Software Patent Abolition Petition
1–10 of 43 posts
Re: Software Patent Abolition Petition
#2That's not a very well done petition. Here are some of the problems.
(1) The America Invents act was not toothless. It contains provisions that put major hurt on patent trolls.
(2) It fails to actually state any realistic action items.
(3) It shows a misunderstanding of the role of the President in the patent system. What they are trying to accomplish requires Congressional action, not Presidential action.
Re: Software Patent Abolition Petition
#3That's not a very well done petition. Here are some of the problems. (1) The America Invents act was not toothless. It contains provisions that put major hurt on patent trolls. (2) It fails to actually state any realistic action items. (3) It shows a misunderstanding of the role of the President in the patent system. What they are trying to accomplish requires Congressional action, not Presidential action.
You're right and they should use that to improve the petition, but I still think it's important to show that lots of politically active folks care about this.
Sure, Obama can't just end software patents on his own. But at least it puts the opposition on the map, politically. Still, that's all the more reason to want to make a good case.
Re: Software Patent Abolition Petition
#4This bigger petition received an official response today:
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/direct-pate...
Re: Software Patent Abolition Petition
#5Petitions are not a good medium for this conversation. The response to the previous petition https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/direct-pate... pointed to the place where the actual discussion is happening, http://www.uspto.gov/aia_implementation/faq.jsp and http://www.uspto.gov/aia_implementation/comments.jsp
Re: Software Patent Abolition Petition
#6I frankly do not understand such black and white take on software patents. I don't think that all of them are evil. If one invests his time and money in developing a software algorithm - something non-trivial, say, an IFS compressor for binary data - why should such invention not be entitled to the same level of exclusive use protection that a mechanical design receives?
Re: Software Patent Abolition Petition
#7This bigger petition received an official response today: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/direct-pate...
The OP petition is an answer to this official response.
Re: Software Patent Abolition Petition
#8How about we start spending more than 5 minutes writing these petitions? Several points are missing and what's there doesn't even convey the key points clearly.
Re: Software Patent Abolition Petition
#9Petitions are not a good medium for this conversation. The response to the previous petition https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/direct-pate... pointed to the place where the actual discussion is happening, http://www.uspto.gov/aia_implementation/faq.jsp and http://www.uspto.gov/aia_implementation/comments.jsp
Agreed. A petition was worthwhile to elevate the attention given to the matter. It could be the response was a brush-off, but it might also be an invitation to the party.
It's pretty hard to overestimate the impact that executive branch policy has on the PTO. If there truly were a "quality-first" directive, with mandates to reject hard-to-understand and overbroad applications on teachability and novelty doctrines, that would have a huge impact on the patent landscape. But there's a ton of work to do in crafting a suggested directive that would accomplish that, and petitions aren't really the proper vehicle for such suggestions.
It might be more productive to interpret the press release as an invitation to work on that document, and the pointer to the AIA page as a forwarding address to take the initiative to the next level.
So: what ought be the content of "Executive Order N to the Patent and Trademark Office?"
Re: Software Patent Abolition Petition
#10We don't have "software patents," since software (as code) isn't patentable subject matter. Instead, we have "business method patents," which cover the systems and methods used by the software in conjunction with an operating environment that are putatively novel, non-obvious, unique, and enabled.
I'd imagine most people fall into two camps: (1) business methods shouldn't be patentable subject matter solely because they satisfy the machine-or-transformation test (as articulated in a trilogy of cases from the 1970s and most recent in Bilski); and (2) even if they should be, many of the business methods today fail on non-obviousness grounds.
Proscribing the issuance of 'software patents' isn't the problem. The problem is that in this digital age, we're relying on the machine-or-transformation test for business practices that exist in the virtual world. Because of the prevalence and impact of the internet in the global marketplace, there's now a fundamental difference between a ROM chip in a device containing instructions interpreted by a microprocessor and a software program compiled into machine readable code stored in RAM and processed by your computer's CPU.