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Authored by: stegu on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 06:26 AM EDT |
That's true in a general sense, and hurting the "little guys" could be
an undesirable side effect of a reform that ended up being too blunt. Patents
are already being used by large corporations to club small inventors over the
head. That needs to be fixed as well, but it is a separate problem.
Consider that implementing and "marketing" some of these laughable
patents would require one person doing one hour of coding and uploading a
paid-for app to an online repository. It's trivial stuff, and it has nothing to
do with real invention. Like B&N says, these "inventions" would be
laughed out of the room by real inventors in a real scientific context. There is
absolutely no substance to them, and they contain no originality whatsoever.
Yet, the trolls extort millions for an undeserved patent on some trivial part of
a large and complex system.
The question is: how do we tell the difference between bad patents and good
patents? That is a hard question that requires some very good thought put into
it, but we could definitely move the line very far from where we are before we
get anywhere near cutting off some of the good patents from issuing, and being
successfully litigated by small and large inventors alike.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Except. - Authored by: Wol on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 04:48 PM EDT
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Authored by: Steve Martin on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 09:08 AM EDT |
Simply requiring that a patent be "reduced to practice and
commercialized", by contrast, impacts anyone who has not
yet brought - may not
even be able to bring - their
legitimate patent to
actualisation.
How can a patent be "legitimate" if the
inventor has never
actually produced a working copy of the invention? Until the
invention exists in the real world and functions as described,
there is no way
to know if the invention actually works; if it
does not, then it is not
"useful" (a requirement under 35
USC § 101) and so should not be
patentable in the first
place.
--- "When I say something, I put my
name next to it." -- Isaac Jaffe, "Sports Night" [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 11:55 AM EDT |
Evil 1:
Require a working model and possibly shut out the inventor who
does not have sufficient funds to build one.
Evil 2:
Do not require a
working model and allow bad patents to proliferate.
We can certainly
measure the bad patents. If you're of the opinion Software is nothing but
abstract and abstract concepts are not patentable subject matter therefore
software patents should not exist: then 100% of software patents are bad
patents! Oops, I forgot, they're not "software" patents anymore, now they're
"method" patents.
Perhaps you can identify a single small inventor who
was able to actually come up with a valid invention that he couldn't afford to
build so was appropriately granted a patent?
If you can't identify one -
then...
Perhaps it's a theoretical harm that may or may not
exist.
Or perhaps it's a real harm that exists in such a small portion of
the whole that it's hard to find an instance of it without a huge amount of
effort combing through a lot of patents. A lot of patents wherein you'll likely
to regularly be exposed to bad patents.
When weighed on the scales of
"harm to Society" - because a patent grant is supposed to be a clear benefit
to Society it surely does appear bad patents being granted far, far
outweighs the harm to the garage-inventor.
Since the purpose of the
Patent is to benefit Society - it is in that measurement things should be
decided - not the measurement of the individual inventor.
If a particular
situation has a choice where Society benefits equally from either choice and one
choice gives the indvidual inventor a benefit - then I'd say the individual
inventor should be considered.
But not when to give the individual a
small benefit ends up causing a much greater harm to Society.
RAS[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 02:53 PM EDT |
Software based patents don't have this
argument. I think that it would be more
time and resource consuming to write it
down in a patent application and file it
then to actually implement it. If the
inventor cannot then either he/she is not
of ordinary skill or the patent is
worthless. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Ronny on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 08:03 PM EDT |
Their third suggestion (cap damages at the amount paid for the patent) is also
open to abuse.
It means you can have a genuine million dollar idea - or buy a million dollar
idea from somebody not in a position to exploit it - then be unable to prevent
it from being "stolen" by a big company.
If I invent a better mousetrap and patent it, it's reasonable to expect that I
can make more money from licensing my patent than it cost to develop the idea in
the first place. Otherwise, there is no incentive to invent in the first place.
It might be reasonable in cases where violation was not willful. But then you
get down to proving willfulness...[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 01 2013 @ 08:37 AM EDT |
I just wanted to clrifay that 8.04 is not approaching end-of-life. The article
is mentioning end-of-life for 8.10, a standard release. The server editions of
both of the current LTS releases, 6.06 and 8.04, are still supported. They are
supported until June 2011 and April 2013, respectively. See Ubuntu's Releases
page for end-of-life dates.As noted, there are two upgrade paths to 10.4:
upgrading from the current standard release, 9.10, or from the most recent LTS
release, 8.04. Users of 6.06 will need to upgrade to 8.04 first, while users of
8.10 or 9.04 will need to upgrade to 9.10. Note that users of 8.10 specifically
will need to upgrade to 9.04 before they can upgrade to 9.10.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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