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

One of the requirement for a US patent are ~not being obvious to someone versed in the art.

I am hugely biased. The existence/invention of the mouse at PARC and devices like touch pads and drawing pads pretty much means just about anything done since is pretty obvious to the point of being derivative.

*BUT* this kind of stuff has been going on for years. A specific example would be Atari patented using 4 bits to map an 8 position joystick for the 2600 VCS. Nintendo was smart enough to design their own system but Atari successfully sued Sega and IIRC won $10s of millions years after the fact.

Rick

Reply to
Rick
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(snip, someone wrote)

I suppose for some, like Thomas Edison, that might make sense.

It seems to me more usual that someone has a problem to solve and searches for solutions to the problem. That could be done looking through patents, or one might just reinvent something.

Now, the real problem it seems to me is that the PTO isn't so good at detecting "obvious" inventions. Also, some patents are unnecessarily broad, covering things that really haven't yet been invented. For both those reasons, one might find something already patented when it shouldn't be.

-- glen

Reply to
glen herrmannsfeldt

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I would guess that more often it is because one doesn't realize that something is covered by a patent. Either one doesn't know at all, or assumes that a known patent doesn't cover the specific case.

One well known infringement case was the Kodak instant camera.

Kodak, in trying to compete with Polaroid, designed a camera that, I would guess, they believed didn't infringe. It is pretty hard to believe that they didn't know about Polariod. (Actually, Kodak made the negative material used by Polaroid, so they pretty much definitely knew.) Polariod sued and, eventually, Kodak lost. (You still see Kodak instant cameras in thrift stores.)

To avoid generating a mirror image, Polaroid cameras reflect the light off a mirror before it hits the film. Kodak, instead, designed a system that exposes through the back with the print visible from the front. I presume they thought that difference would avoid the Polaroid patent.

On the other hand, cobalt-doped ferric oxide magnetic tape was specifically developed to avoid the patent on chromium dioxide. Tape that worked with recorders designed for CrO2 tape could be made, cheaper and maybe even better. As far as I know, that was never considered infringing.

-- glen

Reply to
glen herrmannsfeldt

I can tell you've never tried this. Many patents aren't for anything useful, or are for such a small niche that one might think it useful for a particular application when it isn't. This assumes that one can even sort out what a patent is trying to say, since many, if not most, are written to be deliberately obscure.

Just because it's patented doesn't mean it works, or even if it works that it's a good way to do it.

And in many, if not most, cases, there is such a huge number of patents that will turn up searching for a particular topic, or NOT turn up when they should, that searches are pretty useless to start with. IMHO, anyway.

As an engineer your job is often to invent, and if you work in a lab or an IP company your job is to create useful IP. In this case, there may be a strong incentive to NEVER do patent searches because you may be "contaminated" by what you read, i.e., unable to avoid using ideas that you got from reading patents.

You can spend your time trying to solve a problem in an efficient way with the state-of-the-art components available to you, or you can spend your time slogging through patents that may or may not be useful, or even work properly, that were developed with technology that is probably at least five years old (which is typical time for a patent to grant from application).

In my experience what you're proposing just doesn't make sense in most practical environments.

I don't know of very many cases like that. In my experience most infringement cases come from not knowing that the infringing patent existed, because they can be quite difficult and time consuming to identify. Just looking at the economics of how the game works patent searches generally don't make any sense to perform. There is more risk in doing patent searches, due to contamination, potential for subsequent "willful" infringement, and just plain wasting time trying to find something relevant.

Again, just IMHO. Patents are a very strange game, and I don't know that the "reforms" have made it any better.

Many patent portfolios are defensive, and not intended to be asserted against anyone.

Eric Jacobsen Anchor Hill Communications

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Reply to
Eric Jacobsen

(snip)

But it might be patented anyway.

One that I know about is the patent on analysis of mass spectroscopy for protein sequencing. They patented all possible algorithms for mass spectrometry sequence analysis, even ones not yet devised. It should be possible to overturn, but it will take money from someone who really wants to do it.

-- glen

Reply to
glen herrmannsfeldt

Hah.

Steve

Reply to
Steve Pope

I looked at this and I think it is a perfect example of how poor the patent examination process is. If your primary user interface is a touch screen and you want to lock the device, how else would you unlock the device than through a touch screen "gesture"? How bleeding obvious does the invention have to be to be unpatentable? I guess Google could claim they aren't using a touch screen gesture but rather they are presenting the user with a virtual control which the user operates... and patent that!

Rick

Reply to
rickman

I seem to remember hearing about companies where reading or searching patents wasn't allowed, I assume as a defence in case they accidently infringed on some patent

snip

-Lasse

Reply to
langwadt

(snip)

As I understand it, that doesn't work. Well, possibly it works against willful infringment, but consider Kodak claiming that it didn't know about the Polaroid patent while making negative material for Polaroid.

I was told some time ago that one might just as well read them. That it will be assumed that one has anyway.

-- glen

Reply to
glen herrmannsfeldt

Yup. Not only to prevent accusations of willful infringement, but to try to maintain some semblance of an intellectual "clean room" for research and avoid so-called "contamination".

Eric Jacobsen Anchor Hill Communications

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Reply to
Eric Jacobsen

What I was suggesting was full-on compulsory licensing: if Kodak want to do something like that, they are permitted to licence Polaroid's patent and Polaroid cannot unreasonably refuse them or charge a licence fee that a judge considers unreasonably high; this will make their camera a bit more expensive than Polaroid's, but allow them to compete in the market.

So patents become 'we invented this, so we can use it for free and get up to five bucks from every phone shipped by everyone else who uses it', rather than their present legally-enforced full monopoly position; if you want a monopoly, keep a trade secret.

Tom

Reply to
Thomas Womack

By typing a PIN on an on-screen keypad; by sweeping a finger around a pattern of blobs on-screen. Apple's patent is on the slide-to-unlock bar; if they've spent a lot of time looking at alternate unlock mechanisms and determined that slide-to-unlock is in some usability sense the best, they should get to ask anyone else with slide-to-unlock for, say, a dollar per device.

Otherwise how do you pay for usability research, where almost by definition the result will feel intuitively obvious and be used by every device?

Tom

Reply to
Thomas Womack

The fundamental purpose of a patent is to allow the fruits of research efforts to belong to those who performed and paid for the research. What you suggest reduces the value of that by requiring that a license be provided to whoever comes along and asks for one. That substantially reduces the value of the patent system as a whole by preventing the research from being used exclusively by those who produced it.

One of the beauties of the patent and copyright system is that patents and copyrights eventually expire, so that world ultimately has equal access to the fruits of humanity after the producers of the innovations have been given opportunity and protection to exclusively reap the benefits for a time. So in my view your proposed scheme reduces both the incentive to patent things, and, by creating more incentive to move things to trade secrets instead, potentially removes them from ultimately becoming accessible to everyone.

For those reasons I think it's a bad idea.

Eric Jacobsen Anchor Hill Communications

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Reply to
Eric Jacobsen

(snip, someone wrote)

(snip)

(I hope that is the one you meant.)

I might agree with him. I agree that the license cost should cover the research costs, that makes a lot of sense. But say, for example, that one wanted $1000 per camera or phone as license cost? (For something that the patent holder sells for $100.) I would call that unreasonable, but as far as I know there isn't anything in patent law to refute it.

Also, it seems to me that it isn't always easy to know that a new invention is sufficently different to avoid infringing. It seems that Kodak thought thier instant camera was sufficiently different, until they lost in court. Especially as the courts may not understand the technical details as well as they should.

My old favorite was the patent on the XOR operator for graphical displays, allowing one to erase by drawing over something. That one, as I understand it, was contested twice and upheld both times, where I would say that it was obvious to anyone who understands the XOR operator. I have no idea what the license charge was, or would have been.

It seems to me that the only thing that helps avoid this is the cross licensing deals. But that discourages small companies from competing in a big company world.

-- glen

Reply to
glen herrmannsfeldt

I've heard something similar from a friend who worked for a large company in Silicon Valley.

Along with that was the "Nobody is suing us right now, so this is a good time to clean out your old email."

--
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.
Reply to
Hal Murray

The key here is that "patents and copyrights /eventually/ expire". Patent lifetimes are absurdly long (21 years, IIRC) for the modern world. And copyrights are basically immortal since Disney buys new laws every time the copyright expiration on Mickey Mouse approaches, and the rest of the world has little real choice but to follow USA.

The purpose of a patent is /not/ to let the inventors get paid for their efforts and research. It is to give the inventor a chance to commercialise a product based on the invention, so that other (bigger and established) companies cannot take the invention, build their own product, and out-compete the inventor.

Think about that a little - especially in light of how modern patents are used.

With the patent, the inventor (let's pretend for a minute that it really is the inventor, or his company, who has the patent) has a time-limited monopoly on using the invention, as long as he reveals it to everyone else. He has two choices - he can build his own commercialisation of the product (the patent gives him time to do that), or he can license it to other companies who will build the product.

When patents were introduced, inventors might get two or three patents in a lifetime of work - they represented /real/ inventions. A time limit of half a lifetime was perfectly reasonable - it took a long time to turn the invention into a product, make a production company and facility, and sell the product.

But that just doesn't suit the world today.

For "physical" patents, a time limit of perhaps 2 years is more than enough - that gives the inventor a solid head-start over competitors. The inventor can, of course, sell licenses during that time. It may be worth having a short time (another 2 years) after that when he can still sell licenses, but anyone can get one ("reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms) - that would be purely for money-making.

For software patents, the appropriate time limits are so short that they should simply be banned outright (as they are in most countries).

The biggest patent reform needed, however, is in the review process before they are granted. Any patent application should be judged by a panel of experts in the field. They will be able to reject the patent if it is obvious, if it is too broad, if it is unclear (clarity is an essential part of a patent), or if it is not new. Patent office clerks can handle the bureaucracy - but they can't be expected to handle the technical challenges of assessing a patent application.

For the "panel of experts", I would suggest an organisation of paying members, perhaps split by broad fields (medicine, engineering, etc.). Professionals would have to pay yearly fees to be part of the organisation - that would limit it mostly to real professionals. In return, members would have access to searchable databases of patents, contact information for other members, etc. And any member can judge any patent application they want. Some people might worry that this means the applicant is revealing their idea to too wide an audience - but that's the aim of patents. When they submit their application, it becomes "patent pending". Their only risk is if they submit a poor application, intending to re-submit if it gets rejected. This public peer review would encourage applicants to do their job properly first time, and not waste everyone's time and money.

Reply to
David Brown

You pay for usability research by doing the research, making a good product, and selling more than others because reviewers say "this device is easier to use than the competitors". So what if the competitors copy your ideas in their new devices six months later? The extra sales you make during those first six months should pay for the research many times over unless you are running your business very badly.

Or are suggesting that it is somehow "fair" that you should get paid again and again for that usability research over the next 21 years?

Reply to
David Brown

My employer forbids engineers and software developers from reading patents as a matter of policy (unless specifically requested to by legal).

Reply to
Steven Hirsch

"[The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

What a travesty.

Where's the progress when the wheel is reinvented every other month?

One way out of this mess is for the EU to start ignoring US patents; that might make the US "snap out of it".

Reply to
Noob

Patents, yes. Copyright? Not so much anymore. Since Disney started purchasing legislators I think public-domain has become an antiquated concept.

Reply to
Steven Hirsch

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