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> By "the patent office" you mean taxpayers, right? Because we're the ones who foot the bill for any judgement against the government. I think they meant the p
by dataflow 3y ago
> By "the patent office" you mean taxpayers, right? Because we're the ones who foot the bill for any judgement against the government.
I think they meant the patent office should cover that from fees, not from taxpayers.
- jedberg 3y agoThen the fees would be so high only the biggest companies could afford to file patents.
- lolinder 3y agoThat doesn't really help because money is fungible. In a city near me the taxpayers recently rejected a tax increase to pay for a bond because they were grumpy that the government took out the bond without asking them first. The city was still on the hook for the bond, so they just siphoned money from the roads fund. The same thing would happen here—you can say that the judgment must come from fees, but then the patent office will have to either raise fees to crazy levels in order to cover the risk (thus making patents even more of a large company advantage) or they'll siphon money from things that were being covered by fees and use taxpayer dollars to cover those things.