US Patent system so dysfunctional you can patent a stick from a tree
google.com
google.com
My gut says that the threat would be hollow, but my gut says a lot of things. Like that "1-Click" is too obvious to patent - all you need is a requirement "reduce the number of steps a user needs to place a purchase order", and that's the logical conclusion. Can you tell me if 1-click patents are valid?
If anything can be patented (if not actually defended), and patent threats (even hollow ones) are an obstacle to new businesses, how is the patents system encouraging innovation?
I know pg advises to ignore other companies patents completely (though you should file a few of your own), and worry about the flack when you have something to lose, but that doesn't mean the system isn't crap.
From what I remember, when a user clicks on the 1-click purchase to buy an item, it actually queues the purchase for a certain amount of time before being acted on by the warehouse, and there are things in place to back it out if the user decides to change the purchase.
And indeed, according to Tim O'Reilly, Bezos defended the broad patenting of all types of 1-click purchasing. Here is an excerpt of O'Reilly's description of their conversation:
> First off, Jeff wanted to explain why he thought 1-click was original enough to patent. It has nothing to do with the implementation, which he admits is fairly trivial to duplicate, but with the reframing of the problem. At the time he came up with 1-click shopping, everyone was locked in to the shopping cart metaphor, because that's what you do in the real world. You pick up an item and take it to the counter to buy it. On the Web, he realized, something very different was possible: all you had to do was point to an article, and it was yours...
>What's more, Jeff went on, small inventions can often seem extremely obvious in retrospect. The patent literature is full of this kind of thing. The significance of an invention isn't how hard it is to copy, but how it reframes the problem in a new way.
> This may be true, I replied. But it is hard to believe that if Amazon hadn't introduced 1-click ordering (if they were indeed first to do it), that someone else wouldn't have done this. It beggars the imagination that this is so significant and unexpected an innovation that others should be prevented from using it. Patents are meant to promote the common welfare, the idea being that certain ideas won't be developed without government providing a degree of protection. Is this an idea that required that kind of protection to be developed?
http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/bezos_0300.htm...
The obviousness of a solution is hard to judge, especially since the answer is obvious once you see the answer. So it's hard to say whether anyone else would have done it.
My OP was more to point out the lack of obviousness for something like that than one might think on first blush. The wireless music box is obvious to us in hindsight. But in context of wireless radio at the time, most people used it to send messages. As a potential investor in the wireless music box retorted at the time, "Why would you send messages to nobody in particular?" Contextually, multicasting just wasn't in people's minds.
That said, patent system is broken in the way that Amazon and others use it. I can see why Bezos did it, but that can be a slippery slope to stifling innovation, as much as you try to protect against it.
And the lack of a good metric to tell how obvious something is, especially when seeing the answer makes it seem obvious might point to the idea of patents as being hard to enforce well, however good the merits having a patent system might be.
That's it - my new goal is to invent and patent the Zero-Click Purchase.
You read it here first.
"You'd better click something or I'll have to ship you some books." -- Dogbert
That is not how patents work. Your statement is ridiculously ignorant fear mongering. There's real problems with patents, you're just fueling the forces that wish for status que by letting them label paten reformers as kooks.
It may sadden you, but the patent was invalidated based on at least two pieces of prior art (patents in this case) that were both stick shaped dog toys.
The first is a patent (4577219) filed in 1984 for a stick shaped chewable dog toy ( http://www.google.com/patents?id=ANQ9AAAAEBAJ&printsec=a... )
The second is a design patent (D428220) filed in 1999 for a stick shaped pet toy ( http://www.google.com/patents?id=JJMEAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a... ).
If you were also curious about the gory details of its re-examination process, you can pull it off of the patent application information retrieval (PAIR) service ( http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair ) -- enter the reexamination request number off of the re-exam certificate ( 90/006301 ) and click on "image file wrapper" and then you can see all of the actions undertaken.
Can I paten a technique for saving people's lives that requires no tools and anyone can learn, but no human being has ever done it before (intentionally)?
The paten question is no triviality and should not be treated as such. Don't think "oh why don't they just revoke it". Perhaps what is wrong with our system is the time given, 7 years in software terms may as well be a lifetime, while 7 years in physical product terms is hardly anything. Thats the problem with our system. And copyright is a whole nothing monster. They mingle often, but are not the same.
Do patents currently assist the small companies fight the big ones
The fact that anyone would even ask this is a far more dire social commentary than an oddly unoriginal patent. If something has a $0 cost outside of basic education and consistently saves lives, but you patent it and make money off it, what kind of person are you?
You want to ensure the technique remains available to anyone freely: patent it and publish it along with permissive licenses.
USPTO sends an action and attorneys respond to that action [1]. Which means a case can go on for years if attorney (for clients) has deep pockets [2].
A patent grant was not designed to be end-all be-all for that patent. For example, it can be found invalid at anytime by uspto (re-exam) or by the courts.
An examiner only has hours to read/understand/search/write a response but in any case this was really bad mistake that should have never happened.
1. Attorneys have usually 3-6 months and USPTO has usually upto 4 months to respond to attorney. 2. Using request for reconsideration and continuation among other things.
At what point are those nations going to lose enough patience to point out the unbelievable corruption, cynicism, and mind-bending incompetence with which the law is administered in the first place?
Any proof?
Unfortunately I don't see a way of changing this. Not within a republic with a representative government. And I don't see America switching to Swiss style direct democracy either.
(Americans seem to have a reflex to Goodwin any thread as soon as someone mentions "direct democracy", please don't today. And please do read up on how a certain someone actually got to power.)
The only hope I see is technology (Pirate Bay!) not to "fix" copyright and patent law, but simply to make their enforcement less effective.
At the same time, you can't expect those same lawmakers to govern effectively if they feel their re-election prospects hinge less on the will of the voters, and more on the value of campaign donations provided by the very industries they're supposed to govern.
A lot of people dislike the idea of public election finance, since they don't want 'their' tax dollars going towards 'candidates they don't like' (as if taxation depends on liking each and every thing the government does). But as sharper wits have observed, you pay no matter what.
Moreover, you pay a lot more for the corrupt alternative. Exhibit A is the bazillions of dollars spent bailing out the most politically influential banks, while protecting their shareholders from any major losses and shielding fraudulent managers from richly deserved criminal investigations.
In retrospect, a few publicly-financed elections for one-one thousandth the cost of 2008/09 would have been an exceptionally good value. Extra added bonus: not cratering the global economy. Extra extra bonus: Patent Reform that doesn't die every time it hits the Senate floor.
It's one thing for third-world kleptocracies to run themselves into the ground (see Tunisia). But when the largest, most consequential economy on the planet starts operating in the same way, it's a serious problem.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5443036.html
This was always included on the first day of any patent class in law school.
I found the whole process deeply unpleasant - but as it was mandated by our VC investors, even though I was CTO, I couldn't say "no".
It takes a hell of a lot of guts, admittedly, but doing the right thing often does. The decision has to be made at a pre-investment stage, because you don't want to be placed in a breach-of-contract position later.
So my objections were mainly selfish rather than principled. I like to think these days I would act on principle...
But this is not original. On the net I found Freedom, initially published 23 nov 1999 which includes outgoing mail quotas (http://www.homeport.org/~adam/zeroknowledgewhitepapers/arch-...). For the initial date, check at the bottom.
There were only 20 claims.
Good find. For certain values of "good".
http://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/auspac/07/02/austr...
How much worse is it going to get before it actually gets better?
http://ipwatchdog.com/2010/10/06/animal-toy-patent/id=12711/