Small Inventors Are Being Squeezed by a Convoluted Patent Process
nationalreview.com
nationalreview.com
US patent law is unenforceable against the world’s largest manufacturer, China, which boldly copies patented IP with impunity.
US patent law enables non-practicing entities (NPEs) to hold third parties liable for damages. If you bought toilet paper manufactured on a machine that infringes a patent, you can be sued for wiping your own ass. NPEs have successfully extracted millions from small businesses whose only crime was listing an app in the Play Store using a Google API, or using TLS to protect credit card information in flight —- obvious ideas that possibly technically infringed a US patent.
Patents are thought to protect small inventors but filing fees are exorbitant and as per the article, large corporations can easily steal ideas while tying inventors up in court.
Since patent laws enable trolls to decrease our GDP while trade secrets offer they only true protection against the biggest threats, arguing about the venue where we litigate farcical claims misses the point. We should just suspend the patent system until the rest of the manufacturing globe is on board.
The patent system has become a victim of regulatory capture.
That is of course, if it really did start out to protect the little guy.
One version I have heard is that it started as a means for the military to gain access to the latest technological developments.
The US patent system was the first that worked differently: it was a bribe to the inventor for disclosure: if you describe your invention so anyone could copy it, the government will let you use the courts to enforce a temporary monopoly.
Sometime in the 20th century the “so anyone could copy it” part fell into abeyance and now one of the strategies is to write as vaguely and ambiguously as possible, both to make it harder to copy and so you could argue that someone doing something vaguely related or parallel was “infringing”.
Patents only really work in a few places. Pharma is one because the R&D and other up front capex is massive compared to production.
But few other domains even have that issue.
An inventor can invent things that make a nuclear power plant cheaper or more efficient or better in some other way. He can't control whether the people and organizations who can afford nuclear plants decide to use his invention.
So NPEs are necessary for patents to work for small the inventor, and are how patents work for the small inventor. A small inventor in an expensive field is always a NPE.
I don’t know of a way to fix these kinds of problems.
If patent examination is correctly performed, then all patents will have real novelty and the people who have to license a patent haven't had anything taken away from them since the novelty means that they wouldn't have come up with the thing they have to license anyway.