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Comment by thereddaikon | Hacker News Reader

Massie has two engineering degrees, a bachelors in electrical and a masters in mechanical from MIT so he isn't a luddite or science illiterate. Looking in to him further, he spun off his undergrad work at MIT into a tech startup, a pretty common thing for MIT alums to do, and has several patents. This likely comes from a fundamentally different stance on tech IP than what most of HN believes.

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None of those credentials translate into an understanding of the current state of patent law.

Like all other areas of US law, its a heaping pile of high-court precedent built on longstanding traditions and understandings of what the Founders had in mind 300 years ago. Since it's built on 300 year old legal theory, some of it makes no sense in a modern context -- but that's what we have.

What is true, and what Massie surely understands, is that tinkering with these rules has seismic consequences, that are all of good, bad, and unpredictable. There are extremely strong opinions and lobbies on all sides of this. Any reform to the US patent system will happen slowly, carefully, and incrementally. Congress is too spineless to actually enact anything like this, and the Supreme Court is extremely reluctant to make any decisions on this.

Most likely, reforms will continue to occur at the margins, according to Federal Circuit appeals decisions. One day, the Supreme Court will review Alice, etc. and we might get a nudge one way or the other.

The ironic thing is that moving back to "first to invent" works in favor of big companies who can afford armies of patent lawyers to argue over who was, in fact, "first to invent". First to file is much more egalitarian and more favorable to startups, small companies, independent inventors, and suchlike.

And yes, I get that "first to invent" feels more fair in a certain sense. But from a pragmatic point of view, first to file makes more sense. It's also more consistent with how most of the rest of the world works, if I recall correctly.

  > The ironic thing is that moving back to "first to invent" works in favor of big companies

honestly, i really wonder if that isn't the actual goal of this legislation... especially considering where most lobbying/funding comes from...

It’s a difference in mentality between “old world” (EE, MechE, ChemE, pharma) and “new world” (CS) engineers. In old world, capital intensive industries, patents are a unit of currency in relationships between big companies. It’s the new world, mostly software guys, who have a different mentality. Partly because they have a lot of bad patents in that field. But also because it’s just a more fluid, less capital intensive field. It’s not GE versus Rolls Royce. It’s a startup someone started in their garage. The inventions are not things that took a team of a dozen engineers years to come up with, but often are things that people reinvented by accident.

It's also an east coast vs west coast thing. East coast culture is, go work for a big respectable firm, put on a suit and tie and dissolve into the thousands of others just like you. West coast culture is, go invent something new, form a scrappy team and achieve unicorn status. If you fail, you get points for trying.

Yup. New Jersey versus Silicon Valley.

You guys say that but Massie has his own startup. It isn't in silicon valley but he did start it in college based around technology he invented.

In the old fields, in a lot of cases, inventions also outlive their patents in their usefulness (which is how it's supposed to work). In software, a lot of the time, by the time the patent expires, something better will have been thought up.

Here are some pertinent facts. Rep. Massie did not write this bill. No member of Rep. Massie's staff wrote this bill. The bag-man (lobbyist) who is compensating Rep. Massie for introducing this bill also did not write it. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if neither Rep. Massie nor any of his staff have even read the actual bill, rather than the executive summary. So who did write the bill then? A reasonable assumption is that it is some party who stands to benefit greatly, probably to the tune of billions of dollars, that had their staff attorneys write up the proposed bill. Our entire legislative system has, over time, been warped to maximally obscure the identities and, to a lesser extent the motivations, of the parties that actually write the laws.

All that being said, your surmise that someone with an electrical and mechanical engineering background would see patents through that lens is plausible, but sadly probably irrelevant.

The above is true for all legislation in the modern day USA. Virtually no "legislator" has actually legislated in decades at the very least. Occasionally a member of congress will have their staff write up some bill for political purposes, but nobody takes them seriously, not even the members in question.

Do you have proof of anything you state in your first paragraph?

Maybe he just recycled the STRONGER patent act?

This is so true. K-street mostly writes bills and then invites staffers over for reviews before they hand them off with the check on the side to the reps who vote on them without ever actually reading them. Those staffers are often plied to do the bidding of k- or whatever letter street, with stuff like offers of a job later. (See Jack Abramoff's talks) Such a bullshit state of affairs.

Our representatives don't represent us at all. We live in an oligarchy.

I think I could make an argument that who wrote it is not important when it comes to the question of who you should hold accountable for a bill. Rep. Massie introduced it and attached his name to it as a sponsor. Therefore Rep. Massie should be held accountable for it's contents regardless of who wrote it.

He may not be a Luddite, but he is a sitting congressman, so some level of corruption/bad faith should be assumed.

Or it comes straight from some patent trolls that fund his campaigns.

A technical background may be helpful for understanding IP, but certainly not sufficient. Compare Massie to someone like Stephan Kinsella (BS and MS in electrical engineering and a law degree) who literally wrote a book called "Against Intellectual Property."

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