US House Takes Up Major Overhaul of Patent System 205
Bookworm09 writes "The House took up the most far-reaching overhaul of the patent system in 60 years today, with a bill both parties say will make it easier for inventors to get their innovations to market and help put people back to work. Backed by Obama and business groups, the legislation aims to ease the lengthy backlog in patent applications, clean up some of the procedures that can lead to costly litigation and put the United States under the same filing system as the rest of the industrialized world."
"Backed by Obama and business groups..." (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
...can we *please* kill off software patents while we're at it?
(I know, too much to ask, etc. Knowing Congress, they'll just make it all that much easier for patent trolls and big corps to plow through even the silliest patents now.)
This is not good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being like the rest of the world is a nice mantra that people keep throwing around, but most of the rest of the world simplified the system by having a "first to file" system, meaning someone could steal your invention and file first, and you'd have NO recourse. If that's the way to reduce litigation, then I'm not all for it.
I'm not going to claim the U.S. is the best at everything, but just because the rest of the world does something doesn't make it better.
First to file is NOT BETTER than first to invent.
Mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)
All those conversations about "prior art" that we love to throw around here? Whooosh....all gone. Prior art only matters in "first to invent" instead of first to file.
Not the kind of overhaul you're thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
"ease the lengthy backlog in patent applications, clean up some of the procedures that can lead to costly litigation and put the United States under the same filing system as the rest of the industrialized world."
IOW, same absurd shit, only faster, cheaper and standardized.
Re:"Backed by Obama and business groups..." (Score:5, Insightful)
As a small business owner myself, the funding changes will. The huge costs and absurd backlogs are easily handled by big businesses with their own legal departments and deep pockets for building up patent thickets and getting their patents expedited, but it's much harder for the small fish to get a piece.
To benefit small business owners versus big business owners, you need:
* Lower filing/defense costs
* Shorter backlogs
* Greater tolerance for filing errors (a big established company is less likely to make them)
* Stricter standards for review when it comes to originality, prior art, etc (as a general rule, small businesses thrive on radical changes, while big businesses thrive on incremental changes)
However, there are some things in there that they're proposing which will absolutely not help small businesses: switching from "first to invent" to "first to file", for one. Again, the deep pockets and legal departments of large corporations make getting "first to file" much easier for them. They're also getting rid of the one-year grace period after disclosure which, yeah, while it brings us into sync with the rest of the world, but was always a huge boon to small inventors (it really ought to be *longer*). The grace period gives you time to shop your idea around, determine whether there's a good business opportunity, raise investment, etc, and *then* file.
Re:tl; dr version (Score:4, Insightful)
The US Patent Trade Office FINALLY gets to keep the fees it collects..
Sounds like a disaster in-making to me. What if the Sheriff's office got to keep all the funds that it confiscated? No doubt there'd be a lot more arrests and confiscated funds. Same with the patent office. The Patent office will just issue more and more and more patents as it's now in their best interest. "Come one, come all, file your patents, On sale this week only!"
Re:Damned Liberal agenda..??? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Patent value-based system (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is my thought on a method to handle the awarding of patents:
Don't.
Yup. Simply outlaw the practice altogether and let trade secrets be the law of the land. By the time a product has gone through testing and has made it to the consumer, it is likely nearing the end of its useful life for patent protection anyway.
I consider patent legislation to be a failed social experiment whose time is nearing an end. No, I'm not really an anarchist and I do believe in the rule of law and even think there is a necessity for a legal system, but that patents tend to help those who don't need help and don't protect those that do. I also don't know of any way to reform the system sufficiently to be able to "protect the little guy" without screwing them over even more than they are, where being blunt that legal protection through patents doesn't work at all is likely the best advise you can give to a young aspiring inventor.
Having known many engineers and "inventors" in my lifetime, including some who sought protection through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, not a single one of them ever received in royalties any money more than the legal costs they spent trying to get the patent in the first place, assuming they got anything at all in the first place. At best all a patent has been useful for is a resume bullet point that might make the difference to get a job interview. I guess that counts for something, but it wouldn't be something I would necessarily be impressed with other than showing you actually do know how to work with lawyers.
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Patenting something like the GIF encoding algorithm nowadays would be extremely difficult.
I was going to post a long reply to this, but I think I can sum it up with one letter and three numbers: H.264.
First to file (Score:4, Insightful)
From the summary: "and put the United States under the same filing system as the rest of the industrialized world."
Parent is right. This will absolutely help big businesses at the expense of small inventors and companies. The United States is perhaps unique in the world in caring about who invented a thing first, rather than who filed a thing first, and in caring somewhat about the individual inventor. Despite all of the clamor about it, there are maybe a hundred interference proceedings (i.e. who invented it first) a year--they're VERY rare. Companies and academia are just afraid of them because they (1) require a lot more auditing internally, (2) are a little less administrable than a first-to-file system, (3) are not what everyone else in the world does, and a lot of patent work is international, (4) sometimes a patent is worth billions, and secret prior art is in theory a massive risk, and (5) litigating the point costs money and lots of legal and inventor time when it comes up.
That being said, these reforms are proposed every year. They very rarely get passed. The first-to-file reform has been "likely to change this year" for twenty or thirty years at this point.
The patent system is already nontrivial to deal with for a newcomer, taking years, being very precise and arcane, and costing thousands unless you do everything yourself--and most people who try to do it themselves fail miserably. A patent examiner I know has seen *one* pro se application that was done well. The money is pocket change for a big corporation (maybe more if litigated or if it's an important of complicated patent), reasonable fees but ridiculous delays for a little corporation, doable for the upper middle class when you're not in the middle of an economic recession, and practically prohibitive for a small inventor who is lower middle-class or poor (without backers, anyway, and disclosing it to backers beforehand starts all kinds of legal clocks). The system encourages some innovation, but it doesn't do much about bootstrapping.
Re:Is 15 years rather than 18 under patent so bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
File immediately when you haven't raised money yet? File immediately when you don't know if you have a viable business model yet? File immediately when you, as a starting entrepreneur not versed in patent law, don't know the risks of disclosure? Um, *yeah* it hurts small businesses.