131–140 of 155 posts
TLDR: Give people financial incentive to destroy patents, and they will be ALL over it.
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Re (2): In 1924, legendary federal judge Learned Hand [0] remarked that "the antlike persistency [sic] of [patent] solicitors has overcome, and I suppose will continue to overcome, the patience of examiners, and there is apparently always but one outcome." [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_Hand [1] Lyon v. Boh, 1 F.2d 48, 50 (S.D.N.Y.1924), copy available at http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=96965975…
Agreed. It is an unfair match. It is, statistically, almost a tautology: The set of examiners is necessarily limited by government funding constraints, but the number of patent attorneys and agents they contend with on a daily basis is only limited by the market, which is huge . The examiners will eventually be overwhelmed. I think this is one reason that most examiners (at least IME) have their default mindset to "R…
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I'm aware the USPTO asked you to set up ask patents. The USPTO has a number of pilot programs, and i'm involved in some. My only question is whether AskPatents was how it got to the USPTO. I don't see why it's reasonable to assume that they saw it on the site considering most examiners still don't do that sort of thing. Most of them search the USPTO approved databases, internally, and go about their way. This is in f…
No offense taken, and thanks for the overall support! As to: > "Do you have any evidence that your site is the reason the USPTO found this?" Well, the office has told us directly that examiners are reviewing the site. So, when they then reject an application, based primarily on art posted on the site, that was asked for and posted there just prior to the actual review, it makes me highly optimistic that it's not all…
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Would hurt the proverbial small inventor more than it would hurt others. Almost like a regressive tax.
Make the prior art fee scale up by number of patent applications submitted by that entity, then. First one's free. Then $100, then start growing at some small-ish exponent.
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Agreed. It is an unfair match. It is, statistically, almost a tautology: The set of examiners is necessarily limited by government funding constraints, but the number of patent attorneys and agents they contend with on a daily basis is only limited by the market, which is huge . The examiners will eventually be overwhelmed. I think this is one reason that most examiners (at least IME) have their default mindset to "R…
Increase the filing fee, to pay for better examiners directly? Patents that cost a few thousand dollars?
It's the renewal fees where you should be charging highly IMO; hyperbolic year-on-year increases would be an interesting option to model.
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Increase the filing fee, to pay for better examiners directly? Patents that cost a few thousand dollars?
This weighs against individuals too heavily. The UK for a time had a zero filing fee but they've gone back to a small fee again (to avoid getting so much chaff). It's the renewal fees where you should be charging highly IMO; hyperbolic year-on-year increases would be an interesting option to model.
There was an extremely depressing AMA on reddit a while ago where a patent examiner explained that what all of us consider "prior art" will be completely ignored by a patent examiner: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ww982/iama_patent_e... The bar for prior art is very high - it has to be published in a recognized medium. Most specifically, unless it has a date that the patent officer can verify and cite (and…
Wait. What about the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine?[0] And how can making a physical product not count -- surely any physical product sold in the United States has some kind of qualifying documentation associated with it which counts as publishing, even a manual? [0] http://archive.org/web/web.php
This is an awesome project. I've signed up and will see what I can do to help shoot down patents! There is one true and important point in the article that isn't supported by the example given: > This patent was, typically, obfuscated, and it used terms like “pixel density” for something that every other programmer in the world would call “resolution,” either accidentally (because Microsoft’s lawyers were not program…
> There is one true and important point in the article that isn't supported by the example given
I can't actually vouch for the "true and important" part. I must confess I put that in there to try to be nicer about what I was saying. :-) And it certainly seemed plausible enough that patents would be deliberately written in obfuscated language, I just can't say it's true or untrue from my own knowledge. I know pixels better than patents.
There's a great comment here that sheds some light on this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6085888
In particular, there are reasons for some of the language that seems obfuscated. Read the comment for details and a lot of insight into patents.
Another interesting comment, with a link to a patent examiner's AMA:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087057
(Of course there are interesting comments all up and down this thread!)
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Absolutely correct. I used to work in this industry, and one of the 1st questions asked when we were thinking about testing a drug to treat a disease was "Does someone else 'own' this drug or do we?" If someone else 'owned' the drug, then there was no point in pursuing it because the true "owner" would crush us if the drug ultimately proved useful in treating disease. Interestingly, the people writing the drug patent…
While I'm sure a case could be made that IP protection is necessary in biotech, isn't the example you gave actually evidence of the the opposite -- that patents stifle innovation and research?
I think it's the opposite. Since it costs so much $ to fund clinical trials and apply for regulatory approval, the lack of patents would stifle innovation because the pharma company that discovered the drug wouldn't be able to recoup their development costs if other companies were waiting in the wings, ready to sell a generic version of the same drug.
If development costs (especially regulatory approval costs) go down significantly, then I think you can argue that drug patents are an unnecessary evil. But if things stay as they are, then they are a necessary evil.