On Friday, August 12, 2011 10:47:38 AM UTC+2, KWright wrote: > > > Agreed in principle... > > The problems start if you then follow through on the impact of changes to > the way the USPTO does its reviews. Specifically: > - How will a more thorough process be funded? >
Yup. That's the million dollar question. Solve that, and we can solve this entire mess. Unfortunately I believe the answer is: That's just not possible. You can't put the burden on society, it would cost way too much. You can't put the burden with the patent holder, as it would put acquiring patents _WELL_ out of reach of the kinds of smaller companies that we're evidently all rooting for here, and you can't try and put the burden on the 'sector', because that's tantamount to giving the big guys the keys. It's their money, they are forced to field the experts, and those experts will naturally end up biased. It is legally very difficult to sort companies into 'big earners' and 'little earners', i.e. trying to somehow force BigCorps to pay for it while keeping the sector itself cheap enough to enter for that innovative process to keep churning out nice ideas. Trying to blanket the costs across the industry means it becomes (much) harder to enter as a startup (you'd have to start paying the patent tax right away). Let's say that unicorns exist and there's some way to reform the USPTO so that they'll be clearly doing more good than harm. That form of the USPTO will likely cost (a lot) more money to run, money that goes effectively nowhere (it's not like the USPTO makes or invents things, and while technically they publish a kind of encyclopedia of ideas, I can't imagine anyone would just go there and end up improving efficiency much, the internet is much better at disseminating ideas). We'd be buying a healthier innovation climate for our money, but will the value outweigh its cost? So, even assuming it's possible to reform the USPTO into something that's clearly doing more good than harm, it might still be a bad idea in the long haul for the sector in the large if the created value pales in comparison to the massive financial costs. > - What does it mean for pre-existing patents, from before the changes were > made? > > You just can't touch those. They've changed hands far too often to just plain yank em away from their holders, a few of whom invested serious time and money (in theory - if an ignorably small percentage of patent holders actually 'deserve' them according to these reforms, then the right answer is obviously to just abolish it all, so in arguing for reform vs. abolishment we can take 'there exist a significant number of relevant, 'fair' patents' as a given). What might be fair is to retroactively reduce the terms of all software and process-related patents. Sucks for these mythic 'fair' patent holders, but if the theory that you should be able to turn a buck in 5 years with a software invention holds, they shouldn't be hit nearly as hard as trolls who are trying to cash out on a 15 year old now extremely "Duh, oh, and half the entire industry runs on this stuff!" patent. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/javaposse/-/Az5kzKSUXRkJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
