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Victory Lap for Ask Patents

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#81

Post by tempestn »

praptak wrote: post #44

It would be cool if there was a way to penalize high number and high ratio of rejected patents from a single company. OTOH I don't see a way that allows genuine mistakes from small shops while being immune from big bad corps acting via shell companies.

That is an excellent idea. (To clarify, you're saying a company would need to have both a high number and a high ratio rejected to be penalized.)

More generally, it seems logical to have the size of the penalty increase at a quadratic or even exponential rate, based on the number of rejected patents within a certain trailing time period[1], and scaled by the rejected/submissions ratio. So every rejection would carry a penalty, but the more that were rejected (both in total and as a percentage), the larger the penalty would be, at an increasing rate.

It might also be an idea to do this with individual claims as well as, or even instead of, entire patents, to also deal with the overly broad claims problem.

[1] Or even for all time, but with a weighting factor based on recency. Wouldn't want to get overly complex though.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#82

Post by cruise02 »

spolsky wrote: post #40
yummyfajitas wrote: post #36

One thing I don't understand. Suppose a patent examiner does not ask on Ask Patents about a patent application, but I would nevertheless like to submit prior art. How do I do so?

Ask yourself, then answer your own question.

I think he means he wants to submit prior art directly to the patent examiner. Is there a way to be sure they'll see it?

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#83

Post by cruise02 »

neilk wrote: post #57

It would be great if others could attach bounties to certain patents. Of course then the patent examiner would have to pick "winners", answers that helped the most. Also, like Quora, does the StackExchange system allow one to register one's fields of expertise, to have questions suggested to you? (I'm not a big participant on SE but I know it may be hiding that feature from me, because it slowly reveals features base…

You can post bounties on Stack Exchange if you have enough reputation to cover it. Whoever posts the bounty (not necessarily the patent examiner) gets to pick who wins the bounty. If they don't, it can be automatically awarded to the highest-scoring answer during the bounty period (one week). More details: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-b...

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#84

Post by cruise02 »

maqr wrote: post #34

> The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two. Any idea to which two he might be referring?

He mentioned on a podcast that Amazon's 1-click is one of them.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/podcast-43-false-facts...

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#85

Post by maximilianburke »

I like the concept of Ask Patents but at the same time I wonder if it is possible that participation on Ask Patents could be leveraged by malicious litigants to seek treble damages.

For example, if the company I work for is being sued by a troll for infringement, could the troll see that employees have been participating on Ask Patents and therefore a reasonable assumption could be made that they're reading/reviewing/participating in discussions on patents, and therefore they knowingly are infringing? Would this something that either I or my employer should be worried about?

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#87

Post by ISL »

kolektiv wrote: post #9
ISL wrote: post #5

Trouble is, what killed the patent was prior disclosure from the researchers. The same thing has happened to friends of mine; an undergraduate's summer research presentation may have betrayed patentable inventions. An effect of the 1-year prior art rule is to force researchers to keep mum about what they're doing and to generate greater numbers of incremental patents. If you're interested in the free flow of informat…

I didn't think from reading it that the two groups at MS were the same - I assumed they were independent parts of the org, in which case it was fairly clear that this was an idea that various people have had without direct communication, and thus throws serious doubt on "non-obvious". I'm pretty sure that you could find plenty of other people who've had the idea. Companies like Akamai used to (probably still do) have…

Agreed with much of the above.

If you think something is really, truly patentable you'd keep it under wraps until you did so, as far as possible.

What this encourages though is, "If you think something is maybe patentable, you can't ever tell anyone about it until the invention is complete and fully functional." Nifty side projects occasionally become a big deal. For precision hardware, development time is often 5-10 years. For young researchers, it's critical to be able to talk about whatever it is that you do.

Completely agreed that bait-and-switch is unethical and wrong.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#88

Post by freyr »

geoka9 wrote: post #15
silvestrov wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing missing in the patent system is that the patent seeker should pay a "fee" of $1000 if it is patentlyobvious that prior art exists. That would enable "Amazon Mechanical Turk"-style killing of most patents with prior art.

And the person who found prior art should get a cut of that fee. Crowdsourcing at its best.

And then every patent would receive a deluge of obfuscated examples of prior art.

And the patent office would become even less effective. Perhaps a good thing, unless you believe some things actually should be patentable.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#89

Post by cleverjake »

DannyBee wrote: post #31
ianterrell wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents. What's stopping anyone from crowd sourcing a database of prior art for existing patents that would invalidate them if it came to it? A valid defense against patent infringement is to show that the patent shouldn't have been issued in the first place, right? So a database of Ready Made Legal Defense sounds good. Am I missing something?

It's been tried. Many times.

do go on.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#90

Post by darkarmani »

r00fus wrote: post #75
drpgq wrote: post #45

How about just increasing the costs for filing and maintaining a patent as a quick way of getting rid of some of the really weak ones? Say double the fees and see what happens.

Any flat increase would just make it less likely that the big guys will have competition in their "most patents filed" competition. Also, given we just switch from first-invented to first-filed, it is particularly onerous for those garage-based small inventors as a big corp can easily justify the cost. What might make more sense is to tax intellectual property. We tax physical property with much less value than a "su…

Perfect. Tax them heavier as they age. That way the people trying to create usable products are barely hurt, but by the last few years it costs a lot to hold on to. And you can release your patent to the public domain to release it. That's more likely to hit trolls than innovators.
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