Patent reform: Who's on first?

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A few points

"This year, however, Congress is about to consider a controversial proposal from Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, that would grant a patent to the first person to submit the paperwork--a standard that's common outside the United States."

You are missing a key point, outside the USA you have to keep the idea secret, so when you show up at the patent office with the idea, and its secret and not revealed before you must be the inventor*. No secret no patent. Yet this important point you are missing in this reform.
Without it, you will get patent trolls looking around for inventions to steal and it will be totally legal.
* Of course that doesn't work where the invention isn't normally revealed like algorithm patents or internal business processes etc.

"But a serious worry underlies the amusement: What if a company launches a patent attack against open-source programmers?"
Open source programmers don't have big money in the bank. So the only companies likely to try a patent attack against open source are Microsoft and its proxies. More likely the lawsuits would target companies with lots of cash in the bank to take, Microsoft, Google, oracle, Yahoo etc. The more new things you make, the easier to get you to walk into a landmine, a strong dis-incentive to invent.

"He indicated that he might consider two other legislative options. The first one would be to permit third parties to submit "prior art," the legal term for evidence that an alleged invention was already public, after the patent application has been published but before it has been granted."

If you can't determine prior art independantly of the challenging party, then you shouldn't be issuing the patent! This is one of the problem with software patents, you can't determine prior art. That amendment wouldn't fix it, anymore than showing prior art in the later suit fixes it. If you can't determine prior art independantly, then how can you determine whether the prior art is real or fake to kill a competitors patent!

How about you realise the following:

1. Patents are for real inventions, so the onus should be on the inventor to prove its new and novel, something the US PTO isn't doing.
2. Patents require the ability to determine prior art, so art unsuitable for things where it can't be determined, like closed source software algos.
3. That you are undermining your own capital advantage. If it costs $500 million to make a new 'foobar' the only large rich countries can do it. If it only costs $5000 to patent a 'foobar' then any country can do it, so quit the idea that more patents are somehow helping the USA compete!

Posted by: Nigel Johnstone   Posted on: 09/13/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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