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Comment by h4pless | Hacker News Reader

What's interesting about this case to me is that Personal Audio, LLC is the original assignee for the patent and under the proposed SHIELD act, it would not be liable for paying the defendants legal fees if it lost its legal battle under the newly proposed system.

If the USPTO is willing to grant ridiculous patents that it shouldn't, then the SHIELD act would seem to not make much of a difference at all. It seems to me that the prior art should be a non-issue to produce considering people have been making tutorials on how to make podcasts since '04/'05, but as long as the patents are being erroneously assigned, the SHIELD act will provide very little protection from these types of patent trolls.

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The SHIELD Act is not intended to fix everything broken with the system - just slice off the low-hanging fruit.

More comprehensive reform would probably include a ban on patents in software, or at least a much, much shorter patent period for software and similar domains of invention that move much more quickly than, say, pharmaceutical development and approval.

Even for a $1 billion pharmaceutical drug, 20 years is quite a long time to recover your investment. For something that costs a small fraction of that to develop, it's an eternity.

For a patent covering a trivial software idea, it's ludicrous.

I'd be happy with a system that gives five years by default, using the current process. Twenty years only if you can easily prove non-obviousness and significant research investment.

To be honest, a software patent should be required to include working code. The entire point of the system is not to provide money for trolls and lawyers, but ensure that technical knowledge is disclosed to the public while ensuring the inventors of that knowledge are compensated. That is currently not happening.

Wish I could give you extra upvotes!!

Yes, the SHIELD act is treating the symptom, not the cause.

I think the only solution is to require objective evidence of non-obviousness. The subjective approach, where the patent examiner decides whether the idea seems obvious, is just not working -- particularly for software.

Such objective evidence could consist of successful publication in a peer-reviewed journal, for example, or of providing published references that say that the problem being attacked is known to be difficult, or of showing that others have tried to solve the problem and failed.

In short, the burden of proof needs to be on the applicant to prove nonobviousness, not on the examiner (or the defendants in a lawsuit) to prove obviousness.

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