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While reading all the examples of arguments he wasn't going to make, I was really expecting something new to be added to the debate, instead, he recycles this a

by fnid2 17y ago

While reading all the examples of arguments he wasn't going to make, I was really expecting something new to be added to the debate, instead, he recycles this argument: it is not reasonable to expect that the current patent system, nor even one designed to improve or replace it, will ever be able to accurately determine what might be considered legitimately patentable from the overwhelming volume of innovations in software. Unfortunately, he's wrong -- again -- and has failed to convince me that discrimination against software engineers is the solution to the software patent problems. The simple solution would be to charge more for software patents and use the money to hire more people. Patents, if you aren't aware are under $1,000. That's ridiculously cheap compared to the attorneys, writers, and engineers who invent the code. As a comparison, attorney's in California charge about $20,000 to write a software patent. For $850 (the basic filing fee) how can anyone expect the office to afford to review such patents? Someone capable of understanding them would easily cost $100,000 a year outside the USPTO. If it takes 10 hours to read one of the patents, then each patent would cost the USPTO $500 to review and that's not counting all the bureaucrats involved. The answer is, the USPTO cannot afford to review software patents. Plain and simple. Instead, they just stamp "Approved" on them and let the litigators argue it out in the courts -- adding more millions to the cost, which of course go straight into the attorneys' pockets. If there is anything stifling innovation, it's the attorneys, not the patents. My suggestion: Raise the basic filing fee from $850 to $8,500 or $85,000 Or 0.01% of filer revenue for the previous year. Obviously we have a supply and demand problem. The price is simply too low. Solution: raise the price. Use the additional revenue to hire more software engineers who can better judge the validity of the claims.

sogrady 17y ago
We'll have to agree to disagree, I think. Proposed remedies to the existing patent system - from the economic to the temporal - fail to recognize the basic issue: the inability to scale the grant process. Your solution, for example, merely injects more capital. Besides massively significantly disadvantaging individual inventors (developers in this context) vs larger entities, itself a potentially fatal limitation, it is guaranteed to do little to solve that problem. Even an $85K filing fee would be insufficient to throttle the process such that it would become workable. Of the types of inventions likely to be patented under your revamped system, there will still be - even throttled by a higher patent fee - an extremely small number of individuals worldwide capable of accurately determining whether a given invention is legitimately innovative or merely derivative. The problem is not merely, as implied, supply and demand. It is a multi-dimensional problem that involves, yes, a deficit in talent that is not practically solvable, but also real issues in terms of the vetting process for individual patents themselves. Many "solutions" to the patent system have been proposed over the years; none have found widespread traction. As is to be expected, because the system is fundamentally misaligned with the rate and pace of innovation in this industry.
- fnid2 17y ago
  The patent system now accepts different filing fees for the size of the organization. That's why the percent revenue. And to say that raising the price will do nothing is not true. Raising the price always does something. We won't know what will happen until they are raised. It can be a progressive fee system to protect individual developers who don't have the money of the big corps.
  - sogrady 17y ago
    My argument was not that raising the price will do nothing. "Even throttled by a higher patent fee" implies that the elevated costs would have a negative impact on patent volume. My point is that merely lowering the volume of submitted patents is insufficient to effect the necessary change, because the elements that cause the system to scale poorly are not purely volume based. And that's without even getting into the reality that dramatically higher patent submission costs would heavily advantage larger players at the expense of small innovators, which is likely to make the situation worse, not better given that it is the former who cause most o the problems with software patents at the present time.

by fnid2 17y ago

sogrady 17y ago

We'll have to agree to disagree, I think. Proposed remedies to the existing patent system - from the economic to the temporal - fail to recognize the basic issue: the inability to scale the grant process. Your solution, for example, merely injects more capital. Besides massively significantly disadvantaging individual inventors (developers in this context) vs larger entities, itself a potentially fatal limitation, it is guaranteed to do little to solve that problem. Even an $85K filing fee would be insufficient to throttle the process such that it would become workable. Of the types of inventions likely to be patented under your revamped system, there will still be - even throttled by a higher patent fee - an extremely small number of individuals worldwide capable of accurately determining whether a given invention is legitimately innovative or merely derivative. The problem is not merely, as implied, supply and demand. It is a multi-dimensional problem that involves, yes, a deficit in talent that is not practically solvable, but also real issues in terms of the vetting process for individual patents themselves. Many "solutions" to the patent system have been proposed over the years; none have found widespread traction. As is to be expected, because the system is fundamentally misaligned with the rate and pace of innovation in this industry.

fnid2 17y ago
The patent system now accepts different filing fees for the size of the organization. That's why the percent revenue. And to say that raising the price will do nothing is not true. Raising the price always does something. We won't know what will happen until they are raised. It can be a progressive fee system to protect individual developers who don't have the money of the big corps.
- sogrady 17y ago
  My argument was not that raising the price will do nothing. "Even throttled by a higher patent fee" implies that the elevated costs would have a negative impact on patent volume. My point is that merely lowering the volume of submitted patents is insufficient to effect the necessary change, because the elements that cause the system to scale poorly are not purely volume based. And that's without even getting into the reality that dramatically higher patent submission costs would heavily advantage larger players at the expense of small innovators, which is likely to make the situation worse, not better given that it is the former who cause most o the problems with software patents at the present time.