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You could pay them at their true value; high-end 6 figures would compensate the dulness and they would work for a healthy cause - the patent office could rise t

by vladd 15y ago

You could pay them at their true value; high-end 6 figures would compensate the dulness and they would work for a healthy cause - the patent office could rise the patent review fees to cover up the costs, which would also have the benefit of eliminating the trivial patent applications that can't pull the weight of the review fees. I doubt this will raise final consumer prices since for new inventions the price is more often than not what the market tolerates - I think companies will be forced to drop trivial applications as a response to the fee increase. The other change I would make would be to limit the patent validity to 10 - 15 years max, so after the rich people pay for the research, the invention becomes available to the masses close to the actual production cost.

hendzen 15y ago
This would also hamper the original purpose of patents - to protect small time inventors from large companies duplicating their inventions. Sure, maybe Apple could afford greatly increased patent fees, but if you raised them enough to pay for six-figure salaries of patent examiners, it would be prohibitively expensive for ordinary people to use the system.
Pwnguinz 15y ago
Just to add on to what hendzen said, they are already rather expensive as it is: $15,000 for 20 years (in Canada, where I'm from). Hardly affordable for the average small-time inventor. A friend of mine whom just patented a method of preventing over-the-shoulder spying for PIN input devices and could only afford to buy patent protection for 1 year (and for some odd reason, it cannot be increased with future payments--so whatever you commit to buying in the outset is how much protection you'll receive, period.) Increasing it further would simply make the price far too prohibitive. As for limiting the patent validity period, the current 20 years that most nations follow is not all that long depending on the circumstance. A better method (if it's even regulatable) is X years of protection OR until you recoup your original investment + X % of return (whichever occurs first). The problem is to then police the claims of cost to invent the patent, which is a whole can of worms on its own.

by vladd 15y ago

hendzen 15y ago

This would also hamper the original purpose of patents - to protect small time inventors from large companies duplicating their inventions. Sure, maybe Apple could afford greatly increased patent fees, but if you raised them enough to pay for six-figure salaries of patent examiners, it would be prohibitively expensive for ordinary people to use the system.

Pwnguinz 15y ago

Just to add on to what hendzen said, they are already rather expensive as it is: $15,000 for 20 years (in Canada, where I'm from). Hardly affordable for the average small-time inventor. A friend of mine whom just patented a method of preventing over-the-shoulder spying for PIN input devices and could only afford to buy patent protection for 1 year (and for some odd reason, it cannot be increased with future payments--so whatever you commit to buying in the outset is how much protection you'll receive, period.) Increasing it further would simply make the price far too prohibitive. As for limiting the patent validity period, the current 20 years that most nations follow is not all that long depending on the circumstance. A better method (if it's even regulatable) is X years of protection OR until you recoup your original investment + X % of return (whichever occurs first). The problem is to then police the claims of cost to invent the patent, which is a whole can of worms on its own.