Every week I am becoming more and more impressed with Stack Exchange.
Last week it was "Cross Validated" - their version of stack overflow but entirely for stats.
AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents
41–50 of 82 posts
Re: AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents
#42Fuck yeah. Applying crowdsourcing to prior art discovery is probably the most viable treatment for improving the USA's patentile dysfunction problem, due to: a.) low-cost b.) high potential for busting garbage patents c.) low potential for abuse/trolling/making-things-worse With respect to (c), the most obvious attack vector for Myhrvoldian corporo-fascists would be DOS/dilution-via-huge-numbers-of-paid-shills. But I…
I just hope a patent troll doesn't sue Stack Exchange for patent infringement in order to bring this service offline...
Re: AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents
#43I'm not an economist or a lawyer so wondering:
1) Should there be a penalty for people who file patents that obviously have a ton of prior art to incentivize people not to do this or to do more research?
2) Should there be a reward for people who discover prior art invalidating patent applications/ claims? The reward could come from a) people who are using the idea without holding the patent and thus don't want to get sued over the patent and are benefiting from the research, and b) the frivolous filers from 1).
Re: AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents
#44My favorite part is how the Patent Office director approached Stack Exchange about doing this. As someone who leans libertarian, it's easy to learn about the bad ways government restricts innovation, such as the current patent system, and assume that all government agents involved are either bumbling bureaucrats inadvertently screwing up the system or corrupted cronies deliberately screwing up the system. Of course,…
A large part of the problem isn't the bureaucrats bumbling up the system, it's the "government is always corrupt under all circumstances" crowd passing "accountability" laws requiring 17 redundant forms in triplicate being filled out and sent around to a dozen different independent oversight offices thereby using $100 of resources (in the form of man hours, paper and so on) to spend every $.01. The ones who make these rules do so out a mixture of some absurd fear that that $.01 might be spend incorrectly so we must at all costs prevent such a travesty (damn the costs) and a cynical attempt to prove how awful it must be by their own sabotage (a mentality of "I believe there can be no good here, so I will prove it by injecting as much bad as I can in the system")
Huge numbers of government employees would love to, and regularly do, suggest ways of improving efficiency and outcome, only to be told "it is illegal to be efficient". I've seen it happen over an over.
Re: AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents
#45This seems wonderful. It's exactly the sort of practical solution that could really make a big dent in the patent problem, and to see it actually come into being with the cooperation of the USPTO and Google Patent Search is very, very heartening. I hope folks here will take time to read this new site from time to time and raise any particularly problematic patent applications to their circles. There's the risk of rea…
Regarding the treble damages for having read a patent - since these are patent applications, not granted patents, perhaps one could argue that one didn't know it was actually granted?
Re: AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents
#46If you violate a patent unknowingly, you are liable for damages. If you violate a patent you know exists, you are liable for treble damages. The only rational thing for someone who actually makes stuff to do is to not read any patents, ever, as a matter of general policy. This might not be the socially responsible answer; we should all be fighting the patent madness in our industry. It is, however, the most logical c…
Respectfully, I have to say that your "rational strategy" is a terrible suggestion. This strategy only makes sense if your desired goal is to reduce treble damage risk. Moreover it completely ignores the risk of devoting a ton of resources to developing a product that is already protected by a patent.
> "Moreover it completely ignores the risk of devoting a ton of resources to developing a product that is already protected by a patent."
That's what the legal advisers (who recommend this strategy) are for. You bring them a concept or prototype, they do clearance/patentability checks and make a recommendation -- not only in whether to proceed, but potentially including advice on how to proceed in the most legally advantageous manner.
(Your specific invention may be patentable even when generalized to cover additional uses -- indeed much of the value of good patent counsel comes from their ability to get you the most-broad patent possible.)
Re: AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents
#47This is progress, but not nearly enough. Imho we shouldn't need to dig prior art like this to protect ourselves. I think granting a patent should be the EXCEPTION, not the norm and patent examinators should aim at finding any excuse not to grant the patent instead of rubber stamp it unless they find prior art.
Right after the patent examinator decides the claim is novel it should test whether it is overly broad. For this, simply testing if the claim covers more than one implementation should save a lot of grief. If the software algorithm is described in pseudocode: rejected, in C: approved. This would allow for clean-room reverse-engineering (the claim uses C, we used java), something held as legal for ages in the non software patent world.
And before somebody argues this would make pretty much all software patents worthless: you are correct. Software should not be protected by patents since it is already protected by copyright law.
Re: AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is definitely true that a lot of companies over-protective legal departments have persuaded their engineers never to read patents. I don't think that you should optimize for the case where you've actually lost a patent suit. First of all, that's a pretty rare case. But more importantly, it's cowardice. It's the moral equivalent, in my mind, of carefully crossing to the other side of the street when you see the nei…
We're not going to shut them down by invalidating them one at a time. You're not plugging a few leaks in a dike; you're trying to splash the ocean back with teacups.
How many teacups we talkin here?
In 2011 there were about 500K utility patent applications: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.htm Many of those are not software related.
There are about 1.3M programmers in the US alone: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/19720/where-c...
So 20 teacups each to have each patent looked over 10 times? Sounds doable to me.
Re: AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents
#49It's a trap!
I'm serious. This is a horrible idea. It's simply a way to get you to forge your own new set of chains.
Re: AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're not going to shut them down by invalidating them one at a time. You're not plugging a few leaks in a dike; you're trying to splash the ocean back with teacups.
How many teacups we talkin here? In 2011 there were about 500K utility patent applications: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.htm Many of those are not software related. There are about 1.3M programmers in the US alone: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/19720/where-c... So 20 teacups each to have each patent looked over 10 times? Sounds doable to me.
some patents take days to review - some have to be reviewed in context with other patents etc.
So maybe 200 teacups each but the direction is definitely right.