Supreme Court Should Say No to Patents That Take Old Ideas Away from the Public

Post by cwkoss » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 11:08 PM UTC

fipple wrote: post #29

pitaj wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of evidence that copyright doesn't actually help most creators, and significantly holds back progress. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3198147 The same arguments generally apply to patents. There are monetization models like live shows, subscriptions, Patreon, advertising, sponsorships, etc that work very well for creators. Especially in the internet age, we shouldn't act like copyri…

I can say with confidence that >90% of new small-molecule pharmaceuticals would not be created in a patent-free world. Now, not every new small molecule drug is important, in fact probably the majority aren’t. But those that are, save a lot of lives.

Post by xg15 » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 11:12 PM UTC

sushisource wrote: post #28

pitaj wrote: post #19

I haven't seen anything good about patents in years. Maybe the government should just get rid of them, along with copyright. The idea of granting someone a monopoly to an idea is crazy to me.

Patents for software are fairly nonsense. Patents for drugs, for example, are absolutely crucial to incentivizing complex drug development that may take billions of dollars of research to create something that can be copied easily without patent protection. You can't get rid of those types of patents unless you also start either handing out massive research subsidies or perform research with government money.

Post by monochromatic » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 11:23 PM UTC

dumbfounder wrote: post #2

So this new version of patent trolling is to find old valuable patents that can be invalidated in some way, and patent them again, then sue everyone in the world that "infringes" because they thought the patent was long expired? Wow, that is a new level of scumbaggery.

Post by monochromatic » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 11:27 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #4

squozzer wrote: post #3

Wouldn't an invalid patent still be considered prior art?

Not by the USPTO's peculiar definition of what constitutes prior art.

Post by CobrastanJorji » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 11:35 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #7

opportune wrote: post #5

The entire patent system needs to be redesigned. Lawyers always seem terrified at the prospect of throwing away decades of case law but in this case, considering the nature of what patents represent and how they are used has changed so much from their original purpose, it’s probably necessary. Of course, big business incumbents don’t mind the system because they have corporate lawyer teams that understand how it work…

It may balance out over time, but big businesses spend an enormous amount of money defending themselves against patent suits and defensively filing patents. Patent trolls are the only types of businesses that purely see upside from patents.