U.S. Bans Some Cellphones For Patent Reasons 173
runner_one writes "According to the New York Times, A federal agency has banned imports of new cellphones made with Qualcomm semiconductors because the chips violate a patent held by Broadcom. The International Trade Commission said today that the import ban would not apply to mobile phone models that were imported on or before June 7." Update: 06/08 13:05 GMT by KD : Glenn Fleishman notes that Apple's iPhone will be allowed into the country, since it doesn't use any 3G chips. He adds that Apple "might have the most advanced smartphone on the market unless President Bush or his trade representative overturn the ruling (which they have the power to do)."
Message to Qualcomm. (Score:5, Interesting)
Everytime a large corporation loses a big case like this, I feel we're a step closer to sane patent reform. Hopefully someone will win a patent against Broadcomm next.
US Patent office should pay compensation (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem here, has and always will be the over willingness of the patent office to issue patents when the invention preexists but is not documented publicly, or where it's a minor increment of an existing variation. It's in the law that they have to test for obviousness and prior art, but they so narrowly define those terms as to remove the tests.
The free market will fix it, make them pay for thei
Re:US Patent office should pay compensation (Score:5, Insightful)
How exactly does the free market go about fixing limited duration government granted monopolies (a.k.a. patents)?
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So asking a free market to fix patents is insane. A free market by definition can have no patents.
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If there were penalties for issuing patents which are later invalidated, we'd see the USPTO put more effort into researching the patents they receive, rejection of overly broad patents, and probably eventually start seeing fewer patents requested in general. Then truly innovative inventions would receive pa
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"As the next step, I'd introduce the right for any professional body to issue patents in their own field."
Of course, because we all know that professional organizations can never be corrupt. Patent abuse doesn't have to take the form of issuing invalid and obvious patents, it can also mean only issuing patents to favored members. Let's exchange a flawed system for a totall
Re:US Patent office should pay compensation (Score:4, Interesting)
Like it or not, patents are a mainstay of the US economy. It may be several years before things in the computing industry start to stabilise and such controls become less necessary or seem less daft, but if they did nothing and let patents be flouted the situation would become untenable.
It would be nice perhaps, at least in thought experiment terms if patents weren't an issue, but that's nieve. Patents are here to stay, and the only way a business can currently ensure a profit from their research.
Scurrilous patent claims are another issue, one that needs a solution. I speculate that patents which are held purely to extort money will eventually become so easily invalidated that their use in this manner will become a thing of the past.
Re:US Patent office should pay compensation (Score:5, Funny)
So, uhhh, how many years before the US economy expires?
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I think that we're looking at months....
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Seriously, if the only value we hold is IP that is locked in patents then what happens to our value when those patents do expire?
That said, I think we have a little more value than JUST our IP, so I don't think our economy is expiring any time soon (just don't ask for a definition of soon).
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We will just stop them from expiring, like our perpetually extended copyrights.
We make fluffy fairy bunnies now (Score:2)
Then we decided that we would move industry overseas, and our primary output would be capital manipulation.
Now, we've decided that we'll neither make things or manipulate capital, but instead sue people who actually make things, move capital, invent things, or make entertainment. Parasites on the world.
The next step for the top 5 percenters is to just sit in a chair and demand people give them stuff because they deserve it for being them. What do we need them f
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Umm, isn't it obvious?
Alternative methods to accomplish the same goal have been used as patent work-arounds from the earliest days. If not for someone working-around the Wright Brother's patents, jets would be using "wing warping" instead of "flaps."
Besides that, the free market constantly lobbies the government... if they get bit by broad patents enough times, they'll put their efforts towards
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And finally, if numerous companies go out of business, the patent office will no longer be over-loaded...
Two major flaws with your argument. One, you are treating the "free market" as if it were one monolithic organization with a single obejctive. The reality is that each and every company within the free market will feel differently about paten
Re:US Patent office should pay compensation (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, that is a work-around. Notice, however, that the whole patent system was originally created to help sharing of information, namely inventions. If you made an invention and made it publicly available, in return the government granted you a limited monopoly.
Nowadays, this has twisted into reality where government grants you a monopoly and you absolute do not share your "invention". Instead, you use your monopoly to prevent related innovation by others. The government grants you (limited) monopoly and in return you share a piece of document that, more often than not, shares zero information about the real invention you possibly did. In case of software, the only thing that really could describe your invention correctly would be the source code. However, that is not required to get a software patent. That's where the problem is - you can get a patent to protect your invention without disclosing that very same invention.
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That's not what he said. He said you could get a patent without disclosing an invention AT ALL. It is up to the examiner to determine if a patent is valid and if it is sufficiently described. It is not required of anyone in the system to make it so an uneducated
A patent system that's incapable of responding to the application demand is an ineffective one. Not saying our current system
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If you make someone actually demonstrate that an idea works, instead of just masturbating onto a patent application and giving a lawyer a couple of thousand dollars, it makes the "obviousness" test simpler... just a matter of "has anyone built this particular do-dad before"?
You can't possibly expect the patent office to be staffed with enough knowledgeable pe
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Your notion that source code is required to teach a software is also ridiculous. How would any software textbook work then?
"That's where the problem is - you can get a patent to protect your invention without disclosing th
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If not for someone working-around the Wright Brother's patents, jets would be using "wing warping" instead of "flaps."
I hate to nitpick, but wing warping in a biplane controls the roll of the aircraft. Flaps provide additional lift and reduce the stall speed of an aircraft. The word you were looking for was "aileron". See: Wing Warping [wikipedia.org] vs. Aileron [wikipedia.org] vs. Flaps [wikipedia.org].
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It is a good thing those Wright Brothers patents have expired: wing warping [af.mil].
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Any patents the Wright brothers received would be out of force long before today. In fact, the Wright brothers are a great example of why patents work. We granted them a limited monopoly so that our society could more quickly understand how their invention worked. As a result, m
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How exactly does the free market go about fixing limited duration government granted monopolies (a.k.a. patents)?
It will fix everything, and if it doesn't, god works on his divine plan in mysterious ways.
try living in the UK. (Score:4, Informative)
Now that sucks
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Oh, no. I've got a better idea. Every patent that gets invalidated should result in not only the USPTO paying a fine, but the company that was issued the patent should have to pay a massive fine as well for wasting everybody's time.
How quickly do you think patent trolls will suddenly start disappearing if this occured?
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he company that was issued the patent should have to pay a massive fine. How quickly do you think patent trolls will suddenly start disappearing if this occured?
By "patent trolls", you mean the large companies that have the money to hire tons of patent lawyers and win these court cases? In that case, no I don't see them disappearing. Your new system--where filing patents to protect your inventions can lead to people taking you to court and trying to get tons of money out of you for having a patent they don't like--will only hurt the small inventors that patents are supposed to protect. They won't be able to take the risk that that Microsoft or whoever will take th
Re:US Patent office should pay compensation (Score:5, Informative)
The problem here, has and always will be the over willingness of the patent office to issue patents when the invention preexists but is not documented publicly, or where it's a minor increment of an existing variation. It's in the law that they have to test for obviousness and prior art, but they so narrowly define those terms as to remove the tests.
The free market will fix it, make them pay for their mistakes just like every other professional body.
And then, even better, "we" are supposed to punish "them" when "they" fuck up, by fining them. Except that, as a government agency, the USPTO always has access to the biggest ATM in the universe, the American taxpayer. So what you're really proposing is that *I* pay a fine every time the Patent Office fucks up - "we" get to punish ourselves for bad patents. Which is a proposal where I expect most people's reaction will be "are you out of your fucking mind?"
The only possible solution is to change the laws governing the USPTO if you're unhappy with the way things are currently going. I'm as laissez-faire as the next guy, but there is no "free market" solution to the problem of overbroad or poorly thought-out patents, unless you scrap the whole system. And the odds of that are basically nil, so you're back to changing the laws in order to bring about different outcomes.
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When the patent system is abused, it's not a free market. The people attacking the current abusive patent practices a trying to restore the free market.
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Re:Message to Qualcomm. (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I used to work in the field (not for qualcom) and I am extremely happy no longer to.
Anyone working in the field is well aware of the phenomenon known as "visit from Qualcomm" legal department. In fact, it is a most common question asked when discussing a financial plan or investment in a wireless related SMB: "And have you had a visit from Qualcom yet?".
It is essentially the same tactic as used by IBM in the early 90-es with their PC-based patents. You are left to develop something, start a business and hopla two chaps in black suits show up with a list of patents which you have supposedly infringed. GTE, Nokia, Motorola, Broadcom were simply big enough to tell these chaps to f*** off, and fight it out. Frankly, I can bet that every single one of them fired the legal salvo after a visit from Pan Legalicus Qualcommi. In fact, in Nokia's case it is known to be so as it has happened as a result of Qualcom violating its obligations to license standardised intellectual property on non-discriminatory terms.
One sided summary (Score:5, Interesting)
that they are unique in this field is completely ignoring one side of the story.
Every try to make something in the GSM/UMTS space? You will have about a dozen companies
approach you with their hands out. Nokia, Qualcomm, Ericcson, Motorola, Lucent, Samsung
and several others. CDMA royalties are about 5%, almost all paid to Qualcomm. GSM/UMTS
royalties sum up to about 18%. The only difference is that if you are one of the big guys,
you "cross-license" your patents so that you don't end up actually paying anything. If you
are a new entrant... well, you are out of luck.
What is pissing off the Nokias, Ericcsons and Broadcomms of the world is that in the CDMA space,
they have no patents at all. None. That is because they fought CDMA every step of the way until Qualcomm
demonstrated conclusively that it is a commercially practical technology. Then they
turned around and tried to claim it as their own, and tried to co-opt it by applying it with minor
modifications to the UMTS space.
Actually, I am amazed that Broadcomm is getting away with this. Their sum total of contributions to
the wireless space is close to zero. They have done some work in the wireline world in the early
years, but they have contributed zip, zilch, nada in the development of wireless IP. They are not
even a name in the industry. HOwever, it is possible that they have purchased some IPR of late.
I am quite happy to see cracks in the patent edifice as a whole, but making Qualcomm the villain in
this is not correct. Qualcomm laid many of the foundations for modern wireless communications technology;
Qualcomm corporate R&D is about as close as you can get to how Bell Labs used to be.
Lots of Qualcomm's IPR consists of non-trivial, non-obvious, fundamental contributions to communications
theory. Most other wireless companies, in particular Nokia, Motorola, Ericcson etc have done nothing
fundamental in the past 15 years. They are product companies whose forte consists of taking old technologies
and packaging them in crowd-pleasing form factors, or (in the case of Ericcson), maintaining relationships
with behemoth carriers.
Magnus
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There is nothing wrong with software patents that is not also wrong with hardware patents. The problem is obviousness and a consistent failure to identify prior art. Saying that a programmer is incapable of being an inventor is ridiculous.
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In reference to your above cited signature, Apple doesn't have DRM on their software. When's the last time you had to enter a code to use OS X, or do some sort of stupid activation? Video is a different matter.
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No, you don't have to do activation, but they use DRM to restrict installs of OS X to their own iron.
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Ebay or someone has a patent on the automatic bidding (proxy bidding is what they call it or something). No other site can have that with out getting the license.
Namco
ITC press release (Score:5, Informative)
It says that it found a violation on U.S. Patent No. 6,714,983. Here's the link to the patent [google.com].
One thing to note is that the ITC investigates and makes recommendations to congress and the president. It's not actually a court of law or policy making body. So I think this from the article: isn't really true. Especially when later in the article it states that the government has 60 days to approve or overturn the order made by the ITC.
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Seriously they've patented everything that can use a battery and reduces power usage by modifying the frequency of scanning for access ports. And then they further patented the ability to shut down unneeded parts of a wireless chip.
Unless I'm reading the patent wrong which I hope I am.
TRIPing over your competitors .. (Score:2)
So basically they patented all wired and wireless networks. Isn't just a case of a US company using legislation to impede competitors entry into the market. The whole TRIPS [groklaw.net] thing being designed so any future non-US telecom company will have to pay a tithe to Wa
Once again, patent system blocks progress (Score:5, Insightful)
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Really? How does discovering something again lead to progress? I could re-invent the wheel, or prove that 2+2=4 for independently, but neither would advance the fields of engineering or mathematics. Prohibiting independent discovery is not so much the issue, as dealing with the infringing use. It is the potential prohibition of the infringi
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Best: I have no idea of how to push a heavy weight for a long distance. I search the patent database (on the cave celling) for you wheel patent, implement it and solve my problem in exchange for giving you a small piece of meet of every animal that I haul.
Good: I reinvent the wheel and pay no royalties to you. O
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For example, [in recent news...] the Amazon 1-click patent. Since I'm not running a webshop I didn't try to declare that idea as my own. But I think that if I were running a shop I would want to investigate what's the fastest way to get someone to order something and on with their life. I'd probably come up with a 1-click idea too. It just makes sense. The website already knows who yo
Re:Once again, patent system blocks progress (Score:5, Interesting)
There's also the new (pending?) revisions from SCOTUS on the "obviousness" clause that changes the meaning (I hope) to "if the new 'invention' is simply a combination of existing components that does what you would expect by combining those components, it doesn't count as a patentable invention."
One-click shouldn't be a patent, because it simply chains together existing components in a way that results in the simple sums of functionality. There is nothing "new" there.
A patent on a chip that simply sums together signal detection with wake-up logic to save batteries should also not be patentable, because both of those technologies have been around for a long time.
It's only when the sum of components does not simply result in an obvious function that a patent should be granted. My test would be something like: strip the patent application of the description of what it does and the submitter and give it to a group of engineers in that field. If that small group can't determine what the invention is supposed to do within, say, 8 hours (or some other 'reasonable' time frame), then it can get a patent. Otherwise, no patent.
The problem is that people are now using combinations of preexisting ideas as patents when they shouldn't be allowed. I wouldn't even grant a patent on the optical mouse, because it's an "obvious" combination of an optical motion sensor and a computer pointing device. Now, I might patent something related to how the optical motion sensor works, but only so long as it's not simply a combination of existing components.
broadcom (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:broadcom (Score:4, Interesting)
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You must be new here. 90% of interesting or useful comments receive a Troll, Flamebait or Offtopic mod. This has been the case for the past year or so. But don't worry. The INTELLIGENT readers on slashdot read all comments, at -1, anyway.
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Now say Microsoft decide to patent something like this, say, develop a wireless standard and make it ubiquitous, licensing it to
patenting use of old algs to new problems is naff (Score:2, Insightful)
The primary and secondary examine
The real qustion then - is overturn likley? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Grump
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They're explosive [wikipedia.org] you know. ^_^
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After being given dirty looks by the immigration officer, asked many personal and even rude questions, being fingerprinted and photographed, and generally made to feel like a terrorist, I suspect having your phone confiscated is the least of a tourist's worries when coming to the US. In fact, you rather expect it at some point.
I avoid the US nowadays.
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One Customs offi
Re:Personal use? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Just because Denmark's a prison?
Re:what phones use this? (Score:4, Informative)
If you have a Sprint phone chances are you've seen a "Digital by Qualcomm" logo/sticker somewhere on it. (The exception being the Treos)
Re:what phones use this? (Score:4, Informative)
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Also, the update pisses me off. Yet more damn iPhone hype... "It could well be the most advanced smartphone in America!".
Except it's not a smartphone.
And it's not as "smart" as the smartphones that are already out here.
Feh.
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It's the US...you can patent anything. We're the country that let someone sue Microsoft over a patent that somehow covered MP3s, and they won (I think it was even filed in 2000 or 1999, so there was a ton of prior art...jesus).
"A system for warming your testicles with a laptop computer"
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So yes, its obvious we want to save power on wireless chips, but if you come up with some cool and unique way of doing it, then you get a patent so you can profit on your idea.
And exactly how is it suddenly impossible to profit from an idea without obtaining a patent first? Whatever happened to first-to-market, brand recognition and good, old-fashioned competition?
If you need a state-protected monopoly to turn a profit, maybe your invention wasn't so damned good after all...
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Company A spends 5 million dollars researching how to design and manufacture widgets. They release it into the market. Company B then buy one of the first run, spends 100,000 dollars reverse engineering it, and sells it for 25% of the price Company A offers. Company A now goes out of business.
It's really not that hard to understand, unless you're on Slashdot, where everything someone else came up with is obvious and stupid, but only once they've come up with it.
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Just like if I drive to the store to buy a carton of milk. To the store the milk is worth $2 or whatever. But it cost me that + gas + wear on car + time. Say a store springs up closer to my house, I spend less time/wear/gas to get there. Did they cheat the first company? Suppose the first company had a patent on "putting a store in a neighbourhood," would that be a violation?
Tom
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Yes R&D costs a lot It can take a long time to find an inexpensive to manufacture solution to a problem. That R&D needs to be paid for and that what patents do.
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Think about it, at some level competitors have a common subset of shared assets [in terms of ideas]. Why is it more ideal for all of them to independently waste money coming up with them?
For example, what if AMD and Intel collaborated on a clever ALU design? Intel could use it's clout [and advancements] in the lithography side of things to have it's own distinction from AMD, all while not
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I agree with trademark law oddly enough, but only so far as it applies to brand names and logos, not sayings and other shit. When I go to the store to buy
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In the semiconductor industry, it is quite difficult to copy functionality from your competitors chips. They have a long development cycle, and frequent process changes. If you wait for your competitor to do all the innovation, your chips will lag behind theirs severely.
In this case, both Company A and Company B probably developed the same technology independently. I doubt Qualcom knowingly copied a patented function from a Broadcom chip. In all likelihood, the function was relatively obvious. Both te
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First of all, there's enough examples of things being invented simultaneously by several different inventors to make the basic premise of the patent system suspicious from a fairness
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Why?
This is the whole point - Company B isn't going to reverse engineer the widget and set up its own manufacturing facility overnight. Company A has all that time to establish itself as the brand leader and the ORIGINAL. If company B can afford to sell the widget for 25% less and still turn a profit, I'm sure company A can make money too. They don't suddenly go out of business - unless they're complacent. But complacency isn't c
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Company A has to get said widget to market, advertise, ramp up production, and get it to stores.
Company B may already have production facilities and a big name so Company A could have a very short time to make any money.
There is an old saying in business, pioneers get killed settlers get rich.
Even with patents it is very hard to make a new invention pay off. Yes I am not fond of how some patents are written or used but patents are not a bad thing just like copyrights are not a bad thing.
You
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The patent process needs to be revamped to prevent the abuse that's taking place today
Sounds great, in theory. But how do you propose to make this happen, without introducing too large barriers to enter, too short duration of patents or too expensive/slow patent verification processes?
Patents try to solve an unsolvable problem today in that they need to be short in duration to minimize the chilling effects, but long to earn their owners cash; broad to be applicable, but narrow to avoid carpet bombing; easy to understand to be of use for others and patent examiners, but obfuscated to prevent
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Thanks
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Basalla, G., The Evolution of Technology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1988.
Canadian Intellectual Property Office, A Guide to Patents, Ottawa, Publications Centre Communications Branch, Industry Canada, 1994.
Carter, H.D., If You Want to Invent, New York, The Vanguard Press, 1939.
Cohen, W., R.R. Nelson and J. P. Walsh, Protecting their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not), Working Paper 7552, Cambridge, Nati
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Here's the executive summary: http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000902-3.htm [quebecoislibre.org]
Some more references:
http://wiki.ffii.org/Martin041109En [ffii.org]
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf [mises.org]
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/21/business/wh o.php [iht.com]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,73 69,665969,00.html [guardian.co.uk]
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/again st.htm [dklevine.com]
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020805/newman200207 25 [thenation.com]
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory
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If the duration of a patent is 20 years for a single individual, why not state that the 20 years applies to all people involved in the project, but must be divided amongst them? If a five-man team at a university develops something, give them four years. If a division of a company with 25 people directly involved in a project create some new tech, give them just shy of a year. Include the management that directly oversaw the project, and
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I just had an idea. It sounds great, which probably means it's awful.
Ideas are dirt cheap. No wait, I take that back. People pay good money for dirt, in the right place, like a landfill.
Patent inventions are so miniscule these days that they really shouldn't be active more than a couple of years anyway, but this allows the "little man" the flexibility he needs to compete with the big companies.
That's the easiest way to "fix" most of what's wrong with the patent system, yes. However, it also takes away the incentive to patent stuff in the first place. If you are going to pay upwards of a million Euros (average real cost of a patent in the EU, including attorney fees, future litigation and so on) for a patent, you really want it to last. That's why applicants have come up with so m
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Of course I don't propose to solve all the problems with the current system. That will most likely be the work of a large group of people specializing in that particular field.
Well, so far they have just managed to make it worse. After all, this group of people would be the very same patent attorneys whose jobs depend on making more and more things patentable.
"In 1982, Congress created a special Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) for all patent cases. The CAFC capped off this trend toward broader patent protection by ruling in 1998 that methods of doing business are patentable.
Patent claims for computer software and methods of doing business inundated the USPTO, and
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I think a few USPTO people should go to Guano bay for not doing their duty.
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I didn't expect it to happen in my lifetime, but carry on. There's a reason why emerging market funds are leading the way nowadays.
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That's a problem easily taken care of by a few finely crafted US/EU assets.
Should Asia fall, there's always a possibility of just scrapping the WTO, all other current trade treaties, and making the EU into a North Atlantic group large enough to make Asia fall back.
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US market: 300 million people
Asian market: 2,000 million people
Trade barrier and publicly shredding any letter you get from an economist(lest they do another 1000 letter bit again): Priceless
A few calculated "accidents" causing the fall of countries formerly siphoning off jobs from your country: Beyond priceless.
There's the Austrian model, and there's defending your country from all threats foreign and domestic.
I postulate the US of the future will be a technological backwater in the coming years with it's
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