Patent troll claims ownership of interactive Web—and might win
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Re: Patent troll claims ownership of interactive Web—and might win
#2What would it take, specifically, to bring about meaningful patent reform? I hear about the need for it almost daily, but I'm not sure how this sort of highly convoluted problem can be fixed.
Are there any existing bills or proposals that have put forward a viable solution to this issue?
Re: Patent troll claims ownership of interactive Web—and might win
#3What would it take, specifically, to bring about meaningful patent reform? I hear about the need for it almost daily, but I'm not sure how this sort of highly convoluted problem can be fixed. Are there any existing bills or proposals that have put forward a viable solution to this issue?
Would it make sense to only give patents to companies that are actively developing something and marketing a product?
On that note, although this wouldn't work for ebooks, how about restrictive copyright for readers is only present while the book is still being published and sold?
Re: Patent troll claims ownership of interactive Web—and might win
#4What would it take, specifically, to bring about meaningful patent reform? I hear about the need for it almost daily, but I'm not sure how this sort of highly convoluted problem can be fixed. Are there any existing bills or proposals that have put forward a viable solution to this issue?
I think we're watching it now, actually. Big companies get the short end of the stick on crappy patents. It won't be long before they're lobbying to get it fixed.
If a major company like Apple, Google, Microsoft or IBM sues a tiny company for violating an "obvious" patent, it gets all over the tech media and the big companies reputation suffers.
And there's not much money in suing small companies, so it's not worth it. And the other big companies have enough lawyers and safe guards to make sure they don't violate patents (or at least make sure nobody finds out), so there's no money there, either.
On the other hand, the big companies are major targets for patent trolls, as this case demonstrates.
Re: Patent troll claims ownership of interactive Web—and might win
#5Interesting to note, the law-firm representing Mr. Doyle pays new graduates a starting salary of $177,500. [1]
[1] www.mckoolsmith.com/careers-summer.html
Re: Patent troll claims ownership of interactive Web—and might win
#6What would it take, specifically, to bring about meaningful patent reform? I hear about the need for it almost daily, but I'm not sure how this sort of highly convoluted problem can be fixed. Are there any existing bills or proposals that have put forward a viable solution to this issue?
Would it make sense to only give patents to companies that are actively developing something and marketing a product? On that note, although this wouldn't work for ebooks, how about restrictive copyright for readers is only present while the book is still being published and sold?
To address your first point about patents, I really think that would be a bad idea. Making the patent code more complicated just rewards the people who spend lots of effort on mastering its arcade rules and not making something people want. In this case, a requirement that your product had to be in production would be an easy thing to get around if you had money and know-how (just make a small run of the product that meets the bare minimum requirements), but could really mess up companies that don't have the money to do that, or haven't lawyered up and don't realize they have to.
Re: Patent troll claims ownership of interactive Web—and might win
#7Interesting to note, the law-firm representing Mr. Doyle pays new graduates a starting salary of $177,500. [1] [1] www.mckoolsmith.com/careers-summer.html
That's pretty normal for a top tier law firm.
Re: Patent troll claims ownership of interactive Web—and might win
#8Isn't it companies like Microsoft and IBM that supported software patents in the first place? You live by the sword, you die by the sword.
That being said, I have a hard time believing that they patented the "interactive web". My legalese is poor, but from what I read, all you would need is prior art where you had a basic client-server application that displayed information from a server, and allowed interaction between the two, no?
Re: Patent troll claims ownership of interactive Web—and might win
#9Wouldn't it be easier for all these companies to pool together, pay these people off, and then come to some sort of agreement with the patent office and the judicial folks to stop giving trolls wings and venues? It seems that would be far simpler than to try to reform the patent system, which will probably happen as soon as pigs start flying.
Re: Patent troll claims ownership of interactive Web—and might win
#10Isn't it companies like Microsoft and IBM that supported software patents in the first place? You live by the sword, you die by the sword. That being said, I have a hard time believing that they patented the "interactive web". My legalese is poor, but from what I read, all you would need is prior art where you had a basic client-server application that displayed information from a server, and allowed interaction betw…
We're talking about the web the year Mosaic was released. Before 1993 there were no web browsers that ran in Windows. There were no web search engines yet. There was little more than static hypertext webpages for research labs. There may well not have been other client-server applications yet...