Patent Reform Town Hall Meeting (Balt/Washington Area IEEE Consultants Network)

I agree. The reform isn't really changing anything. They could make a patent support fee significant sum of money; say, $100k per year. That would invalidate many worseless patents; leaving only the important and actually working ones. Set a requirement that the original inventor could waive the fee if he makes profit from his patent within 3 years, either by making product or by licensing; otherwise the patent goes into public domain.

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Thanks for putting it all so well, reflects my attitude better than my sole post on this did. I guess I would go even one step further, make the 5 years 0. At least for a while until the big ones stop being able to block progress by utilizing the patent system.

In other words, in a competition (such as life) it is OK to outrun the others, and it is not OK to hold them back even if you have the means.

Dimiter

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Alternatively, the fee could gradually increase with time. The first year would be a relatively cheap $10,000 - enough to avoid most time wasters, but cheap enough that a small company with a good idea can afford it. Jump to $100,000 for the next year, and increase geometrically each year after that. Patents that really are worthwhile, and generate substantial licensing fees, would be kept for longer. Most would be kept long enough to give the inventor a head-start over the competition, then released to the public domain.

It may make sense for the increase factor to depend on the field - it should be high (such as 2) for patents in fast-moving fields such as electronics, but lower (maybe 1.25) in slower fields such as medicine.

Of course, for many actively used patents, this system exists already - it's just that the steadily increasing fees are paid to lawyers and other legal fees, rather than to patent offices.

r

You can make the above statement, but that doesn't make it true. Patents provide a means for an inventor to profit from the invention with protection from the government. You can talk about the problems about patents, but that doesn't make them 100% bad. The problems are with the implementation and not the concept.

y .

How is it a loss for the inventor? Yes, money flows from the licensees (the ones who feel the patent is worth paying for) and the inventor (the one who spent the time and effort to create the invention that others didn't or couldn't.

What would happen if there were no patents? Small companies would be limited to low cost manufacturing making virtually no profit while the large companies are able to reduce their cost of production and make much larger profits. The playing field will never be level, but patents help to even it out. Otherwise the small companies have only one choice, tiny niche applications that aren't worth the trouble of the big companies.

Rick

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This is not really correct because a trade secret does not qualify as "prior art". For it to be prior art it has to be published or visibly used in an existing application. If you protect an invention with as a trade secret by definition it is not "prior art".

Rick

I tend to agree with most of what you've written here. Patents are a minefield with all sorts of downsides that go with the upsides, and sometimes the upsides aren't so great unless conditions are exactly right.

In my experience most big companies have large patent portfolios because their competition does, too, and they need a defensive position. A defensive portfolio is required not only to keep one safe from the big competitors, but from the independent, submarine, or troll inventors/companies that are happy to come out of the woodwork and try to tap the deep pockets.

So when a big company sees itself moving strategically in a particular technology direction, there is incentive to try to think of, and potentially patent, anything that might turn out to be useful in that arena as far ahead of time as possible. This does mean that a lot of speculative patents get generated, sometimes for things that don't work, aren't the best way to do something, or just wind up being bad ideas. Sometimes there's benefit in quantitiy, and often there are enough genuinely useful patents that come out of the exercise to make it worthwhile.

The game is entirely different for small companies. Often it makes more sense to do what Al does and not bother with patents. Every case is different, and defensive portfolios aren't all that important if you're not big enough to show up on anybody's radar (e.g., don't have enough $$ to make it worthwhile for anybody to come after you).

Eric Jacobsen Anchor Hill Communications

Since we have been all talking at length about patents and I for one (and probably many others) need to update my map as to actual costs in today's world.

Can anyone share what is really costs to patent something?

1. Initial filings? Assume that you don't have in house lawyers.

1. Maintenance costs?

2. Litigation (Not necessarily the really big cases like Apple vs Samsung)?

Al Clark

rickman wrote in news:581b0c05-090c-4cae-b846-ca2aad5b9d82 @n38g2000yqm.googlegroups.com:

Patent filings are not free. There are up front costs and maintenance.

If you own a useless patent, it probably isn't worth the up front costs. If you have a really good patent, you probably can't afford to protect it.

We would use trade secrets. This is precisely how software has been protected historically since most of the IP is hidden in object files.

Small companies would be

Small companies can be more agile

The playing field will never be level, but

How?

For example, Not so long ago, I reviewed a patent on a PGA/Attenuator circuit held by Hewlett Packard. It was incredibly obvious and certainly exists in many earlier designs. I think I knew this circuit approach 25 years ago.

That said, I don't dare use it. They could sue me into bankruptcy even if I could prevail in the courts.

If you are a DSP specialist, read Microsoft's partioned convolution patent. They list prior art and then seem to claim that they are patenting the same prior art.

There is a great discussion about this patent by Angelo Farina if you are interested.

Otherwise the small companies have only

This may be true. Its a good reason to have much shorter life cycles for patents.

Al Clark

I have never worked on an invention where I thought the cost of getting a patent would be more than the cost of creating the invention. Sure, an inventor might be discouraged from applying because of the cost of the patent, but if the invention is significant enough to deserve protection the patent process is there to use. You are not forced to use patents. As you say, you can always use the "trade secret", but that does not stop someone from reverse engineering your design or independent invention. For the small business operator the lack of a patent can be fatal.

"Hidden" is not much protection. Among the biggest trade secrets are the software license keys and code which are regularly cracked. If the FPGA companies didn't give away their tools they would still be freely available. The same is true for software development tools. Trade secrets are one of the worst ways to protect an invention.

Yes, and they have to live and die by being faster than the foot stomp of big companies or even just the other small knock off companies. If they have a patent on an invention they have a level of protection from competition. Sure, this can be challenged, but without it they are the infringer when the other company gets the patent. If there are no patents they are just "out" when everyone else takes the invention.

If you have to live by inventing and giving it up every year or two that is a huge burden to bear. I wouldn't bother to create the invention if I didn't have any means to protect it.

You are talking about a bad patent. Yep, they exist. A contrary example is the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper. He persisted over a long period and won. An example of a good patent and its protection is Velcro. The inventor got a patent in 1955 after working on the invention for over ten years. It took much of the life of the patent for the invention to be made practical and then popularized. Some could argue that this was not much of an invention since it is really just a hook and eye fastener on a smaller level. Hook and eye fasteners have been around for a long, long time establishing a lot of prior art.

A decent patent system is not easy to create. It is easy, however, to criticize a patent system be pointing out flaws.

No, I don't have any interest in any one patent. There are lots of problems with patents, but that doesn't invalidate the concept. It just means we need to address the problems.

How does the size of the market for the invention relate to the life of a patent? I would love to have a patent on an invention that addresses a small market but for the next 21 years. I would retire today! In fact, that is my goal, to come up with something that will give me some continuing revenue that I can protect. Not many of my ideas have been patentable, or at least protectable by patent because there is more than one way to skin a cat.

Rick

(snip)

I was recently reading (and not related to this discussion) about a patent on a special movie camera lens. The patent application included a movie supposedly made with the lens, but later it was found not to be true. In court, the patent was overturned due to the deception. Strange business.

-- glen

Al answered you better than I could.

I agree with you that the implementation is the biggest problem with patents, rather than the concept.

Patents in some form /may/ be a good idea in some fields - though definitely not software - if they were implemented better. So no, not

100% bad - just very far from 100% good.

In my experience initial filing runs about $5k - $12k depending on the patent. Simple patents take less preparation time.

That's just for filing, though, and generally prosecution costs to see the patent through to granted status may incur another $5-$10k or more. The usual number I hear quoted for total costs to grant is $15k-$20k.

So the bar is fairly high. You need a pretty good reason to pursue a patent to make the expense worthwhile if you're a small business. Those reasons do exist, though, depending on the nature of the business, the overall strategy, and the long-term goals.

The USPTO fee schedule is here:

Maintenance is due at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years and the fee depends on whether or not you qualify as a "small entity". An individual or business with fewer than 500 employees qualify as small entities (generally).

Maintenance costs in foreign countries (e.g., Europe) can be much higher, around $1k - $2k / year.

That depends entirely on the case but can clearly be very expensive. I think just about everybody, including the big companies, want to avoid litigation whenever possible due to the expense. Among the big companies they often just wind up signing cross-licensing agreements.

FWIW, I am not an attorney or a patent agent, I just have some experience in the area. Others experiences may not match mine. Proceed with caution. ;)

Eric Jacobsen Anchor Hill Communications

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FWIW: Company I worked for said ~$50k per with overhead. Of course they were all prepared by in house patent attorneys. If you want to go to the trouble of filing it yourself and doing your own drawings, it can be done on the cheap. I know someone who did this for maybe $100 years ago and as has been pointed out, it wasn't worth the cost so even $100 was to much to spend.

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Here's one of the ways it works: We did contract research for clients. The first thing the clients do when you are successful is take a look at your patents. If you have a weak position they try to reduce the amount of money you are paid and royalties. If you have disclosed anything not patented there is a good chance they will patent it themselves.

Ditto. I see the CIPs as evil incarnate. There is no pressure to innovate as long as you can just keep refiling the same patent with a different cast of characters. The current laws are that you are 'paid to invent' so everything you do is property of the company you work for. The company I worked for used to give you a dollar but stopped the practice when it was pointed out it established a reward system where employees could take you to court since rewards should be based on value. Lockheed eventually won the 'superzip' but the nothing special for inventors stayed in place.

The system is set such that

1) You don't see squat for any invention, you are treated exactly like the co-stooges at your level. 2) The patents will eventually leave the real inventor off with CIPs filed in suits names.

Rick

snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org (Eric Jacobsen) wrote in news:4eaf1463.521263955 @www.eternal-september.org:

I think the VC argument is not very compelling. Less than 1 out of 2500 US businesses are funded by VCs. The average investment is in the millions of dollars.

Sure VCs want to see patents. They have deep enough pockets to go to war. They are also all about harvest in the 5-10 year period where the potential payback is huge for a few of their bets. I don't fault VCs. I just recognize that most companies (including companies with patentable ideas) are not actually funded by VCs.

Erik, lets say you have a good patent and some big company wants to challenge you. Do you have a few extra million dollars to sustain a fight? (If you do, give me a call) What if you don't want to be owned by the big company?

I bet that Samsung & Apple will end up spending a $100 million dollars before somebody gives up.

Apple makes some great products. Aren't we all glad Xerox didn't wipe them out when Apple commercialized most of the Parc Place ideas. I like my mouse.

Polaroid held a monopoly on their camera technology even though the original idea went back to the 1940s. I think this might have been due to the fact that if you have the basic patent rights completely tied up, there is absolutely no incentive for another entity to make further improvements on a technology they can't commercialize for 20 years. So Polaroid just kept making incremental improvements, that effectively monopolized the technology until a paradigm shift obsoleted the whole method (digital camera). (This is speculation on my part, someone can explain it if I am wrong)

Actually, I am not anti-patent. I just thing the game is completely rigged to favor the large companies at the expense of small innovative companies and individuals.

Real patent reform would make the filing process more transparent (like disclosures before some 20 something engineer grants the patent), had actual peer review, were written in English (or for a technical patent, engineering or science English as opposed to lawyer obfuscation), automatically expired in a reasonable market period like 5 years, and didn't take 3 years to grant.

Imagine if disclosure happened before a patent was granted. All someone might need to do is identify the same invention already exists as prior art. This would eliminate a huge number of the existing application and backlog. This would be especially true for software patents since many of these are "invisible" without close inspection.

There is a tremendous amount of prior art that exists that was never patented. A patent examiner might make an assumption that if they can't find prior art in the patent record, that somehow this means that an idea is new.

I don't fault the inventor. I am sure that many of us have reinvented things without intentionally stealing someone else's idea. Tukey & Cooley rediscovered the FFT in 1965, but Gauss invented it first in 1805. I don't think anyone thinks that Tukey & Cooley were stealing Gauss's invention. Fortunately, we didn't have software patents or the FFT and probably all its derivatives would have been held hostage for 20 years, or at least until the historians corrected the record.

Al Clark

Thank you Erik.

Al Clark

snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org (Eric Jacobsen) wrote in news:4eaf1259.520742163 @www.eternal-september.org:

Samsung)?

(snip)

Sometimes you don't even need to do that.

There is in Consumer Reports today an article on how to save money on prescription drugs by buying cheaper versions. One is to buy Prozac or generic Fluoxetine instead of Sarafem. When the patent on Prozac ran out, they renamed it Sarafem (for $243) instead of $4 for the generic.

-- glen

My point of bringing up the VCs was just that it's an example that there is strong evidence that patents can benefit small companies, and those with financial interests often prefer them for that reason.

I'd venture to say that most companies (certainly not all) are funded by some sort of investor entitity, and many non-VC entities (in my experience) will also want to know about patent status on key technologies. Investments into technologies that don't have patent protection will generally present more risk to the ROI than those that don't.

It's just something that's been very routine in my experience, and I think is a strong indicator that even big companies making investments want to see small companies have patent coverage on their key technologies. It reduces the risk that the advantage of the research being invested in doesn't just fly over to a competitor and ruin the ROI.

It's rare for a big company to challenge a small company's patent unless the small company is getting bright on the radar as potentially having a big impact in a market. If that's the case then there would likely be others willing to take the other side of the bet, i.e., you'd probably not be alone in defending the patent. You might have to give up a piece of it, but you may not be alone.

Not sure what you mean by being owned by the big company. Big companys often buy little companys to get their patent portfolio. Is that what you mean? For many that potential exit strategy is one of the big reasons to patent the technology in the first place, so it's often a success when that happens.

My understanding is that Apple actually licensed everything they got from Parq from Xerox. Xerox evidently didn't think it was all that important at that time.

And I'm just saying I've seen a lot of the other side of that, where small businesses have greatly benefited, often at the hands of big companies, by owning patents. I spent a number of years where a pretty good chunk of my time was spent just doing technical due diligence on startups for the capital investment arm of my household-name employer at the time.

It was more or less in conjunction with the standards work I was doing at the time (i.e., the big companies and VCs were making bets on who would be contributing or influencing the standards and the related markets). So I got to see it from the VC's point of view, the big company's point of view, especially regarding capital investment, and from a lot of the little companys participating in the standards arena.

It's the same sort of thing with M&A into big companies...there's almost always a patent portfolio involved or the deal won't make as much financial sense if the technology isn't somehow protected. M&A often involves small companies with key technologies getting absorbed by big companies. That's often the desired exit plan for the founders of the small company, so it's a win for them.

That being said, I've also spent a good chunk of my career at small companies that eschewed patents, and were, at the time, successful at it. That's not rare, either. Patents certainly aren't a requirement to have a successful technology business, it just depends on what you're doing or want to do or how you want to do it. There's certainly a good deal of expense and risk related to patents, and avoiding that when your business doesn't need it is often a good thing.

I think that's why publication at 18 months is the default now.

For a little while there was a website call Bounty Quest where people posted bounties (usually $5k - $10k) for prior art on specific patents. I often wish that were still around, but it went away a long time ago. Interestingly, it came about partly as a result of the controversy over Amazon's 1-click patent.

As a small business person I see the benefits and dangers of patents, but there can definitely be benefits depending on what one wishes to do. It's like most things, there are risks, and sometimes the ones that take the risks get the rewards, and sometimes the ones that take the risks get burned, and sometimes the unburned ones that didn't take the risk at all do okay, too.

Eric Jacobsen Anchor Hill Communications

On Oct 31, 11:54 pm, Al Clark wrote: ...snip...

...snip...

What in business in not slanted to the large company? They get the big money makers and the rest of us get the crumbs or what we can snatch off their plate. Even mid size companies have to think about what they are doing if they want to produce a BIG product regardless of the patent issues. What would be the point of ramping up to design and build millions a year of something that a much larger competitor can produce for $5 less?

Is the reason why there are still just two big FPGA companies patents? No entirely, it is as much an issue of the enormous cost and time required to build such an infrastructure.

Patents are the mainstay of large high tech companies, but what about high tech isn't slanted to the big companies? I just think "completely slanted" is an overstatement. There are plenty of individuals and small companies who have benefited greatly from patents.

Rick

Can I have some of what you've been smoking?

In the real world, for all intents and purposes, patents are NOT public, because

1) they are written by lawyers who are deliberately trying to communicate as little information as possible, 2) many employers "forbid engineers and software developers from reading patents as a matter of policy"

The system is borked.