3 ms·

About 300k patents are granted per year. There are not enough resources available to do it the right way.

abeppu 2y ago
Yeah so I have to imagine that most of those are bogus, right? That's like if 1 in a thousand people in the country had a new "invention" every year. Considering life expectancy, that's like if a single digit percentage of people would get a patent at some point in their lives? So suppose to apply, one needed to pay for market-rate hiring of a jury of PHOSITAs, and all applications became more expensive -- then you'd only apply for the things that are strategically important and very likely to be approved. Overall the number of applications should go down and the quality of granted patents should go up. I think the main equity issue here is that someone who figures out something genuinely inventive and valuable is less likely to be able to pay for the process. And perhaps, how do you vet that someone is a PHOSITA acting in good faith?
- freejazz 2y ago
  Raising the costs to patent an invention is only going to benefit huge, established companies. A good start would be to prevent congress from funneling PTO money out of the PTO. As it stands now, congress takes the money PTO makes from applications and various other fees and uses it however congress pleases.
  - abeppu 2y ago
    I think the other side of this is, how would one enter the pool of eligible PHOSITAs participating in establishing obviousness? If the fear is around blocking out individual inventors or small companies, that's reasonable -- but can you earn that money by being a reviewing participant in several other applications? Can we even give people and organization "application review credits" that are earned through reviewing?
    - freejazz 2y ago
      The PTO has qualified people reviewing patents. The issue is the number of patents they have to review and the time they have to do so. The former being numerous and the latter being non-existent. That's why bad patents get through. The reviewers just do not have the time to adequately delve into each application. Similarly, I have no idea on what basis you think that 300,000 applications would have to be bogus. We are talking about all possible inventions. I find a lot of the rhetoric on HN does not respect the problem-space patents exist in, i.e. coming up with comprehensible textual delineations in order to properly categorize literally everything that has not been invented yet. If you do not respect the difficulty of that problem, you are going to have trouble coming up with realistic solutions that actually achieve the goals of the patent system, which is something that the US constitution requires congress to implement.
      - xp84 2y ago
        I’m disappointed that, faced with those difficult conditions for devoting enough time to vet applications thoroughly, the PTO shrugs and grants them without vetting. I would rather it be severely backlogged until proper funding is available, like when you apply for Global Entry: “sorry, there aren’t any appointments available for the next 2 years.” Bad patents granted are dangerous and harmful, and costly to litigate. How is someone supposed to innovate if they don’t know that a patent won’t be granted tomorrow for a drop-down menu or, “accessing sequential bytes on magnetic media” or whatever. Personally, I don’t think the patent system at all serves the purposes stated in the Constitution and I strongly advocate for it to be amended, to limit it to very specific scopes (perhaps medical devices and drugs). The purposes stated imply that the publishing of a patent is a good alternative to keeping things a trade secret, and that while you couldn’t copy and sell a patented item you could use a patent to learn from and that it thus advances the state of the art. I think in reality though, all software patents are nonsense legalese and used in massive d*ck-waving contests between large companies. Nobody successful studied existing software patents as a way to advance their knowledge. Any approach that doesn’t acknowledge the absolute perversion of patent law to serve completely different ends than intended, especially in the software market, is not in my opinion a good faith argument.

Yeah so I have to imagine that most of those are bogus, right? That's like if 1 in a thousand people in the country had a new "invention" every year. Considering life expectancy, that's like if a single digit percentage of people would get a patent at some point in their lives? So suppose to apply, one needed to pay for market-rate hiring of a jury of PHOSITAs, and all applications became more expensive -- then you'd only apply for the things that are strategically important and very likely to be approved. Overall the number of applications should go down and the quality of granted patents should go up. I think the main equity issue here is that someone who figures out something genuinely inventive and valuable is less likely to be able to pay for the process. And perhaps, how do you vet that someone is a PHOSITA acting in good faith?

freejazz 2y ago
Raising the costs to patent an invention is only going to benefit huge, established companies. A good start would be to prevent congress from funneling PTO money out of the PTO. As it stands now, congress takes the money PTO makes from applications and various other fees and uses it however congress pleases.
- abeppu 2y ago
  I think the other side of this is, how would one enter the pool of eligible PHOSITAs participating in establishing obviousness? If the fear is around blocking out individual inventors or small companies, that's reasonable -- but can you earn that money by being a reviewing participant in several other applications? Can we even give people and organization "application review credits" that are earned through reviewing?
  - freejazz 2y ago
    The PTO has qualified people reviewing patents. The issue is the number of patents they have to review and the time they have to do so. The former being numerous and the latter being non-existent. That's why bad patents get through. The reviewers just do not have the time to adequately delve into each application. Similarly, I have no idea on what basis you think that 300,000 applications would have to be bogus. We are talking about all possible inventions. I find a lot of the rhetoric on HN does not respect the problem-space patents exist in, i.e. coming up with comprehensible textual delineations in order to properly categorize literally everything that has not been invented yet. If you do not respect the difficulty of that problem, you are going to have trouble coming up with realistic solutions that actually achieve the goals of the patent system, which is something that the US constitution requires congress to implement.
    - xp84 2y ago
      I’m disappointed that, faced with those difficult conditions for devoting enough time to vet applications thoroughly, the PTO shrugs and grants them without vetting. I would rather it be severely backlogged until proper funding is available, like when you apply for Global Entry: “sorry, there aren’t any appointments available for the next 2 years.” Bad patents granted are dangerous and harmful, and costly to litigate. How is someone supposed to innovate if they don’t know that a patent won’t be granted tomorrow for a drop-down menu or, “accessing sequential bytes on magnetic media” or whatever. Personally, I don’t think the patent system at all serves the purposes stated in the Constitution and I strongly advocate for it to be amended, to limit it to very specific scopes (perhaps medical devices and drugs). The purposes stated imply that the publishing of a patent is a good alternative to keeping things a trade secret, and that while you couldn’t copy and sell a patented item you could use a patent to learn from and that it thus advances the state of the art. I think in reality though, all software patents are nonsense legalese and used in massive d*ck-waving contests between large companies. Nobody successful studied existing software patents as a way to advance their knowledge. Any approach that doesn’t acknowledge the absolute perversion of patent law to serve completely different ends than intended, especially in the software market, is not in my opinion a good faith argument.