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It is definitely true that a lot of companies over-protective legal departments have persuaded their engineers never to read patents. I don't think that you sh
by spolsky 14y ago
It is definitely true that a lot of companies over-protective legal departments have persuaded their engineers never to read patents.
I don't think that you should optimize for the case where you've actually lost a patent suit. First of all, that's a pretty rare case. But more importantly, it's cowardice. It's the moral equivalent, in my mind, of carefully crossing to the other side of the street when you see the neighborhood bully approach. Yeah, it's "the most logical course of action," but the better course of action is to get your own gang together and shut them the f* down!
- njl 14y agoWe're not going to shut them down by invalidating them one at a time. You're not plugging a few leaks in a dike; you're trying to splash the ocean back with teacups.
- d2vid 14y agoHow many teacups we talkin here? In 2011 there were about 500K utility patent applications: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.htm http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.htm Many of those are not software related. There are about 1.3M programmers in the US alone: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/19720/where-can-i-find-statistics-on-worldwide-developers-and-software-companies/20300#20300 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/19720/where-c... So 20 teacups each to have each patent looked over 10 times? Sounds doable to me.
- fpp 14y agosome patents take days to review - some have to be reviewed in context with other patents etc. So maybe 200 teacups each but the direction is definitely right.
- d2vid 14y agoI just went on to AskPatents and tried my hand at it: http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/197/prior-art-for-style-and-layout-caching-of-web-content/239#239 http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/197/prior-art-for... I'm not doing anything close to as good a job as a patent examiner would do, but with about an hour of work I (hopefully) was able to start pointing to some prior art that could get an examiner quickly up to speed on what the state of the art is. I agree the amount of work involved to comprehensively invalidate a patent would be days - hopefully a group can do the same with shorter time contributions.
- fpgeek 14y agoUnless the rules are different for this process, every piece of prior art that you point to now that an examiner doesn't agree with / understand is a piece of prior art that can't be reused further down the line (e.g. in a trial).