Thank you for your comment, @zridling, but some of your facts are, well, not facts. They're false. A patent application trying to cover "Brown-colored desks" would have been invalid in 1789 and all the more today. Everyone would know it, and it would be worthless. That's a straw man argument, worthless as an example for productive discussion.... I am a patent attorney, and I serve inventors from the garage to the post-doctoral academic lab to the large company. I would love to have a discussion about patent policy and the US patent system, but I would not love to spend all of my time clearing up misinformation and baseless vitriol. @zridling, do you really prefer the latter?-MSchantz
MSchantz, you missed the <sarcasm> present in 'brown-colored desks'; it was meant as a glaringly silly illustration, not fact. But believing that the Patent system is screwed is not vitriol, it's a fact, and especially so with regard to software patents. It's a system that provides you endless work and income, but unless you're seeking to reform it, you're part of the problem by participating in it.
So I ask:
We are witnessing a classic patent thicket in the realm of smartphones, with every major tech/telecom company in constant litigation with every other tech/telecom company on the planet? Patent infringement cases in the software industry has tripled in the past ten years Given that you're a patent attorney, what are three bad things you see with the system in this [digital] century?
Take as a recent example
Oracle suing Google: "
Google, if found to infringe, would owe Oracle between $1.4 to $6.1 billion dollars -- a breathtaking figure that is out of proportion to any meaningful measure of the intellectual property at issue. Even the low end of Cockburn’s range is over 10 times the amount that Sun Microsystems, Inc. made each year for the entirety of its Java licensing program and 20 times what Sun made for Java-based mobile licensing." It's as if Oracle's Larry Ellison is trying to make billions off of patent infringements, not do business.
Another recent example this week is Apple being granted a multitouch patent, i.e., if you design a tablet or phone that can use two or more fingers on its display screen, Apple can sue you. Software patents provide too little incentive for too much litigation in the tech industry. Little is gained by granting such intellectual monopolies to such companies like Apple. The [software] patent experiment ha no doubt failed except to employ a lot of lawyers and eat up a lot of court time.
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Links:
James Besson: A Generation of Software Patents (wrote a great book in 2009 titled
Patent Failure, which is about the US Patent system in general.)
http://papers.ssrn.c...?abstract_id=1868979
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