the drug. Most healthcare is provided by public institutions and most initial drug development is by public universities. Maybe we could have the public sector commission the non public parts of the process and have the public healthcare pay for the drug certification (this would also help the conflict of interest where the certification is paid by the drug company not the user) . Then when a drug is certified to treat a specific ailment anyone could manufacture it.
Patent trolls seem almost harmless nowadays (Score:3)
IPR is transforming patents from a turkey shoot on the big companies with deep pockets to a tool for them to throw up barriers to entry, using revolving door type western corruption (ie. nothing so gauche as direct quid pro quo, just networking and everyone knowing what's required from them ... while lying to everyone, including themselves ... it's all very civilized).
Either way promoting innovation is irrelevant. Just abolish patents already.
Abolishing patents (Score:2)
I'd bet that the would-be patent abolishers on this thread also complain about China's blatant IP thievery.