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Does anyone here actually read patent filings? I've been involved in writing a few and the result was useless drivel. Combined with the fact that there are pen
by Eridrus 10y ago
Does anyone here actually read patent filings?
I've been involved in writing a few and the result was useless drivel. Combined with the fact that there are penalties for willful infringement, I'm not sure what the benefit to reading patents in your field would be.
- mwfunk 10y agoThe patent system has evolved in a way that has practically inverted its original intents. You're exactly right, practitioners in a given field (ex: engineers in the tech industry) often avoid looking at patents, because no good can come of it. Most are too vague to be useful for licensing, but it opens one up to willful infringement claims later on.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoIsn't failure to perform a search with due diligence an equal liability in US patent cases?
- mwfunk 10y agoIANAL, but my understanding is no. Also, software patents tend to be so vague and generic that if you were to thoroughly search for anything that you might conceivably be infringing on, you'll spend a preposterous amount of time doing so, probably find not one single thing that directly applies to what you're doing, and will probably find a few thousand that don't apply but are generic enough that some lawyer might still haul you into court in east Texas, who can then claim willful infringement because of your search. I probably couldn't even write /bin/ls without stepping close to infringing on hundreds or thousands of vague, generic IP land mines planted long ago by unscrupulous lawyers who are just waiting with bated breath for someone to stumble across them so they can drag people to east Texas or (more likely) shake them down for settlement money before it goes to court.
- maxxxxx 10y agoPatent lawyers read them and check if your work doesn't infringe. In my company that's standard procedure.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoThey are a public storehouse of technologies. We have a right to read them. Some are well written and have useful information for reproducing them rather than just a lot of BS fluff. I just ran across the TMDS encoding patents (DVI & HDMI signaling) a few weeks ago. My thought was "wow, this is a pretty good patent" and conveniently just expired.