3 ms·
> "First-to-invent / first-to-file makes no sense, as it seems that if two people invented the same thing at the same time, that should set a strong presumption
by NeoTar 3y ago
> "First-to-invent / first-to-file makes no sense, as it seems that if two people invented the same thing at the same time, that should set a strong presumption of "obvious." If two people file for the same patent, unless one is very clearly first in all respects, each should act as prior art for the other. "
I think this is too much of a simplification. Imagine the case of blue LEDs. It was known that these would have a huge market, and there were probably 100 different research groups around the world spending millions of dollars and thousands of hours trying to determine how to make them commercially successfully - even with some early weak prototype and research papers. That's clearly not 'obvious'.
In our history, one team (well, really an individual) managed to perfect the process first, but it could easily have been two or more teams randomly hitting the same solution at almost the same time.
I'm not sure what the 'right' thing to do in that circumstance would be - award it to the team who happened to try 'x' first, the team who filed first, or shared somehow.
But my point is that simultaneous does not necessarily imply obvious.
- nextaccountic 3y agoIn real life, the inventor of the blue led was basically scammed by his company. The company earned a lot of money and basically shifted the whole business to produce blue leds. Veritasium recently made a video about that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M I think this illustrate another point: patents should protect inventors, not companies. Companies shouldn't be able to amass a "portfolio" of patents to bully their competition either.
- blagie 3y agoI like the idea of making sure the inventor gets some portion of royalties. To be honest, it'd probably help my employers too. If that was the case, I'd have dozens of patents under my belt. As is, I see little upside to applying for patents for my employer. My general feeling is that the price of a patent application should grow in some non-linear way with the number of patents. Having a few, targeted, focused patents should be cheap. Google has around 100,000 patents (source: random web site; could be wrong; if it is, swap out for any other big company and big number). For reference: Patent office fees for various services are currently $100-$1000. Legal fees are probably $20k-$100k. The patent examiner has very little time and capacity to do a good job, and there is a resource mismatch. In abstract, an alternative would be a smooth rise in costs along the lines of: - First patent is $50 - Tenth patent is $500 At this point, moving from individual-scale to corporate-scale: - Hundredth patent is $50,000 (so about equal resources to both sides) - Thousandth patent is $200,000 (subsidizing the individual patents) - Ten thousandth patent on is $1M to file In practice, this hides a lot of complexity. I think the biggest problem I can't think for how to solve (suggestions welcome!) is the corporate shell game. Google sets up a thousand subsidiaries, each of which files 100 patents. Perhaps a simpler alternative: - Individual personally filing a patent: $50 - Individual with lawyer / LLC / S-Corp / small business: $5000 - Private C-corp: $50,000 - Public C-Corp: $100k
- NeoTar 3y agoWould you imagine that you could you still buy/sell patents? In which case - Google, rather than applying for patents itself, offers a patent purchase programme for employees. It will buy every patent filed for by it's employees as "Individual personally filing a patent" for 1000 USD.
- blagie 3y agoPlus a $10k transfer fee and a $100k patent conversion fee to change a personal patent to a C-corp patent. Transfer fees are not a bad idea in either case. If a company goes under, it often leaves a portfolio of patents which get auctioned off to the highest bidder. There should be some minimum bar there.