Comments on: Patent Office chief endorses legal reform

Head of Patent Office says reforms are needed--and larger budgets too. Segway inventor Dean Kamen isn't so sure.

[unknown unknown]

Watch them make a bigger mess of the patent system.

Before you know it patents will last the life of inventor plus 70 years.

[Andrew J Glina]

Likely

It is the way that copyright is going. Look at Disney's refusal to let Mickey Mouse become public. But this is the way that big companies like it.

[sanenazok]

Something's amiss

The NRC says that "patents should not be awarded when they're 'obvious'" - that can't be right as the law already has a sophisticated non-obviousness requirement. Maybe the summary is wrong?

[declan00]

obviousness...

You're right about the current law; if anything, the problem is that my summary of the summary was pretty brief. Here's the relevant section of their statement:

"Reinvigorate the nonobviousness standard. The requirement that to qualify for a patent an invention cannot be obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art should be assiduously observed. In an area such as business methods, where the common general knowledge of practitioners is not fully described in published literature likely to be consulted by patent examiners, another method of determining the state of knowledge needs to be employed. Given that patent applications are examined ex parte between the applicant and the examiner, it would be difficult to bring in other expert opinion at that stage. Nevertheless, the open review procedure I will describe next provides a means of obtaining expert participation if a patent is challenged."

[Remo_Williams]

Oh, she did, did she?

"I've begun to wonder whether the time for the patent is an adequate time," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

Or, more likely, she's begun to wonder because someone dumped some cash into her re-election fund. And it wasn't me.

Patents should be MUCH easier to knock down. In a democratic (ha) society, patents should get a very healthy dose of public discourse.

And copyrights should expire after creator's death plus 20 years, period. Retroactive. And Disney should be outlawed, in the same way Nazi symbols are outlawed in Germany.

-Remo

[hadaso]

"Award a patent to the first person to file a claim"???

"Award a patent to the first person to file a claim"???

You get it? What he says is simple: if you thought up something, and didn't think you want the benefit of a patent, of if you thought up a 100 things and cannot afford to get them all patented, then someone else might file for a patent, and be awarded a patent as the "first person to file a claim", and then you are not allowed to use whatever you thought up without paying the thief a licensing fee! (Either that or go through a lengthy procedure to prove prior art, that might be very difficult with a law that practically means that by not filing a claim you agree that others would (and you cannot afford this procedure anyway. Remember why you haven't filed a patent claim? You couldn't afford it!)

Can this guy really run the patent office? It seems that his view of the role of patents and the patent office is not as protection to inventors, but rather as servants to corporations...

[taphilo]

Patents Going the way of Copyrights

As a prior post mentioned, it will not be long before patents become as long as copyrights - and a prior poster noted that Sen. Feinstien Disney happens to be in the same state as Disney who lead the charge in copyright changes, and who holds patents on a lot of technology relating to amusement parks, movie techniques, optics, animatronics, would want to lock those down too.

Collarary:
Maybe they should change the tax laws to match depreciation writwdown to length of ownership so that if you own copyright / patent to something you MUST depcreciate it in equal amounts for each year over the life of the owenrship - then you would see the corporations sreaming about it being unfair! They want it both ways.

This is no different than the tax writeoffs of buildings. They should match that to copyright: 105 years to write off a building in the same equal per year method - and the total write down can NEVER exceed the value of the building ever - not matter if new owners. That would stop the writedown of a building of 500 million in 10 years by three owners of a building worth 300 million.

A CHEAP cost to get a patent is $800 - but you need to hire someone to do the prior art thing, husband it through the two to three year process, so in reality it could cost $10,000+ to get a patent. The average inventor would have a hard time coming up with that. Go for 5 or 6 and you have 50,000 sunk into something you may never even "own." Price barriers would allow big pockets to patent out over regular people easily.

The office is for EVERYONE, not just for corporations.

Tom

http://www.taphilo.com