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Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

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Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#121

Post by bluGill »

Blackthorn wrote: post #117
bluGill wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US you can be sued if you have a safety system that isn't on some models and someone gets injured. check with a laywer for details. Note that despite the above, don't buy a tool without those safety features. Better to spend more now and live than get your heirs a pile of money.

Not sure about the details of that, you can definitely buy Hammer/Felder table saw products in the USA (not that I want to, given their shitty attitude about using this feature as a market segmentation tactic). It's frustrating because I'd much rather have a proper European sliding table saw like the Robland CZ-300 II, but I don't want to give up the safety of a Sawstop system.

You can be sued, and will probably lose in court. however that is a risk you are allowed to take. They are allowed to see such products even though nobody should. Eventually regulations will take over, but for now it is just a economic optimization problem: will the monetary loss from killing/injuring someone and losing the law suite be more money that just putting the system on the say - I hope you feel icky just reading that.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#122

Post by LorenPechtel »

hutzlibu wrote: post #51
contravariant wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it is the obvious choice for medicine, but is it really the best option? Do we really have no other methods to fund medicine? Is it worth prioritising new patentable discoveries over other ones like making drugs cheaper or using them more effectively?

"Do we really have no other methods to fund medicine? " We have. Public funded (also via universities) and donation based research. But investment money is kind of big and if it would suddenly disappear, it will hurt current research as most (?) of it is dependant on it. But all that money would not necessarily disappear, when patents suddelny gets abolished, as there is also the option of increased secrecy. Meaning…

I think the current system probably funds it about as well as we could do. We get a bunch of startups attempting to push one drug through--succeed and it's a big payoff for it's investors, fail and they lose their investment. It's actually a bad bet for investors so it moves money from overly optimistic investors to the public.

We do have problems elsewhere in the system, though:

1) Drug ads. They should be pretty much nuked from orbit. Drugs are a medical decision, any promotion activities should be directed at doctors, not patients. I would make an exception for drugs that radically improve treatment for something patients might have considered something they just have to live with and not told their doctors about. (I have Viagra in mind here--and that's the only one that comes to mind.) In such a case I would only permit "there is a new treatment for X, talk to your doctor", no names of either the drug or the company.

2) Dodgy approval decisions. The recent Alzheimer's drug comes to mind.

3) Drug companies should not be able to find out what doctors prescribe. That creates a conflict of interest.

4) I question whether drug makers should even be allowed to do the phase III testing at all. That puts the researchers in a position where a no decision could be bad for them down the road.

On the flip side, I think we could benefit from having an appears-to-work type of approval. It would require extensive real-world use data (either from foreign use or like what we have seen with marijuana being widely used for chemotherapy nausea) but not the usual approval process. Obviously, no patents, but all companies selling it would be required to put some specified percent of sales into a pool used to fund more research. (And I wouldn't mind doing something like that for all drugs, albeit at a lower percentage. Every drug has say a 5% tax that goes into a FDA account for that drug. When there's enough money in the account to fund useful research about it the FDA does so. Common off-label uses would be prime candidates for such studies.)

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#123

Post by AlbertCory »

rudyfink wrote: post #62
lend000 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to have enforceable NDA's, keep things as trade secrets, and have a well built organization that simply continuously out-innovates AND out-executes the competition. I think patents are okay, but the maximum duration should be 5 years and there needs to be some proof of utilization of the patent to sue for damages. 20 year patents are ridiculous, and it seems like even in the 1800's that should have been cons…

I wouldn't be surprised if it takes 5 years (or more) to both get a patent and litigate it though any appeal. FWIW, in the current U.S. system, my understanding is the time it takes to get the patent comes out of the 20 years, though I think you can get some time back if it takes a very long time.

Correct. There IS a "patent term adjustment" if the PTO takes longer than it should.

The term you want is "prosecute" not "litigate."

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#124

Post by patrec »

Jalad wrote: post #101
patrec wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US4405829A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7478074B2/en

These links seem to be self defeating in nature. First, most of them are math related, except you get the computer to do the math. You can't (or shouldn't) be able to own or outlaw math. The last link is a Support Vector Machine as far as I can tell. Those were discovered in like 1964 according to Wikipedia. And then it was patented in 199x? That's absolutely wild

> First, most of them are math related,

Nope. At least not for any reasonably sane definition that would not apply to all software.

> Those were discovered in like 1964 according to Wikipedia. And then it was patented in 199x?

Maybe before whining about how Vapnik got an unfair patent for something someone else did in 1964, try learning something about SVMs and their history. It's quite insulting.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#125

Post by feoren »

patrec wrote: post #100
linuxhansl wrote: post #68

I have a challenge out to all my friends: "Show me one, just one, software patent that is not obvious to someone skilled the field, and I will stop my annoying diatribes about how bad software patents are." To this day I have yet to see to a useful software patent.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US4405829A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7478074B2/en

-- Method for node ranking in a linked database (PageRank)

An application of Bayes' Theorem (1763) and heavily related to Markov chains (1906). Build a Markov chain of simulated users clicking around the internet and build its weights with Bayes' Theorem and you basically have PageRank. It's clever, but no more clever than what thousands of software engineers invent every day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain

-- RSA

A pretty strong example, but largely based on Diffie-Hellman key exchange published a year before and known since 1969. At least this one was granted to its actual inventors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie–Hellman_key_exchange#Cr...

-- Support vector machine

"The original SVM algorithm was invented by Vladimir N. Vapnik and Alexey Ya. Chervonenkis in 1964. In 1992, Bernhard Boser, Isabelle Guyon and Vladimir Vapnik suggested a way to create nonlinear classifiers by applying the kernel trick to maximum-margin hyperplanes. The "soft margin" incarnation, as is commonly used in software packages, was proposed by Corinna Cortes and Vapnik in 1993 and published in 1995."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_vector_machine#History

Patent issued in 2004 to none of the above people. Fail. Patent has FORTY YEARS of prior art. Should never have been issued. I personally remember SVMs being considered "old school" AI in my college AI class in 2005.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#126

Post by dedev5 »

Let me play devils advocate here.

Although there are examples in this article of clearly scam patents being thrown out, please remember that there are likely examples of the opposite where clearly valid patents get thrown out without a court case, and more where it was unclear which way the patent office should go.

Overall, this alternative system to challenge patents weakens patents as it is indented to. Especially in software patents this is may be a good thing to many, but it is clear to see that this system has probably resulted in some valid patents not being filed as their inventors lack faith that a patent will prevent uncompensated ip theft, and it gets hidden instead.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#127

Post by pclmulqdq »

strbean wrote: post #119
pclmulqdq wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read the rules. They only apply to patents that currently have ongoing litigation and parties that are not involved in the litigation or likely to produce a product. They are a lot more narrow than you think.

> They only apply to patents that currently have ongoing litigation No they don't. The allow the USPTO to prevent initiation of proceedings by denying petitions for IPR/PGR. The proposed discretionary denial criteria do not require that there is other ongoing litigation. Contrived scenario: - My company makes spoons, but I'm toying with the idea of pivoting into making keyboards. - PatentTrollCo. is granted a patent…

That comment is wrong. The rules clearly state that there has to be ongoing litigation on the patent. Otherwise, basically nobody could IPR anything until they get sued.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#128

Post by anankaie »

Zigurd wrote: post #90
wongarsu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should probably depend on the product type. I get 20 year parents for medicine where research is expressive and time-to-market is long. But for most fields 5-10 years is plenty to make back your R&D investment and make a profit. And after your patent expires you still have the first-mover advantage

Pharma "research" categorization of expenses is maximized. In part to create sympathy for long patent terms, in part to obscure the role of government funded research underlying many pharma products, and in part to maximize tax benefits.

And in large part because FDA multi-stage trials are very expensive to get through and the risk of failure is high. I know it is popular to hate on the pharmacy companies right now - and deservedly so - but the research costs are not totally made up like you are implying.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#129

Post by loup-vaillant »

judge2020 wrote: post #17
myshpa wrote: post #6

Why Software Patents are Bad, Period. https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0027 Patents are out of control, and they’re hurting innovation https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/patents-are-out-of-control... Economic and Game Theory Against Intellectual Monopoly https://web.archive.org/web/20120121014753/https://levine.ss... PATENTS AND INNOVATION IN ECONOMIC HISTORY https://gwern.net/doc/economics/2016-moser.pdf Historical rec…

I'm starting to believe that all patents are at best ineffective, and at worse harmful in a globalized world, because it's not like airpods clones off aliexpress are actually being stopped at the port all too often.

Besides, airpods clones off aliexpress are supposed to be stopped by trademark law to begin with…

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#130

Post by patrec »

feoren wrote: post #125
patrec wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US4405829A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7478074B2/en

-- Method for node ranking in a linked database (PageRank) An application of Bayes' Theorem (1763) and heavily related to Markov chains (1906). Build a Markov chain of simulated users clicking around the internet and build its weights with Bayes' Theorem and you basically have PageRank. It's clever, but no more clever than what thousands of software engineers invent every day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_t…

Ugh, I pasted the wrong patent there for number 3, but Vapnik does in fact hold a couple of SVM related patents. Concerning the "FOURTY YEARS of prior art", well SVMs without the kernel trick are about as much prior art (and useful) as perceptrons compared to Deep Neural networks.
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