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>whole patent system is mindbogglingly stupid. The patent system serves a purpose: In the case of drug patents, it enables drug research to exist at all. It's
by SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
>whole patent system is mindbogglingly stupid.
The patent system serves a purpose: In the case of drug patents, it enables drug research to exist at all.
It's crazy expensive to bring a new drug to market. Unless we're going to have the government fund all new drug research, we need patent protection for drug development. I'd be happy to mass-invalidate all patents that don't actually have serious R&D dollars behind their creation (the idea of the patent protecting the small inventor hasn't been true for many years), but that becomes a difficult threshold to quantify.
And as the EFF points out, this patent is not valid under current law. It doesn't satisfy the most basic criteria of "novelty." No matter how much we improve the PTO, there will still be stupid patents that leak through. What's broken is that, once issued, such a patent is hard to tear down (and there are probably thousands of such patents already issued).
We need a vastly simplified and streamlined way to tear down obviously bad patents like this. The PTO has reached out in the past to get help from experts in judging patents; extend that to reviewing existing patents, and give the PTO an explicit mission to seek-and-destroy such patents since they are measurably hurting the tech economy.
Cut out the bureaucratic obstacles to destroying patents that show no novelty. Make a patent challenge a process that takes no more than a month, and that reliably invalidates or limits the scope of broad-reaching patents, so that if you get a bogus letter demanding payment for some patent that never should have been issued, you could potentially drag out the negotiations long enough for the patent to be rendered null and void.
That would destroy the Patent Troll business model.
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- Kluny 11y agoHow about gamify it? Have a UI connected to an open-source repository of all current patents. Patents come up on a users dashboard formatted all prettily, with a form ready to go for listing your evidence. Users earn points for each patent they knock off. Combine efforts with the US Patent Office for maximum results - users do all the work, patent workers only have to approve/disapprove evidence.
- joopxiv 11y ago> ... this patent is not valid under current law. Yet it was approved. And with the current system, it will cost more to fight it than to give in to the extortion of the patent trolls. > In the case of drug patents, it enables drug research to exist at all. You should wonder if this is a good thing, if government should not be involved in this. At the moment, the decision what research to fund is economically driven. Diseases that aren't profitable are ignored.
- SomeCallMeTim 11y ago>You should wonder if this is a good thing, if government should not be involved in this. At the moment, the decision what research to fund is economically driven. Diseases that aren't profitable are ignored. I think both should happen. That we want both to happen. I fully support government subsidized programs, including research (and a safety net, and highway repair, and...). I'd love to see the government spend more on researching less profitable diseases. However, capitalism, for all its faults, is very efficient at some things. One of those things is the allocation of capital in research projects for those diseases that are profitable. With government allocation of money, we might get the same results, but odds are good that the money would be allocated less than optimally.