4 ms·
What if patent applications required a fee that was added to a bounty fund to reward people that could demonstrate prior art during the examination period? Engi
by hirundo 8y ago
What if patent applications required a fee that was added to a bounty fund to reward people that could demonstrate prior art during the examination period? Engineers like Swildens would then be more than interested bystanders, but have skin in the game and therefore incentive to do what he did just out of interest.
Bounty claims could also require an accompanying fee, to be refunded if the claim succeeds. The fees would discourage low quality patent applications and bounty claims.
- Skunkleton 8y agoI don't think this would work. If the fee was too high, then smaller companies and individuals would be locked out of patents. If the fee is too low, then it doesn't matter and large companies will continue business as usual.
- rfrey 8y agoMake the bounty $10000 * sqrt(# patents owned by applicant)
- Skunkleton 8y agoThat isn't a bad idea. That would disincentivize patenting everything under the sun too.
- Retric 8y agoTrolls will often have one patent per company all owned by a 2nd company. That's really hard to stop.
- franga2000 8y agoHow about making it travel up the tree? Find the "root" company, then count the patents of all of the companies directly or indirectly under them. (yes, I like graph theory. Is it that obvious?) Use that to increase the fee. It would not only make trolling harder, but make it easier for small companies/inventors to have one or two crucial patents, which is what the system was designed for. Of course, as with most things that make sense to me, it would never pass as law.
- true_religion 8y agoNot really. Perversions of the intent of law are easy to stop... just make it clear that the intent is what matters, and judges will force people to declare their corporate heirarchy or be held in contempt of court. No lawyer will play games when intent is more impprtant than the letter, sonce you cam be held in jail for contempt indefinitely based solely on the judges reputation.
- petre 8y agoAlso adjust that $10k with inflation yearly.
- DominikPeters 8y agoThe important part is the payout to people finding prior art, less so the disincentive to file patents that don't hold up. So this could be financed through insurance: patent filers could insure against bounty payments.