Patents: do they have a future, if so what? 1

Patents should be to a common standard worldwide, and should last for 15 years only. Copyright ditto.

I have no opinion on which country's legislation is superior.



Cheers

Greg Locock

SIGlease see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

Fortunately the Chinese disregard for intellectual property laws is a cultural thing and will take generations to change, if it ever really changes. Even a totalitarian regime can't stamp out this thievery. And I say fortunately, because the rampant theft of intellectual property ensure that only idiots will do their tech development work in China.

Let's remember what a patent is supposed to do: it's a means to ensure that private technological development isn't kept 100% as trade secret, potentially dying with the inventor. In return for disclosing the nature of an invention to everyone, including competitors, the inventor gets exclusive right to profit from this invention for XX years depending on location. After XX years, everyone can benefit from the invention without paying royalties or license fees.

Patents can't be effective for the patent holder without functioning civil courts, and that's another reason China's a basket case on this issue.

Each business will determine what method of protection suits it best to protect new inventions: patent or trade secret. What's best depends on a lot of factors, most notably how much it will cost to defend patent rights in cases of infringement- and whether or not it's reasonably possible to prove infringement. If the only way to get proof of patent infringement is to potentially involve your own customers (who are also customers of the infringer), the value of a patent is questionable at best.

That businesses tie up the inventions of their employees, even the inventions that the business ISN'T interested in commercializing, is a damned shame and hopefully something will be done about this too.

Generally, a patent is as good as its author (not necessarily the inventor). After issuance, it's about as good as the author's attorney. Most are relatively useless.

Let's agree to two of the objectives of the patent system being as Molten metal describes, to benefit the inventor and to prevent good ideas being lost.

I think we ought to add a third; to encourage new ideas to be brought forward and not forgotten.

How many good ideas, I wonder, never see the light of day not because the inventor decided to keep them a trade secret but because he/she never did anything with them?

What factors would encourage more ideas to be brought forward?



JMW

Although the original question is good, patent offices around the world are seeing exponential increase in applications. New patent classes for software have been introduced. There is greate debate on patenting of chemicals, chemical reactions, genes, proteins and anything "life" based. I have read that patent applications in these areas are getting so complicated that the patent examiners competence to effectively examine the application is being questioned.

Patents have become much like the investment market: effective, affordable to and dominated by large transnational corporations.

Patents and their continuations are very expensive for an individual or small corporation.

Patent licencing rights by an individual or small corporation is effectively impossible as it's very expensive and frought with likelihood of IP theft when it's realized it's small you against Big Co.: the potential penalties are manageable risk to them.

An unfortunate development of the expensive, lengthy and legal process of patenting is that patent holders seem to acquire a sense of entitlement: their patent is so awesome everybody will want the product, just wait till I catch Big Co. stealing it..., or you should develop their IP based products with them for free because of its awesomeness.

To improve what a patent is and does, in my world I would:

1. Take the lawyers out of the patenting process; I firmly believe they add no value except for (sometimes) a thorough prior art search. Standardization can be good, but patents do not describe the object being patented: the legalese is an exercise in murdering the language through adjective-ing everything so as to be extremely generally specific.

2. Lower the cost. The least expensive patent I've heard of was about $13,000. Usually they're between 30 - 50,000.

3. Change approval process to demand proof of concept. I've worked on several projects where patents existed but no actual device had been created. Otherwise people will become patent sitters filing thousands of frivolous applications, like the web name squatters.

4. If a patent office examines and awards patents, then the same patent office should examine cases of infringement. I'm sure this is a common epithet, but guidelines can be developed for pre-examination qualification in infringement cases.

5. Develop suggested penalty guidelines for patent infringement. Currently its a case by case basis. Most don't get to court as the lawyers can always find a way past a patent: my cynical self is sure they embed it in the patent preparation as job security. Those that are prosecuted successfully can be lucrative, but are extremely rare.

for a list of strange patents.

This is a potential career path for all of us. If you have a technical education, you qualify to take the Patent Bar, which in turn makes you a Patent Agent.

Patent Lawyers are simply Patent Agents with law degrees. An agent can still represent clients with the patent agency (but cannot do some things outside of that, such as make a contract between an inventor and a company).

So if you hear the dark side calling, you could change up your career and make a lot of money.