3 ms·

My opinion, is that society would be best served by a limited number of patents awarded each year with 'vastly ample time' for reviewers to consider the most in

My opinion, is that society would be best served by a limited number of patents awarded each year with 'vastly ample time' for reviewers to consider the most innovative things, find prior art, and for potentially impacted industries to also bring forth their own research on prior art and how innovative experts in that useful art find the patent. Plus they should be required to be written in a way that's useful to someone in the industry, rather than just lawyers.

bmitc 3y ago
An issue with that, it seems, is it wouldn't decrease the barrier to applying for a patent. It is my understanding that patents were invented to help smaller operations keep hold of their designs while allowing bigger operations to release their innovations rather than keeping them completely shrouded. Neither of these tenets are upheld anymore. Large companies use patents as a bully mechanism and also as a preventative/precedent mechanism to patent things long before, if ever, incorporating them into actual products. They just use patents to land grab. Patents today are highly skewed towards large, rich corporations who can afford the lawyers to create and then protect them. Meanwhile, smaller companies are screwed as it is very expensive to create and protect patents, and there's basically nothing a small company can do if a large corporation just up and copies a patented thing. In general, the patent system is completely broken at this point. It only benefits large and mega corporations, and foreign countries ignore it anyway. So it just is harming the overall ecosystem.
lucb1e 3y ago
How does limiting the number of grants increase the amount of time available for reviewers? If anything, a company would be incentivized to submit more applications in the hope that something sticks or at least drowns out the potentially more innovative competition, if only theirs look shinier at first glance and warrant more investigation.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bmitc 3y ago

An issue with that, it seems, is it wouldn't decrease the barrier to applying for a patent. It is my understanding that patents were invented to help smaller operations keep hold of their designs while allowing bigger operations to release their innovations rather than keeping them completely shrouded. Neither of these tenets are upheld anymore. Large companies use patents as a bully mechanism and also as a preventative/precedent mechanism to patent things long before, if ever, incorporating them into actual products. They just use patents to land grab. Patents today are highly skewed towards large, rich corporations who can afford the lawyers to create and then protect them. Meanwhile, smaller companies are screwed as it is very expensive to create and protect patents, and there's basically nothing a small company can do if a large corporation just up and copies a patented thing. In general, the patent system is completely broken at this point. It only benefits large and mega corporations, and foreign countries ignore it anyway. So it just is harming the overall ecosystem.

lucb1e 3y ago

How does limiting the number of grants increase the amount of time available for reviewers? If anything, a company would be incentivized to submit more applications in the hope that something sticks or at least drowns out the potentially more innovative competition, if only theirs look shinier at first glance and warrant more investigation.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]