4 ms·
No, it absolutely shouldn't work like that. When a patent is granted, you can sue over it, and challenging a patent at that stage means spending lots of time an
by kmeisthax 4y ago
No, it absolutely shouldn't work like that. When a patent is granted, you can sue over it, and challenging a patent at that stage means spending lots of time and money defending against an infringement lawsuit. The entire patent troll business model relies on people paying to not be sued.
The patent system was designed with the assumption that USPTO would do its job, and switching to an adversarial model for patentability would just make it easier to get obvious patents.
- whoopdedo 4y ago> spending lots of time and money defending against an infringement lawsuit It works unfavorably the other way as well. If you have your patent infringed you have to spend lots of time and money advancing the lawsuit. More, in fact, since the burden of proof is on you to claim infringement. No matter how you slice it the end result will be the biggest organizations with the beefiest legal teams will win all the spoils of patents while independent inventors can only survive by attaching themselves to those behemoths. That's the situation that open patents were designed to prevent. Ideally patents should exist to empower inventors to be able to live off their ingenuity; not for the sake of rent-seekers to bully creators into entering a protection racket.
- account42 4y agoYou make it sound like these concerns are even remotely symmetrical. GP is describing how (non-obvious) patents have a significant negative effect on everyone creating something potentially patented whereas your example is of patents not perfectly protecting everyone that chooses to participate in the system.