Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
The law is for YOUR protection. Honest!
rjbull:
This today from the OSNews website: [...]
In other words, more protection for large companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft,
--- End quote ---
-40hz (June 24, 2011, 08:40 AM)
--- End quote ---
I dunno. It's easy to rant. With apologies for not thinking this through very clearly:
I used to help with patent monitoring when I was at work, though in the ink/toner industry, not the software patents that have got everyone so excited. Some people seem to talk as if patents were deliberately created by government as a bureaucratic tool for big companies to stifle progress, especially if it's made by the small guy. It's more a case of big companies warily circling round each other. They quite naturally want commercial advantage and don't want their concepts making money for the competition too early. Don't forget that a patent is a contract between the assignee and the public, giving the assignee a monopoly on the use of the invention, subject to some conditions, for a limited period, after which the invention passes into the public domain and can be used by anyone without payment. In other words, the big companies are in fact revealing (within the parameters of the patenting game) what they're doing, and eventually their competitors will be able to use the invention for free. OK, not for a long time, but the principle is there.
The U.S. patent system has always had certain peculiarities, as compared with the rest of the world. It insists on "first to invent," rather than "first to file." Although that sounds like morally higher ground, it's in fact a lawyers' paradise. You can riffle through the European Patent Office's documentation and clearly establish who got there first - but it's going to be very hard indeed to assess the claims of two competing companies from lab notebooks or whatever, and very expensive too. Rightly or wrongly, the insistence on "first to invent" has always seemed to me to assume that almost all inventions, and certainly the game-changing ones, are made by individuals or duos working in a garage. Well, those do happen, but in my experience, very rarely indeed. The great majority of patents came from fairly large companies, were mostly made by teams, and assigned to the companies those teams worked for. The inventions might not even be particularly innovative, but they should have enough novelty to qualify, and sometimes gain their owners a owners a temporarly advantage. So perhaps patents are a big company game, but in the main the players are big companies.
Carol Haynes:
It's easy to rant.
-rjbull (June 26, 2011, 04:13 PM)
--- End quote ---
Yes true
Some people seem to talk as if patents were deliberately created by government as a bureaucratic tool for big companies to stifle progress, especially if it's made by the small guy.
--- End quote ---
That is very true - but like most legal tools the people/companies with the big bucks can pervert and destroy the original concepts (laws, patents, trademarks) to their own ends. That seems to be the order of the day these days in software companies.
It's more a case of big companies warily circling round each other. They quite naturally want commercial advantage and don't want their concepts making money for the competition too early.
--- End quote ---
That is also true - but another truth is that they all claim to have invented things they never did - and usually the little people who did the hard work in the first place either get screwed or paid money to shut up.
Where is Xerox in all this? They invented the windowed interface - why aren't they suing Apple and Microsoft and Linux?
To me the perfect illustration of this distortion of legal intent is the companies trying to make trademarks out of normal everyday English and then having the audacity to sue people for daring to use that language themselves! App Store is only the recent tip of the iceberg.
It still doesn't negate my argument that the current patents and trademark systems are not there to protect anyone but rather to allow the wealthy and powerful to abuse smaller companies and individuals with impunity.
The whole legal framework needs to be rewritten for the model world 'cos it certainly ain't working as intended now!
40hz:
Where is Xerox in all this? They invented the windowed interface - why aren't they suing Apple and Microsoft and Linux?
-Carol Haynes (June 26, 2011, 04:31 PM)
--- End quote ---
They did sue Apple back in 1990. See here for details. This occurred in the middle of Apple's lawsuit against Microsoft where Apple was ultimately denied the patentability of the desktop metaphor.
Xerox lost their suit too.
From Wikipedia (emphasis added);
In the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit, Xerox also sued Apple alleging that Mac's GUI was heavily based on Xerox's.[2] The district court dismissed Xerox's claims without addressing whether Apple's GUI infringed Xerox's, since the latter licensed it to the former back in 1979 for pre-IPO stock.
--- End quote ---
Apparently somebody forgot (or was afraid) to tell Xerox's Board of Directors that somebody in the company had already licensed the rights to Apple. (And for what amounted to 'chump change' at the time they did.)
Whoops! ;D
Jimdoria:
I definitely support the intent of the patent system. However, the issue (and perhaps this is due to "first to invent") is that large companies with the financial and legal resources to work the system have started claiming overly broad patents and then using this legal toehold to stifle / subdue competition.
If you as a small shop develop a multimedia streaming device that beats the pants off of anything Apple offers, but Apple owns the patent on "streaming multimedia over a network" your invention is essentially useless to you. Apple can step in and demand a cut of your profits so big that it puts you out of business, or just seek to put you out of business directly.
(BTW, not really picking on Apple here. Insert Microsoft or Oracle or even GE above if it makes you feel better.)
Now imagine you are an inventor who wants to avoid this scenario. What is your due diligence? An exhaustive patent search of any patent that might potentially cover the technology you're thinking of inventing? Better be a rich guy to start with. And once your search is done, you may find that any device you create (or part of any device you create) could conceivably be described by one or more existing patents. So you give up and switch to gardening, which stifles innovation - the exact opposite of the system's original intent.
The real crazy maker is that so many of these patents are not just over-broad but ACTUALLY PRIOR ART. They are patents for things that already existed well before the patent was filed. But the patent office grants the patent anyway, because they simply can't keep up with what's already in existence, and aren't really incentivized to do so anyway.
What's really needed is a more stringent definition of what's patentable. The Patent office used to require inventors include prototypes of their inventions along with their filing, until they ran out of room to keep everything. But now inventions are software or CAD designs, which take up only server storage space, which is more or less limitless. Maybe they should go back to the old system and require an actual, physical implementation of the invention in order to be eligible for the patent.
rjbull:
another truth is that they all claim to have invented things they never did - and usually the little people who did the hard work in the first place either get screwed or paid money to shut up.-Carol Haynes (June 26, 2011, 04:31 PM)
--- End quote ---
As Jimdoria notes, some companies have been awarded patents even where there was prior art, or where the invention was obvious to those skilled in the art. But that's a failure of the patent office, not necessarily of the legislation itself, and my impression was that the U.S. Patent Office was the worst culprit. That seems to mean a need for higher-quality staff, more staff, more training, and more moral fibre to stand up to clever presentation. At times I also wondered if national chauvinism played a part - if it isn't American, it isn't an invention, and who in the homeland cares about those damn foreigners anyway. :(
To me the perfect illustration of this distortion of legal intent is the companies trying to make trademarks out of normal everyday English and then having the audacity to sue people for daring to use that language themselves!
--- End quote ---
I too find this action arrogant and unacceptable. It isn't covered by patent law, though, and (in the UK at least) trademark/trade name law is a lot more lax.
It still doesn't negate my argument that the current patents and trademark systems are not there to protect anyone but rather to allow the wealthy and powerful to abuse smaller companies and individuals with impunity.
--- End quote ---
In my limited experience of a small corner of manufacturing industry, I feel that's greatly overstating the case... Is this in danger of becoming a case where urban myths and conspiracy theories are trumping dispassionate argument?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version