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There needs to be more money spent on staff at the US Patent Office so they don't just rubber stamp patents and let the courts decide. 1) Something needs to be

by baldfat 13y ago

There needs to be more money spent on staff at the US Patent Office so they don't just rubber stamp patents and let the courts decide. 1) Something needs to be a true innovation to be a patent 2) The process should take a lot of man hours. I don't feel either of those things happen due to shortage of staffing and a wild everything is possibly patentable.

bzalasky 13y ago
I'm adamantly against software patents, however, when it comes to chemistry patents, I know it's not a rubber stamp process. It can take a couple years to get a patent, and lots of patents are rejected. A lot of the process involves the examiner stripping out claims that are invalid (the parties seeking the patents generally want them to be broader than they really should be).
- danielweber 13y ago
  I've seen software patents get both rejected and approved. It is by no means a rubber-stamp process.
  - delackner 13y ago
    As holder of a US patent on a purely software "invention" (aka, some game I wrote) I can categorically state that the only way it could have been granted was that it was rubber stamped because it is just a lot of talk about the algorithms I wrote, executed on a portable game system.
    - hdevalence 13y ago
      Out of curiosity, why did you get the patent?
      - delackner 13y ago
        CEO loved the idea of getting a patent because he thought it would make us look impressive and it would defend us in advance if someone else made a similar thing and tried to attack us with their own BS patent. Makes me sad when i consider the comparison with my grandfather's multiple rounds of back and forth with the PTO fighting to finally get a patent on a mechanical device. Comparitively yes, they rubber stamp software patents because they clearly dont understand the art. They kind of understand more traditional (aka real) inventions.
rayiner 13y ago
> 2) The process should take a lot of man hours. The intellectual property laws generally reject this "sweat of the brow" doctrine.[1] The idea is, that someone should be able to get a patent for something that results from a flash of insight rather than years of expensive R&D. I think rejection of this doctrine is a grave mistake as applied to patents. Essentially, it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of innovation in the 21st century. A new invention does not happen because someone has a clever idea one day while mulling over a problem during lunch. That may have been true in the early 20th century and earlier, but it's not true today. Today, invention is driven by research labs staffed by expensive PhDs using even more expensive capital equipment. The purpose of patents in the 21st century is to protect and be able to transact in the results of this capital-intensive R&D. E.g. Adonit has a new iPad stylus that's 1.9 mm versus the 6 mm typical for iPad styluses (https://adonit.net/jot/script https://adonit.net/jot/script). The capacitive touch matrix on the iPad normally cannot pick up on such a narrow point, so they use some active sensing technology that relies on measuring the electronic field emitted by the capacitive matrix and feeding that back to special software over Bluetooth. For this they have a patent. This was not a flash of insight. This was the result of measuring EM field strength with expensive equipment, buying lots of iPads to test product variability, doing lots of experiments and iterating the design. The purpose of a patent here is to keep companies from free-riding on all that R&D, not to reward anyone for a flash of insight. By rejecting sweat of the brow doctrine in the context of patents, patent law has become divorced from its underlying economic justification: the prevention of free-riding. The magnitude of the disincentive created by free-riding depends very much on the capital investment that went into the invention. [1] Sweat of the brow doctrine is more typically used in the context of copyright, but is applicable to a degree for patents as well. The doctrine has opposite effects in the two contexts. In copyright, it has been used to reject copyright-ability for things like phone books that might take work to compile, but aren't "original works." However in patents, it has been used to justify granting patents for "inventions" that weren't a lot of work to invent.
- nimble 13y ago
  > This was not a flash of insight. This was the result of measuring EM field strength with expensive equipment, buying lots of iPads to test product variability, doing lots of experiments and iterating the design. So what do you think is going to happen if someone else takes the same flash of insight ("use active sensing technology to achieve a smaller stylus"), puts in their own brow sweat to work out the details, and deploys a competing product? Adonit isn't going to sue for infringement, right? And if they do, they won't win. Right?
asabjorn 13y ago
I think a bigger problem is that a well-funded entity can keep resubmitting rejected patent applications for re-examination. I think there needs to be a limit on how many "appeals" you can get. From what I have heard, and this might be wrong since I am no expert on the matter, re-examinations creates a perverse incentive for patent-examiners to accept patents since their job-performance is rated on how many patents they process.

by baldfat 13y ago

bzalasky 13y ago

I'm adamantly against software patents, however, when it comes to chemistry patents, I know it's not a rubber stamp process. It can take a couple years to get a patent, and lots of patents are rejected. A lot of the process involves the examiner stripping out claims that are invalid (the parties seeking the patents generally want them to be broader than they really should be).

danielweber 13y ago
I've seen software patents get both rejected and approved. It is by no means a rubber-stamp process.
- delackner 13y ago
  As holder of a US patent on a purely software "invention" (aka, some game I wrote) I can categorically state that the only way it could have been granted was that it was rubber stamped because it is just a lot of talk about the algorithms I wrote, executed on a portable game system.
  - hdevalence 13y ago
    Out of curiosity, why did you get the patent?
    - delackner 13y ago
      CEO loved the idea of getting a patent because he thought it would make us look impressive and it would defend us in advance if someone else made a similar thing and tried to attack us with their own BS patent. Makes me sad when i consider the comparison with my grandfather's multiple rounds of back and forth with the PTO fighting to finally get a patent on a mechanical device. Comparitively yes, they rubber stamp software patents because they clearly dont understand the art. They kind of understand more traditional (aka real) inventions.

rayiner 13y ago

> 2) The process should take a lot of man hours. The intellectual property laws generally reject this "sweat of the brow" doctrine.[1] The idea is, that someone should be able to get a patent for something that results from a flash of insight rather than years of expensive R&D. I think rejection of this doctrine is a grave mistake as applied to patents. Essentially, it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of innovation in the 21st century. A new invention does not happen because someone has a clever idea one day while mulling over a problem during lunch. That may have been true in the early 20th century and earlier, but it's not true today. Today, invention is driven by research labs staffed by expensive PhDs using even more expensive capital equipment. The purpose of patents in the 21st century is to protect and be able to transact in the results of this capital-intensive R&D. E.g. Adonit has a new iPad stylus that's 1.9 mm versus the 6 mm typical for iPad styluses (https://adonit.net/jot/script https://adonit.net/jot/script). The capacitive touch matrix on the iPad normally cannot pick up on such a narrow point, so they use some active sensing technology that relies on measuring the electronic field emitted by the capacitive matrix and feeding that back to special software over Bluetooth. For this they have a patent. This was not a flash of insight. This was the result of measuring EM field strength with expensive equipment, buying lots of iPads to test product variability, doing lots of experiments and iterating the design. The purpose of a patent here is to keep companies from free-riding on all that R&D, not to reward anyone for a flash of insight. By rejecting sweat of the brow doctrine in the context of patents, patent law has become divorced from its underlying economic justification: the prevention of free-riding. The magnitude of the disincentive created by free-riding depends very much on the capital investment that went into the invention. [1] Sweat of the brow doctrine is more typically used in the context of copyright, but is applicable to a degree for patents as well. The doctrine has opposite effects in the two contexts. In copyright, it has been used to reject copyright-ability for things like phone books that might take work to compile, but aren't "original works." However in patents, it has been used to justify granting patents for "inventions" that weren't a lot of work to invent.

nimble 13y ago
> This was not a flash of insight. This was the result of measuring EM field strength with expensive equipment, buying lots of iPads to test product variability, doing lots of experiments and iterating the design. So what do you think is going to happen if someone else takes the same flash of insight ("use active sensing technology to achieve a smaller stylus"), puts in their own brow sweat to work out the details, and deploys a competing product? Adonit isn't going to sue for infringement, right? And if they do, they won't win. Right?

asabjorn 13y ago

I think a bigger problem is that a well-funded entity can keep resubmitting rejected patent applications for re-examination. I think there needs to be a limit on how many "appeals" you can get. From what I have heard, and this might be wrong since I am no expert on the matter, re-examinations creates a perverse incentive for patent-examiners to accept patents since their job-performance is rated on how many patents they process.