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Make fees means tested and scaled to income or wealth. Make fees scale according to a power law. There are numerous ways to level the playing field. We have onl

Make fees means tested and scaled to income or wealth. Make fees scale according to a power law. There are numerous ways to level the playing field. We have only to improve upon the current system and cannot let perfect be the enemy of good.

toss1 4y ago
What? What you are proposing has nothing to do with the perfect vs the good, it is a massive fantasy completely ignorant of how things actually work. Fees are merely a rounding error in the overall cost of patents, prosecuting (obtaining) them, pursuing cases against "violators" or defending them. The fees are in the $hundreds to small $thousands of dollars [0]. It typically costs $20,000 to $50,000 in patent lawyer fees to get a patent. A company I was personally involved with ran up over $350K in attny bills to obtain only a handful of patents. The fees were a rounding error. Fees for prosecuting a "violator" or defending a suit? Again, court fees are in the $100 range. Just the opening motions would be in the $20,000 range easily. And that does not even begin to account for the technical and executive time to understand and mount a defense. I've been directly involved, and one thing that is absolutely the opposite of scalable is the court system. It is massively time-consuming and money-consuming. Worse yet, it takes many years for any case to wind it's way through the system, often more than a decade. Yet, you are proposing dumping the entire issue on the courts and attorney system. How are you proposing to mitigate those costs? Seriously, not to be rude, but you should stop positing about stuff of which you are clearly massive ignorant (or actually explain how your proposed solution would actually work among all the factors). Sheesh [0] https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/fees-and-payment/uspto-fee-schedule https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/fees-and-paymen...
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Help me understand how cost scaling doesn't fix the problem of "players with money can simply massively burden the minor players, often to bankruptcy." If it becomes more costly for players with more money to burden minor players, then would they not burden minor players less?
  - toss1 4y ago
    For the small players, you aren't reducing the costs This includes but is not limited to 1) the costs of the courts. 2) the costs of the attorneys to defend, 3) the costs of the technology and executives to mount a proper defense, 4) the opportunity cost to the small defending company which COULD OTHERWISE be focusing it's resources on something productive like a new product or support (vs defending a bogus lawsuit). Again, the courts do not even begin to scale - the courts are the opposite of scalable. The new class of enabled patent trolls may lose one case, but they'll win others, possibly because they've bankrupted their victim, and can continue to plague the rest of society. Moreover, the courts are massively inconsistent. Again anti-scaleable. The inconsistencies get worked out through appeals to higher courts. This literally takes decades and hundreds-of-thousands to millions of dollars per case. They do not get worked out when it is state cases, which is why we have already have venue shopping (you know about the East Texas patent scam courts, right?). And your so-called "solution" to charge big players orders of magnitudes more cannot be gamed? Simple, make a small company, pay the small fee, buyout later. Or syndicate the fees, or get rounds of investors to handle the fees, since the return is virtually guaranteed. Ya, then you change the fee structure (years later) and the game begins again. The fees are only a rounding error in the costs, and if you think exponentially higher fees cannot be gamed, I'd like to talk to you about a fantastic deal on an oceanfront property in Kansas, because you are so friggin gullible. No, automatically granting patents with some weird scaled fee structure and letting the courts sort it out is one of the worst ideas ever. You would literally lay waste to entire sectors of innovation. It would be only a few years before people would soon be screaming for proper centralized regulation and a patent office capable of judging obviousness and prior art; congratulations, you've just re-invented what the founders invented nearly 250 years ago. Seriously, you are making a nice demonstration of how ignorance of how a real system works creates the illusion of finding wonderous solutions. For every highly complex system problem there are a huge variety of simple solutions, all of them wrong. Congrats, you just found one.
    - kelseyfrog 4y ago
      Is there a way for you to interact with me without being insulting? I'm trying to learn something and it's getting in the way. If the problem isn't about increasing costs for large players, then what about decreasing those for small players?

toss1 4y ago

What? What you are proposing has nothing to do with the perfect vs the good, it is a massive fantasy completely ignorant of how things actually work. Fees are merely a rounding error in the overall cost of patents, prosecuting (obtaining) them, pursuing cases against "violators" or defending them. The fees are in the $hundreds to small $thousands of dollars [0]. It typically costs $20,000 to $50,000 in patent lawyer fees to get a patent. A company I was personally involved with ran up over $350K in attny bills to obtain only a handful of patents. The fees were a rounding error. Fees for prosecuting a "violator" or defending a suit? Again, court fees are in the $100 range. Just the opening motions would be in the $20,000 range easily. And that does not even begin to account for the technical and executive time to understand and mount a defense. I've been directly involved, and one thing that is absolutely the opposite of scalable is the court system. It is massively time-consuming and money-consuming. Worse yet, it takes many years for any case to wind it's way through the system, often more than a decade. Yet, you are proposing dumping the entire issue on the courts and attorney system. How are you proposing to mitigate those costs? Seriously, not to be rude, but you should stop positing about stuff of which you are clearly massive ignorant (or actually explain how your proposed solution would actually work among all the factors). Sheesh [0] https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/fees-and-payment/uspto-fee-schedule https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/fees-and-paymen...

kelseyfrog 4y ago
Help me understand how cost scaling doesn't fix the problem of "players with money can simply massively burden the minor players, often to bankruptcy." If it becomes more costly for players with more money to burden minor players, then would they not burden minor players less?
- toss1 4y ago
  For the small players, you aren't reducing the costs This includes but is not limited to 1) the costs of the courts. 2) the costs of the attorneys to defend, 3) the costs of the technology and executives to mount a proper defense, 4) the opportunity cost to the small defending company which COULD OTHERWISE be focusing it's resources on something productive like a new product or support (vs defending a bogus lawsuit). Again, the courts do not even begin to scale - the courts are the opposite of scalable. The new class of enabled patent trolls may lose one case, but they'll win others, possibly because they've bankrupted their victim, and can continue to plague the rest of society. Moreover, the courts are massively inconsistent. Again anti-scaleable. The inconsistencies get worked out through appeals to higher courts. This literally takes decades and hundreds-of-thousands to millions of dollars per case. They do not get worked out when it is state cases, which is why we have already have venue shopping (you know about the East Texas patent scam courts, right?). And your so-called "solution" to charge big players orders of magnitudes more cannot be gamed? Simple, make a small company, pay the small fee, buyout later. Or syndicate the fees, or get rounds of investors to handle the fees, since the return is virtually guaranteed. Ya, then you change the fee structure (years later) and the game begins again. The fees are only a rounding error in the costs, and if you think exponentially higher fees cannot be gamed, I'd like to talk to you about a fantastic deal on an oceanfront property in Kansas, because you are so friggin gullible. No, automatically granting patents with some weird scaled fee structure and letting the courts sort it out is one of the worst ideas ever. You would literally lay waste to entire sectors of innovation. It would be only a few years before people would soon be screaming for proper centralized regulation and a patent office capable of judging obviousness and prior art; congratulations, you've just re-invented what the founders invented nearly 250 years ago. Seriously, you are making a nice demonstration of how ignorance of how a real system works creates the illusion of finding wonderous solutions. For every highly complex system problem there are a huge variety of simple solutions, all of them wrong. Congrats, you just found one.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Is there a way for you to interact with me without being insulting? I'm trying to learn something and it's getting in the way. If the problem isn't about increasing costs for large players, then what about decreasing those for small players?