Comments on: Staking a claim in the patent gold mine

Who does the system protect--unsung inventors or opportunist litigants?

[Uncle Gil]

Patents are great

I found a huge company infringing on patents we have, in the software business, patents are the only IP with teeth. You will never win on "look and feel" alone and you could never afford to litigate on copyright.

Patents level the playing field, so I say keep innovating, inventing and patenting!

[quasarstrider]

Patents

"Patent protection is a fundamental right. It is why some people left Europe."

What a bunch of crock. Is this guy telling me that James Watt did not patent his steam engine in the UK during the XVIIIth century?

The fact is, USA industry largely rose through the XIXth century by blatant copying of European technology without paying patent royalties to the original European inventors (how about the incandescent lightbulb, invented by Europeans before Edison?). Much like China does right now. Selling that technology provided funds for further R&D development in the USA.

Invented by whom?

That's a surprise. Who DID invent the incandescent light, then? Edison's claim has gone unchallenged for the half-century that I've known about it...

Patents destroy American innovation

Patents aren't a way to provide incentive to innovate.

They are a way to keep people from innovating out of fear of infringing on the bogus patents of companies like this.

Meanwhile these lawsuit companies make loads of money. People like Paul Ryan are destroying the lead America used to have on American innovation, because innovation thrives by building on the ideas of others. If those ideas are locked up in legalities, the technology can only be innovated upon by the patent holder, instead of the entire world.

Exactly right

This is exactly correct. The problem with the patent system today is that patents are being issued for completely trivial things. It used to be that patents were for truely unique and innovative things. Now too many of them are for ideas that are blatantly obvious or that have been in use for many years already.

We DO need patents to protect innovation. But we do NOT need them to protect every idea imaginable. There is a happy medium, and this country enjoyed that medium for almost a couple of hundred years, but now corporations large and small have discovered the use of a patent as a weapon to extort revenue, not as a defense against others stealing ideas.

The patent system as it exists today makes it almost impossible to do any kind of independent creative software development. Whatever you work on, you can rest assured that if it becomes even a little bit popular, you will face a bevy of lawsuits at such an expense as to make it financially impractical to defend against them. We're already at the point now where only large corporations can afford the millions of dollars required to defend themselves against these allegations, and we as a country are paying a hefty price for it. Our technological edge is slipping away at a rapid pace, and is already completely gone in many areas.

[wrangel]

Patents kill innovation

I think this is correct, the concept of patent rights has degraded the technological growth of not only the USA, but of the entire world. I know many bright people who have some of the most interesting ideas on making some devices better, but with so many legal run-arounds they are discouraged from developing these ideas. In the past 10 years we have gone from a world of solid non-stop development, to a world of slow paced patent hungry, greedy merchants. I can almost bet, we would be walking on the moon by now if it were not for patent rights and laws, we are sp scared of being sued that we rather leave the ideas on paper hidden in our garage.

[quasarstrider]

Edison lost his case in Britain

To Joseph Swan, who managed to invent an incandescent lightbulb with a carbon filament years before:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan

Edison also copied work by William Sawyer. You can read all about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb

Several people independently and simultaneously invented incadescent lightbulbs, but Edison was *not* one of them.

Patent

I think I'll patent some obscure and largely used word like 'The Internet' and sue the pants off anyone using it. Just like the guy who patented the word 'stealth'.
Patents are a good way of stopping innovation. I'm sure Microsoft and IBM aggree.
Patents are a good way of stopping someone from innovating a thrown out idea into something useful.
Someone should patent the 'Submit' button so I can't send this reply.
Gawd I was happy when the EU rejected the patent proposal...

[ordaj]

We should just scrap patents. The person/company...

...that can market an idea better or add some differentiation wins.

[Michael Grogan]

Patents are good, but only when

used properly. Patents should be restricted to physical inventions, not ideas. Copyright software and patent hardware. If patents can be granted for software it shouldn't be able to carry copyright protection as well (which lasts much longer) and Windows, as well as many other programs, should be in the public domain after the seven year life (20 only applies to design patents) of a utility patent.

Ideas are not patentable

Ideas are not patentable. Ideas are similarly not copyrightable. Patents and copyrights protect different aspects of software. Generally speaking copyright protection is very thin, and only protects the code as written. In other words, it protects against plagarism and near-verbatim use of the code. Patents on the other hand protect the method or process that arises when the code is executed. For example, if you have a method of injection molding and cooling that is controlled in a specific way by software, you could get a patent for the incection molding/cooling method as implemented by software.

[EmporerEJ]

Acacia IS a blight

I don't care how you slice it...Acacia is life draining succubus.
They are nothing but opportunists and money run amuck.
What they are doing to the adult industry is horrendous, and will have far reaching consequences to the world.

Patents are a multi-edged sword

Patents are a multi-edged sword: they have positive and negative effects.

We need to see past the rhetoric spouted in the article about 'the American spirit' and judge patents on basis of their net addition or detraction from our society.

Patents are fine for brick-and-mortar things because:
1) people can understand such things and easily see if they if they are rubbish or genuine
2) most of the obvious and important physical inventions were already in the public domain when patents were first issued (e.g. the wheel, nuts, bolts, rivets, glueing, the use of string ...)
3) in the real world patents are therefore fairly specific.

In the software world now:
1) not all the really obvious inventions are free
2) software often uses so many more different 'moving parts' than in hte physical world that it has turned into a minefield of 'rights'
3) there seems to be no way (neither in Europe nor in the US) to prevent the issuance of totally daft patents, by which I mean patents that are blindingly obvious to anyone who can program and who is faced with a particular problem. (e.g. the 1-click patent, the patent on including pictures in email, the patent on using XML for word-processor documents, patents on the use of databases to track information from people who visit your website and buy things, a Microsoft patent on the concatenation of two logical operators).

And let's not fall into the trap of believing that just because someone can now charge people for some silly patent, 'value' is created. It's not! If the patent had never been issued everyone in society would have been able to use it, thus removing
a) the cost of the patent to everyone
b) the cost of enforcing the patent

As in macroeconomics: patents don't create anything: they just channel flows of money.

Now patent proponents have a strong case that monetising new ideas provides an incentive to keep producing them. Granted.

But ....
That's simply not how the patent system works. The vast majority of patents are held by very large companies, and not by small innovators. It would allow inventors to sell an idea, but not so much to exploit it (that would require acess to lots of other patents which they don't have). Just look at all the 'patent cross-licensing' deals that seal many lawsuits.

As a matter of fact, the same large companies who own most of the patents (e.g. IBM and Microsoft) now wish to see the patent system reformed to avoid current excesses.

I fear that the net effect of the (US) patent system is to wreck the tap water system in favour of selling 'bottled water'. If that is 'creating value' then I'll pass, thanks.

[rcsteiner]

The patent system is (at least partially) broken.

For traditional patents involving physical and/or mechanical devices, the patent system is not so obviously broken, and it might even be working well.

That context isn't my area of concern.

When it comes to "software" patents, however, it seems that not only is there not sufficient review in many cases by the patent examiner (resulting in bogus patents that fail the obviousness test from the start), but many of the patents granted are patents for extremely generalized concepts and processes, not for specific implementations.

That allows for the equivalent of something like "transporting a heavy body by using a wheel on an axle" or "moving an item in a store from a shelf to a shopping cart with a single hand movement"to be patented in a software context.

Many of the things being successfully patented these days are things which are OBVIOUS to anyone who has any training or experience in software design, but which were not obvious to the patent examiner who granted them. While the courts will sometimes correct the situation, the process of taking someone to court to have a nonsense patent overturned can be extremely expensive.

A more efficient method of reviewing patent applications is needed. Perhaps some sort of peer review requirement? And a more viable method for overturning (or at least formally challenging) bogus patents needs to be created.

It's getting to the point where even interface elements and file/communications formats are being flooded with patents, making it impossible to write a simple Hello World program in some cases without shelling out cash to the appropriate parties...

Non-litigation options

If you think a patent is bogus, there are other ways to have the claims invalidated or cancelled. One method is called ex parte reexamination. A relatively new method is called inter partes reexamination. In both of these, the patent office reanalyzes the patent in light of information that is brought to light by a third party. In ex parte reexam, the third party is basically anonymous. IN inter partes reexam, the proceeding has an adversarial flair, and the patentee and third party go head to head on the merits, with the examiner deciding the bout.

Additionally, significant new legislation is now before congress to introduce post-grant opposition proceedings, much like those in existence in Europe.

Error on brevity, perhaps?

"And aggressive patent reformers such as Bruce Perens and Lawrence Lessig routinely criticize patent companies but then defend copyrights, which give plaintiffs a much longer monopoly on their materials."

This line makes it sound like patents and copyrights provide the same level of protection, which is hopefully obviously false to anyone. What patents and copyrights protect is fundamentally different, and I don't mean that they protect different categories of items.

A copyright protects a single work, as written. A patent protects a process, and though people like to argue this, patents, as least in software and business practices, do protect ideas. Yes, the definition you will read in law texts will say that patents protect inventions, not ideas. That's a pretty fine line and many patents do seem to cross it, so the semantic difference many people always seem to bring up in defense of patents seems to be talking about theory, not practice.

Let's say I've written an application with some kind of unique algorithm for image processing. Let's say someone else, working completely independently from me and knowing nothing of my project, writes a very similar application with essentially the same algorithm, but completes it a month later.

If I try to sue based on copyrights, the judge should throw the case out, because the other developer didn't infringe my copyright in any way. His work is completely separate; he didn't even use my code as a basis, so I can't even argue his application is a derivative work. This is the level of protection that I think is entirely appropriate; he did the same amount of work I did.

On a lawsuit based on patent infringment, I can win. Why? Because if I have a patent on the image processing algorithm, I can force him to license it or prevent him from distributing his algorithm, because even though he developed it on his own, I developed the same algorithm first. If the algorithm was extraordinarily complex, this isn't so much of a problem, but patents are being granted for very general and obvious algorithms.

What if the image processing algorithm I developed was very simple, just new? (Not likely by now, I agree, but for the purposes of argument). Let's say I just encountered a unique problem, and this algorithm was a solution pretty obvious to virtually any software developer. There are a number of patents covering such algorithms. In this case, I will have totally blindsided the other guy; it's too simple for him to even think someone would patent it.

This is situation that software patents are putting software developers into, and it's because many of these patents cover algorithms that shouldn't even be considered "inventions" because they are too simple and obvious. That, to me, crosses the line between "invention" and "idea".

Either way, the point is that the author's statement makes it sound like calling for patent reform in software and supporting software copyrights is a position that does not make sense. I suspect that this is to due to an attempt to keep things brief, but it resulted in a misleading implication. It makes perfect sense to have problems with software patents and yet not be opposed to software copyrights, and I hope the author realizes this.

Patents do not stiffle anything

I am shocked that someone can think the patent system is a bad thing. We currently have a patent pending and, yes, it is a long and costly process but we believe it is a great investment opportunity. Where else can you, using only your imagination and hard work turn $7 or $8K into who knows what. And why shouldnt we be allowed to protect something nobody else has ever done and others will profit by using??

The only ones that suffer from the process are those with great ideas that dont have the money or the time and those that would steal the idea.

[quasarstrider]

Patents are a government granted monopoly

A government granted monopoly which now basically extends over all processes and ideas. Including business methods (e.g. Amazon one-click shopping).

Patents introduce artificial scarcity into a market. Patents are a negative and unnatural right in that you can prevent a third-party from independently developing the same thing and competing with you in the market when there is no physical reason why it must be this way. It is taxation without representation.

The original argument in the USA constitution was that limited patents were preferable to trade secrets to the society as a whole and this is why the constitution allows patents. For the case of software, it is highly dubious that patents serve any such disclosure role. In fact, none of the software patent proponents want it for that. They just want a state blessed monopoly.

People should stick to what they know

In taking the "inventor" patent route, I found it very costly (time, efforts, $$) and extremely difficult. It takes an incrediable amount to get patented and with the risk being <1% of patents make it to product, the reward has to be worth the nightmares you go through to get there! However, if you are in a large company that pays your salary guess it isn't so bad but the company needs to stay viable to keep your salary going. As far as patents granting monopolies please study the V-chip and anti-trust and find that is totally untrue.

What about patenting all the combinations of music notes

If i make a software that can produce all possible combinations of music notes and i copyright all of these.....

Does USPTO says anything to this?

[zachar_ypavlides]

Patent Expense

I agree absolutely that our Patent system is expensive and time prohibitive for the small inventor. My name is Zachary Pavlides and in 1980 through Yellow Phone Inc a company I owned I invented the very first Voice Mail technology for the Apple computers. I tried to patent it but then we made a revision and I had to pay for the revisions, money I did not have then. Since then the Patent office has granted a patent to someone else who applied about 5 years later. Given the popularity of the Voice Mail today my loss is in hundreds of million of dollars. I am doing ok today and I am introducing a new product with great potential as well.

[wrangel]

another example of greed

Here is where the problem begins, greed. Patent=Greed, nothing else can make this more clear. Ideas go down the drain as the patent pool grows larger and larger, one day you wont be able to take a step without owing someone copyright fees or without violating the patent they have on the proper step technique. Imagine that