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Comment by DesiLurker | Hacker News Reader

I also blame USPTO execution, IMO USPTO should not be shielded from lawsuits for assigning patents on obviously BS innovation like 'rectangle with rounded edges' etc. if it does not even meets the common sense a decade ago then there should be some liability of enforceability on uspto.

on a general note I feel like everything in US is translating into a money fight. from congress to law to carpool lanes, there seems to be only one goal left that matters in life, money. apologies for tangential rant!

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On a conceptual level, USPTO is operating on the same procedures that was initial created more than 200 years ago. Practically every other form of government administrative operations has change, but the patent process has not.

Following 19th century government standard, USPTO is only really responsible to take in a patent request and check its own records to see if a patented idea is new or not, and then allow the skill government clerk who took the request to make a judgment based binary decision. The assumption in 19th century government process is that anything not in the records are not something for which the government can be held responsible to make a judgment on. Anything beyond this is assumed to be the courts and juries responsibility.

And in the past they did also have a few safeguards. A working model had to be added in order to make sure that function and copy of the idea is guarantied. The scope of patentable ideas was also narrowed down to a few areas for which a skilled government employee with a massive record could make a relative good guess if something was novel or not. Both was removed about 50 years ago, and a explosion of "new" patents has been requested ever since.

> And in the past they did also have a few safeguards. … Both was removed about 50 years ago, and a explosion of "new" patents has been requested ever since.

Patent model requirement was abolished in 1880, not 50 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_model

(I don't know when the "scope of patentable ideas" was widened.)

That happened with the Patents Act 1953, where the phrase "or process" was added by Congress.

According a legal law professor this was also when they removed the requirement for a working model, but I suspect that this was actually the date when the process to deposit a model was removed. There is plenty of models being sent after 1880 to USPTO (according to museums who write about their collections), so clearly it didn't all stop 1880. Also according to internal policy documents from inside USPTO that dates to early 1960, "the only thing you need to bring us a working model of is anything you claim that reverses entropy", which again highlight a change in attitude during that time in history.

That said, you are right that the official date when the requirement ended was 1880.

Lawsuits for everything is not a sane solution.

The USPTO follows the law as closely as they can (and your "rectangle with rounded edges is a design patent, not a utility one").

They have a 2400+ page manual they try to keep up to date with the current law, covering how patent applications are examined.: https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/index.html

They also accept comments on it here: https://uspto-mpep.ideascale.com/a/index

People have turned to lawsuits because they are completely and totally ineffective at getting political change.

The faster they get better at that instead of "suing", the better off we'll be.

In the meanwhile, you are quite literally blaming the people who are doing pretty much the best they can. They have very short periods of time to get their work done, etc.

There are certainly some problems here, but your problems are legislative, not executive.

I agree lawsuits are not sane solution but as you hinted they are the only tools for 'non consensus driven' change at a personal/corp level. Pretty much everything else I think about involves congress which requires influencing elections which requires large amounts of money (esp for numerous HR seats as opposed to presidential).

BTW govt agency accepting comments might as well direct them to trash bin directly. you can see that from recent FCC net neutrality debacle.

>In the meanwhile, you are quite literally blaming the people who are doing pretty much the best they can. They have very short periods of time to get their work done, etc.

what I am blaming them for is not doing their job properly and which very evidently causes everything to be deferred to courts to fight it out, which needs lots of money and introduces uncertain subjectivity (east texas district for instance). guess what that translate to for individual companies, more defensive patents.

I hate to say it but I agree with stallman to a degree on this.

"I agree lawsuits are not sane solution but as you hinted they are the only tools for 'non consensus driven' change at a personal/corp level. Pretty much everything else I think about involves congress which requires influencing elections which requires large amounts of money (esp for numerous HR seats as opposed to presidential). " TL; DR - i don't like the governance system my country built :) Sorry, but either change it, or live with it. Making an end run around it is bad.

"BTW govt agency accepting comments might as well direct them to trash bin directly. you can see that from recent FCC net neutrality debacle. " This is false for many agencies, and is definitely not true of the USPTO.

"what I am blaming them for is not doing their job properly" They very very much are.

"and which very evidently causes everything to be deferred to courts to fight it out"

This doesn't even make any sense.

People fight it out in court because there is a lot of money involved. IT doesn't matter if the PTO says it's valid or not, people fight either way.

What you've written seems like a very angry and uninformed rant.

I would urge you to actually go and study the history and details here, instead of just making a bunch of assumptions and asserting non-factual things as fact.

> on a general note I feel like everything in US is translating into a money fight. from congress to law to carpool lanes, there seems to be only one goal left that matters in life, money.

It it could be seen as a return to the "gilded age"...

My take is that there's an undercurrent of unease that everything is about to go to shit and "I want to get my pile of cash before it happens."

Of course, since all money is just an electronic agreement now, anybody not hoarding gold is gonna be SOL anyway. So it's a bit short-sighted.

Gold... if shit hits the fan with today's population densities, the only currencies that will matter will be food, fuel, drugs (alcohol & tobacco) and ammunition.

and maybe cryptocurrencies if internet survives in any form.

why the downvotes? the distributed, permissionless transactions seems to be a design goal for cryptocurrencies. if so they are perfect for dystopia given some mass communication mean exists, even something like ham radio will do.

What makes you think they'd be more useful than gold in such a situation? In much the same way the have no direct use, and their use requires wasting scarce resources (energy, bandwidth) on performing transactions.

for the scenarios you are thinking about you are better off holding lead instead of gold. you can always acquire gold if you have lead.

jokes aside IMO there is a lot of very short term thinking even for the richest because majority of wealth today sits in stock market and real estate and they depend very strongly on civilization status quo continuing. the root cause IMHO is dysfunction at the congressional level which is basically our prefrontal cortex as nation.

I would think gold wouldn't be worth anything in the modern world if civilization actually collapsed.

You would need a semi-robust trading market as well as an upper class who can afford to not spend resources on survival to trade gold for necessities, wouldn't you?

Probably. But gold is more useful than electronic money. Gold has inherent value because it's a metal that's easy to hammer into useful objects that won't corrode and it's pretty. (Although it's too soft for things like knives and most other tools.)

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