How to fix the patent system in 10 easy steps

Bravo! I really like many of your suggestions. The five-year limit may be good for technology-related patents, but for traditional items, the old limit may still work. I especially like #10, because so many pharma companies are trying to profit off medical treatments! Withholding treatment for profit is just not right!

#3 sounds easy to implement, but unfortunately peer review does have its own set of problems. I work in science research, so I know.

Pleasantly idealistic and wholly impractical.
Reads like one of those chain letters that go around claiming to be from Carlin or someone similar that tell how to fix the country.

I think point 10 should rather be something like “You cannot patent laws of nature nor scientific discoveries of laws of nature”

You also forgot to tackle “plot patents” as descibed by Richard Stallman in http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,1510566,00.html .
However, I can’t think of a direct step summarizing the idea… (probably point 5 could be applied, although it wouldn’t be sufficient)

Nice idea… incomplete in practice.

First, even nowadays, 5 years is not enough. The original 17 years is short enough as it is to commercially exploit a normal invention. The problem with patents is WHAT is patented, and patent extensions… the standard patent length is fine.

#10 should be put up to #3. It’s the same concept as #1 and #2.

#7 sounds nice, but it would never work in practice. It can be MANY years before a patent gets overturned… many patent employees have left by then. This would ONLY be an incentive for the long timers, and a negative incentive at that… yuck. Negative incentives almost never motivate people to perform better. Heck, often positive incentives don’t either… see Joel’s comments on Incentive Pay: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000070.html

I’m all for it. I agree with it.

But it will never happen in real life because nobody already in power gets rich off it. All they get is “innovation”.

As to the fool who asks “why should people profit from 20 years of my work”….

Well, why should people profit from General Relativity without having paid Einstein for it?

Why should people profit from Quantum Mechanics without paying royalties?

Why should people profit from DNA without paying the estates of Watson and Crick?

You don’t understand what drives creation and you will never create anything. Why should the whole world be held up to the standards of a desolate and impotent mind?

Yahoo for you, another patent rant that made it to the top of Reddit.

So, what’s the next step? How do we actually DO something about this, how do we make it so? How dow we protect our futures as independent software developers so not to be devoured by large corporations assuming ownership of simple ideas?

Seriously, it’s time to stop crying about the damn problem, and it’s time to start acting. Protests, patitions, letters, organized efforts to spread the word and fear of how patents can halt innovation and put the little guy out of business.

Has America just gotten lazy? Let’s organize, let’s fight this with more than our blogging.

There is no way the patent office is going to read a blog and start shaking in their boots. They just laugh at how small we are to them and how we don’t actually do anything but hide behind our keyboards and expect our “voice” to be heard.

I think you overlook an important function of patent law – the disclosure of inventions to the public.

I agree that there are a great number of problems with the patent system which require improvement. However, firms should be encouraged to give up their ideas to the public, rather than keep them secret.

This extends to software and business methods and biotechnology. I will admit that certain inventions like Amazon’s 1-click are self-disclosing, so it would be impossible to keep that invention secret once commercialized. It would seem that the disclosure of that technology in a patent is rather worthless, because the invention is obvious on its face.

But there are countless other examples of technology that we could never appreciate or use unless published in some form or other. Academia or Open source are examples of disclosure forums. Patents is another.

Indeed, one of the goals of the patent system is to organize scientific information. This goal has not been emphasized well. Patents need to be written more straightforwardly, and addressed to real people, not lawyers.

I avoid the sticky question of moral judgment on the technology itself. But I pose the question of whether it is better to know about a life form technology with strings attached (in the form of a patent), or to keep the scientific knowledge private to the researchers?

The system is not perfect. It is improving, though, I think. Better search engines and user interfaces might help to improve the disclosure function of patent law. What do you think?

Richard, I take your point. But I’m not stating opinions, just asking questions.

Ask why so many large companies such as IBM, Apple, CA and so on are making donations of patent portfolios to Open Source. They are not keeping enabling source code secret. Is it because patent rights are strong? I think maybe: it is a credible argument that patents encourage disclosure of ideas, even to open source. The disclosure seems to be getting better, with good documentation sometimes included.

While I don’t doubt that there is a profit motive in there somewhere, the end result is disclosure of ideas, which is what I care about.

Yuri, not only is it not a “credible” argument that patents encourage disclosure of ideas (did you not read anything I said?) but it is LOGICALLY ABSURD and EMPIRICALLY FALSE. If you start by assuming blatant lies, you will never understand the world around you.

Why is it that large companies are donating their patent portfolios to open source foundations? That’s really simple to understand *IF* you understand that patents don’t work and what they’re *actually* used for.

Patents are legal weapons. That’s what they are, that’s all they are. Large company A has a warchest of patents which it uses against large companies B and C which have their own warchests. If startup company D doesn’t have any patents, then companies A, B and C can clobber it to death. Exactly like the USA with its vast military arsenal can clobber third world countries like Vietnam, Nicaragua, Korea and now Iraq.

Is that the reason why large companies have patents, to clobber poor dumb schmucks? Actually no. Large companies have patents as a defensive arsenal against other large companies. And just like any military or nuclear arsenal, patents waste a lot of resources to maintain and do nothing productive whatsoever.

If you understand that, then it’s trivial to understand why large companies are donating patents to open source foundations. In effect, they’re signing mutual defense treaties, in the hopes of cutting the costs of military expenditures in hot and cold wars (corporate lawyers and threatened lawsuits), possibly even in the hopes of cutting their military assets (patents).

Companies don’t WANT patents, but they have to have them as a cost of doing business. Now they’re doing something to try to get rid of patents and you talk about how patents must be a good thing? Your logic is tantamount to “everyone wants to give up their guns to make a professional police force, so guns must be a good thing, nevermind the murders”. Bah!

Richard, thanks for your interesting comments.

I would hardly categorize my ideas as “plausible but false”; instead, I would say they are open questions going to the heart of knowledge transfer theory.

You say that the claim that patents encourage disclosure is “logically absurd” but offer no proof. Instead, you refute 1 example and conclude the entire claim is false. I question the rigor of this approach.

What I was trying to say is that software firms are going above and beyond the disclosure required in a patent and donating enabling source code to Open Source (remember, source code is not required to get a patent). I theorize that this may be because of strong patent rights.

If patent rights were weak (in terms of enforcement), there would be a reluctance to give up enabling source code to anyone, because it could be used by any competitor once disclosed.

Thus, in this case, strong patent rights encourage disclosure to Open Source. If a firm knows that a court will readily enforce its patent, it is much more likely to donate it to a certain segment (Open Source) knowing that it is protected against commercial competitors.

Your view that firms are donating to disarm competitors’ patents is confusing. IBM is not donating its patents to Microsoft or vice versa. There is a phenomenon of cross-licensing of patents between large firms, but that is more likely anti-competitive behaviour of oligopolistic firms.

I welcome your comments, cheers,