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Patents are about sharing information – don't shroud them in secrecy

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Re: Patents are about sharing information – don't shroud them in secrecy

#41

Post by anticensor »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #35
Railsify wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been a surge in stupid patents because Obama changed the rules to allow patents to be granted to the first person to file for patent, even if the device of process has been in use for 100 years.

Patents are only valid if they relate to new and inventive stuff. USA came in to line with the rest of the World which uses first-to-file (first to invent means the litigious will always challenge inventorship which is exceedingly difficult to determine as there isn't necessarily a paper-trail). USA patent seem, to me, to be worse than other places, and first to file works elsewhere suggesting that is not the problem…

First to file vs first to invent only matters if if there are two near-simultaneous independent patent applications on same subject by different parties.

Patents are not like registered marks where you can apply for the same thing over and over; only the original inventor or its employer can apply, otherwise lour patent would be invalidated due to prior art.

Re: Patents are about sharing information – don't shroud them in secrecy

#42

Post by excessive »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #34
excessive wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you go to court, the presumption is that the patent is valid. The judge is unlikely to be technical, and he must assume the experts at the patent office did their job. Since the patent office basically rubber stamps anything you send to them, it's a very uphill battle to start with. In my case, we submitted lots of prior art (some over 100 years old) to the court, and of course they shared this with the plaintif…

It sounds like you didn't have very good counsel if the court didn't consider clear prior disclosure as demonstrating invalidity. FWIW in the UK we have expert patent court judges; USA used to have that too, I gather. >I doubt it was non-obvious to one skilled in the art // You have to be careful here, "obvious" doesn't quite mean the same as in daily life. It's so easy to see a neat solution to a problem and go "tha…

The plaintiffs certainly had a larger legal team. We brought our patent attorney and a trial lawyer on our own dime, and we managed to get some time from the chief patent counsel for a very large company because he had a relationship with one of our investors.

The plaintiffs managed to get jurisdiction in their own city (across the country from ours), and the general belief was that the judge granted this because he wanted a change from the drug trials he normally dealt with. This made it very expensive for us, and they definitely had the home court advantage.

I could whine about a lot of other things. For instance the plaintiffs removed every juror candidate who had any college, leaving only locals who I don't think even understood trigonometry. The fact that you're not supposed to be able to patent math, but somehow math on a computer gets through the patent process, etc...

> ex post facto analysis

I'm not sure what definition of "obvious" survives then. I was out of college for less than 2 months, and I wrote the code in a single evening. The "infringing" algorithm was less than 10 lines.

Re: Patents are about sharing information – don't shroud them in secrecy

#43

Post by shadowgovt »

That's certainly the goal.

The implementation of the goal is a hot mess. Because punitive damage is a thing, anytime working for some other form is generally discouraged from even reading them, lest the owner can prove willful infringement.

Re: Patents are about sharing information – don't shroud them in secrecy

#44

Post by saagarjha »

bnjms wrote: post #38
buyingarmor wrote: post #30

People usually think of incentivizing R&D in general, but patents also help to prevent trade secrets. A trade secret can be kept secret indefinitely and can potentially be lost if the company loses interest or is shut down. Patents help encourage publishing advances in technology so that they eventually advance the public domain. If they weren't interested in that then they probably wouldn't make patents expire.

Can you give an example of something today’s scientists and engineers could not reverse engineer or make from scratch given a working implementation? Espionage and industry standard will get at most of it too. I don’t know trade secrets are the problem they used to be. I’ll give you moon rockets and the pyramids.

DRM software?

Re: Patents are about sharing information – don't shroud them in secrecy

#45

Post by cma »

jacques_chester wrote: post #29
levythe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's typically considered the best approach to cast a broad net, then narrow down until a patent is granted. That being said, in the US, patents are given on a first to invent basis, so if you are awarded a patent that is overly vague, it's pretty likely it won't hold up if challenged. I find myself questioning the value of a patent office that awards patents that are vague enough that they wouldn't hold up in a disp…

In my understanding the US is now on a first-to-file system.

Yes, but a publication or public disclosure that happened before has precedence over a filing.

Re: Patents are about sharing information – don't shroud them in secrecy

#46

Post by ImprovedSilence »

mschuetz wrote: post #5

I do research in computer science and in the last few years, lots of trivial and dumb patents in my field appeared out of nowhere. However, I can only assume that they really are trivial because they are written in a way to claim a lot without actually describing how any of it works. These patents have 0% information in them. What's more, they all read like a rewrite of papers that were published years ago (before th…

The patents are written with the most broad and generic claims as possible first. Then the claims are re stated like 3 or 4 times, that would seem identical, but each re statement of them adds like one or two words of detail or specifics each time down. (So maybe claim 2 won’t stand up in court, but claim 23, a derivative of 2, will, the idea that you sue for infringement of as much as possible) I’ve submitted a patent before, and hardly Understood my own patent by the time the lawyer was done with it. But after really paying attention, I guess all the technical details are there. I think larger companies that aren’t specifically patent trolls patent as much as possible just for their own defense too.

Re: Patents are about sharing information – don't shroud them in secrecy

#47

Post by everybodyknows »

excessive wrote: post #31
kurthr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the specification is not enabling and novel to one skilled in the art (much less obvious), then it is not valid. Under rexam or court proceedings they will be worth the paper they're printed on. That's an expensive way to determine things, but it sounds like that particular section of art at the patent office isn't doing much. On the other hand they only have to hide one novel idea and unique claim in the list to…

When you go to court, the presumption is that the patent is valid. The judge is unlikely to be technical, and he must assume the experts at the patent office did their job. Since the patent office basically rubber stamps anything you send to them, it's a very uphill battle to start with. In my case, we submitted lots of prior art (some over 100 years old) to the court, and of course they shared this with the plaintif…

> The patent office re-rubber stamped the new stack of paper, and the judge disregarded it during the trial.

Not sure I understand this -- are you saying the judge took the PO rubber-stamp as proof that though the prior art might be related, it was not disqualifying?

Re: Patents are about sharing information – don't shroud them in secrecy

#48

Post by marcthe12 »

edoo wrote: post #32
buyingarmor wrote: post #30

People usually think of incentivizing R&D in general, but patents also help to prevent trade secrets. A trade secret can be kept secret indefinitely and can potentially be lost if the company loses interest or is shut down. Patents help encourage publishing advances in technology so that they eventually advance the public domain. If they weren't interested in that then they probably wouldn't make patents expire.

Patents started out as 7 years and have been extended through lobbying efforts.

Yep I have no issue with patents but in certain cases even 10 years is to much. Software industry can move fast at times.

Re: Patents are about sharing information – don't shroud them in secrecy

#49

Post by excessive »

everybodyknows wrote: post #47
excessive wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you go to court, the presumption is that the patent is valid. The judge is unlikely to be technical, and he must assume the experts at the patent office did their job. Since the patent office basically rubber stamps anything you send to them, it's a very uphill battle to start with. In my case, we submitted lots of prior art (some over 100 years old) to the court, and of course they shared this with the plaintif…

> The patent office re-rubber stamped the new stack of paper, and the judge disregarded it during the trial. Not sure I understand this -- are you saying the judge took the PO rubber-stamp as proof that though the prior art might be related, it was not disqualifying?

Yes, exactly.

Re: Patents are about sharing information – don't shroud them in secrecy

#50

Post by OmarShehata »

amelius wrote: post #16

> In exchange for the right to sue others to stop using the invention, patent applicants have to disclose enough information about their invention to allow others in the field to make and use it. This seems unnecessarily stiffling. Can't we change this so that anyone can still use the patented tech, but at a reasonable price?

This is already how it works. A patent holder can license the right to use the invention for a fee. You can't have the right to charge for something without the legal right to prevent someone from using that thing without paying you.
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