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BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired)
Wired covers
the latest entrant into the wireless lawsuit game: BT. "An example
patent is 'Service provision system for communications networks,' which BT
was awarded in the 1990s. It essentially boils down to an app figuring out
whether a phone is connected to the web via Wi-Fi or 3G, and choosing to
stream at a different bandwidth. Google infringes this in Google Music and
the Android Market, BT alleges." Yes, this is the same BT that once
claimed to have patented the hyperlink.
(Log in to post comments)
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 19, 2011 21:33 UTC (Mon) by geertj (subscriber, #4116) [Link]
I wish BT good luck, now that Google owns the Motorola patent portfolio. Given the area of business Motorola was in, i can easily imagine BT infringing on a dozen of Google patents.
Sigh, what a silly game.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 19, 2011 21:40 UTC (Mon) by phedders (subscriber, #14685) [Link]
I thought patents had to be non-obvious... And I used to think the guys than ran BT were quite smart.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 19, 2011 22:10 UTC (Mon) by gidoca (subscriber, #62438) [Link]
Non-obvious to a government employee, which doesn't mean a lot...
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 19, 2011 22:48 UTC (Mon) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
Patent offices are supposed to employ experts in various fields who assess the validity of patents in their fields. Software may well be too much of a moving target for them to find any such experts. Or, maybe that's the excuse.
Then again, my understanding is that patent offices take in fees per patent granted, not per patent examined, so there's an incentive to grant patents even if they wouldn't pass the smell test.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 11:31 UTC (Tue) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> Patent offices are supposed to employ experts in various fields who assess the validity of patents in their fields.
Correct. And in some patent offices it is not uncommon that the examiners have a PhD or equivalent, and a masters level degreee is typically a minimum requirement. In times like these the Patent Offices have no problems recruiting skilled people. Salaries tend to be good too.
> Software may well be too much of a moving target for them to find any such experts.
By definition inventions have to be new and the technical fields are expected to be moving targets. Specialised search engines and access to large digital libraries of scientific journals (such as IEEE journals) are used to find prior art. Plain Google search is also used.
> Or, maybe that's the excuse.
If that were the case patents should be easily obtained. Discussions on patent attorney fora show otherwise.
Mind you, if open source programmers were a bit more generous with comments also source code would be a lot more useful in showing prior art. Sprinkling junk like "you are not expected to understand this" can be positively damaging for a piece of software to be usable as prior art.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 12:24 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
To bad IP law is fundamentally immoral and does little more then trample all over progress and stomp the rights of individuals and businesses.
It's now a shield that is used by large companies to pay off the Government to prevent competition from smaller companies.
It's something that needs to end. Otherwise we are just going to slip into another technological dark age.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 14:02 UTC (Tue) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> To bad IP law is fundamentally immoral and does little more then trample all over progress and stomp the rights of individuals and businesses.
That is quite a statement, yet both sides seem to be able to cite ample evidence for eiterh view. So far it does not seem that obvious. And without protection how do you get investors to fund your startup or get returns on a 10+ year development project?
> It's now a shield that is used by large companies to pay off the Government to prevent competition from smaller companies.
It is interesting how different the world looks from the inside and the outside of the IPR world. In patent attorney fora you will find patents are seens as means for the little man to avoid being trampled down by the large established companies. In fact many countries have special provisions for small entities. In big versus little, the big company has a lot of tricks available that a small company simply cannot afford.
> It's something that needs to end. Otherwise we are just going to slip into another technological dark age.
Without patenting many companies are likely to try secrecy for protection and such secrets enjoy a much larger protection in the US and UK than many other countries. I doubt that is much of an improvement.
And it is interesting that you use the expression "dark age", after all keeping people in the dark was, from what I was told an expression used about a method of protecting knowledge by keeping it secret.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 18:23 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Patent protection for software is double-dipping as the software is already protected by copyright and is secret. Since the publishing of the patent doesn't provide any useful service to the advancement of technology it is giving government protection in exchange for nothing for society, it's a taxpayer cost with no benefit.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 23:48 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] The fundamental question is this: should we be granting monopolies on the application of solutions to particular problems and to entire problem domains? Moreover, in fields where those solutions borrow heavily from existing, freely available and freely usable work, and where many people are likely to arrive at such a solution on their own through the natural, routine practice of their profession (which involves the application of skills like observation and deduction, not the perusal of a patent catalogue), should we deny those people the right to apply their independently discovered solution to a problem domain just because someone else has claimed to have already "invented" the only solution?
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 23, 2011 11:27 UTC (Fri) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> The fundamental question is this: should we be granting monopolies on the application of solutions to particular problems and to entire problem domains?
Perhaps I misunderstand what you ask here but it seems to me you believe you can get a patent to all solutions to a problem and entire problem domains. I do not know where you can get such patents. Rather you can get patents for new and specific solutions to a problem and the description has to be clear and sufficient for a person skilled in the art to actually work the invention.
> many people are likely to arrive at such a solution on their own through the natural, routine practice of their profession
You have to make sure you are not looking at this in hindsight. If everything were obvious way back then, one would expect all inventions to have been made already. Nevertheless we see progress takes place gradually. Also the requirement of non-obviousness or inventive step is put in place to deny patents to routine practice. If the patent regards something that truly was within the field of an uninventive routine worker in the field the patent can be revoked.
> just because someone else has claimed to have already "invented" the only solution?
That is an assumption which not always is true. The idea of patents promoting progress is also to encourage others to find independent alternative solutions. This argument is frequently brought up and illustrated with James Watt's steam engine as an example. Rather than inventing many wanted free use of his inventions. In reality alternatives were plenty such as turbines, stirling-, diesel- and otto-engines, 2- and 4-stroke engines and more. It just takes work. When people talk about the *only* solution I always wonder how they can be so sure there is just one single sulution.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 23, 2011 18:43 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
in theory you are right about the checking that goes in to granting a patent
however, in practice, the patents that have been granted (not just in the US) do not get checked according to the stated rules.
go read through the many patent lawsuits going on right now and see if you still think that any of them are really as narrow and specific as you claim all patents are.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 21, 2011 8:32 UTC (Wed) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> Patent protection for software is double-dipping as the software is already protected by copyright and is secret.
There is an either-or at work here: either you keep it secret, or you file a patent application describing the technology suffcient for a person skilled in the art to work the invention. Failure to provide sufficiency is grounds for revocation in many countries/regions.
If you can get a patent while simultaneously keeping it secret I certainly wonder how you did that.
> Since the publishing of the patent doesn't provide any useful service to the advancement of technology
How do you know that is the case?
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 21, 2011 10:05 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] I gather that the patents being granted on software tend to fall into two partially intersecting categories: the unintelligible (hence, no real gain to society) and the "what kind of drooling idiot thinks that's innovative?" (hence, shouldn't have been granted...)
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 21, 2011 16:06 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
go read a few software patents, they are not written in terms that a programmer can understand. Even if a programmer wrote the initial information, after the lawyers get done re-writing it, the initial programmer has to read very carefully to see their initial invention in the patent.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 22, 2011 10:17 UTC (Thu) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
If an application is unintelligible (I take it this corresponds to insufficiency) or a case of "what kind of drooling idiot thinks that's innovative?" (also called obvious or lacking inventive step) a patent should not have been granted, moreover the patent can be revoked on either of these grounds. No professional would want to draft an application that falls foul of any of these grounds.
It might be worth keeping in mind that the question of obviousness should be framed in the times that the application was filed, not in view of state of the art today. It is not clear that people should lose their patents just because something 20 years later is regarded as obvious in view of perfect hindsight.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 22, 2011 14:07 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] From the point of view of rentier capitalists (and anyone they're paying to work for them), a patent doesn't need to be iron-clad. It merely has to be sufficiently robust that the targets of patent suits will think it's easier and cheaper to sign an out-of-court licence settlement than to try and get the patent invalidated. As long as the targets are picked carefully (not too large, not too violently principled, not too well-connected) it works a treat.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 3, 2012 16:32 UTC (Tue) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
Is that 'not too violently principled' why no-one ever sues Debian? (and it doesn't have much money)
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 22, 2011 16:43 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
You seem to be describing some idealized system that doesn't really have much relation to what actually exists in the real world.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 23, 2011 9:44 UTC (Fri) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
When drafting oppositions these are always avenues to explore. I have done this myself. Statistics are freely available from EPO where typically 1/3 of the cases the opposition fails and the patent is maintained, 1/3 where the patent is revoked, and 1/3 where the patent is maintained in amended form.
Invoices from these processes are very much in the real world and clients paying for this would not continue such proceedings if it all were a fairy tale.
Are you making your statement from your own experiences?
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 21, 2011 16:56 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] There is an either-or at work here: either you keep it secret, or you file a patent application describing the technology suffcient for a person skilled in the art to work the invention. Failure to provide sufficiency is grounds for revocation in many countries/regions. There are a lot of reasons including that one that should prevent most software patents from being granted but unfortunately they are granted and in great numbers which retards the software industry. Only large players can afford to get patents and most of the patents are on techniques which are re-implemented over and over as they are the obvious solution to any competent developer with the appropriate domain knowledge. The large companies blanket cross license their patents, form covenants not to sue or take the position of Mutually Assured Destruction because everyone infringes on everyone else's patents liberally, there is no way to not do so. Small players or new players are the prey of the incumbents because they have no portfolio with which to defend themselves. This is starkly illustrated in the phone industry where everyone is suing everyone else, trying to waste as much money as possible of their opponents to encourage them into per-unit licensing deals. MS has been very successful with this strategy and is extracting licensing revenue solely because they took the time and money to file patents and Google didn't bother. > Since the publishing of the patent doesn't provide any useful service to the advancement of technology How do you know that is the case? No one in the software industry has ever read a patent to learn a technique, that never happens. Patents in software are solely a means to extract rent from competitors in addition to making product, they provide no public service.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 23, 2011 10:06 UTC (Fri) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> Only large players can afford to get patents
How strange. Some of my clients are small, some even are students on a tiny budget, and they found it affordable. In most places you are allowed to file a patent application without having to use a patent attorney or patent agent. And if you use a professional representative you might keep in mind that this is a service industry and you are allowed to shop around for a price you can accept.
> obvious solution to any competent developer with the appropriate domain knowledge
The question really is: was it really obvious at the time the patent application was filed? Hindsight can make everything obvious, thus the tests for non-obviousness or inventive step can be rather complicated.
> Small players or new players are the prey of the incumbents because they have no portfolio with which to defend themselves
Amongst professional representatives (see for instance Patentlt-O or IPKat for such fora) the view is that IPR is a tool for small companies to avoid being overrun by large companies. Also many countries have special provisions for small entities. Finally large companies prefer not to take on small companies because it rarely is worth the expenses and few like to be seen as a modern day Genghis Khan. Also it is not uncommon that new players file patent applications both to secure freedom to operate and also get an overview of what rights already exist in the field. Around here investors prefer to see applications are filed before investing.
> No one in the software industry has ever read a patent to learn a technique, that never happens.
Licensing is very much used in the mobile phone sector and if the patent is useless you will have little success in licensing negotiations. At least one of my clients used patents to learn of new technology. Many, perhaps most, in this business use expensive and huge systems to monitor IPR activity from competitors. Reading an application requires training but so does programming too.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 3, 2012 16:45 UTC (Tue) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
> The question really is: was it really obvious at the time the patent application was filed?
If it is independently reinvented then it shouldn't matter whether it was obvious or not at the time of filing. The whole principle that you can claim a code concept for 20 years is wrong. The principle that you shouldn't be allowed to re-implement interesting code ideas you come across is also wrong.
> > No one in the software industry has ever read a patent to learn a technique, that never happens.
> Licensing is very much used in the mobile phone sector and if the patent is useless you will have little success in licensing negotiations.
Licencing is not the same as learning-from. Entities licence patents to avoid being sued over them. They often have little choice. That doesn't mean they learned anything useful from the patent, or couldn't have thought up a perfectly good solution of their own.
I suppose that somewhere there is a software engineer that leanred saomething from a patent - they can't _all_ be totally devoid of useful info. But I've never come across such a person, and it's quite obvious that this largely theoretical good is negligible in comparison to the large, expensive and inconvenient harm of the system.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 9, 2012 17:43 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
>> Only large players can afford to get patents
> >How strange. Some of my clients are small, some even are students on a tiny budget, and they found it affordable.
Let's put some numbers in so everybody can make their own decisions. How much does it costs (as in total cost) to have a patent approved? That should include the paperwork, but also an average number of rejections and resubmissions, and also investigation of possible related patents.
It's true that mostly only large players (or trolls) do make any USE of patents.
> [...] tests for non-obviousness or inventive step can be rather complicated.
In that case the system should default to not granting. That would put the burden where it belongs: into the interested party.
> Amongst professional representatives (see for instance Patentlt-O or IPKat for such fora) the view is that IPR is a tool for small companies to avoid being overrun by large companies.
You will excuse me, but amongst professional developers (look all over the net for references) IPR is a tool for bureaucrats to extort money from innovators. Also, it's seen as a tool for big corporations to keep competition away from it's customers. Thus, looks like small applicants only option is to sell their patents to bigger fish, often for peanuts. Or get into big trouble.
> Many, perhaps most, in this business use expensive and huge systems to monitor IPR activity from competitors.
I would call this marketing. Certainly not development.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 9, 2012 20:58 UTC (Mon) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> Let's put some numbers in so everybody can make their own decisions.
There are large variations here but if we assume a national application most people are allowed to draft, file and prosecute their own applications ("pro se" is the term used). Cost for filing plus cost for printing on grant would be about USD 400 for a short patent with few claims. If you use a patent attorney or patent agent and prepare a lot yourself I have been able to get it to grant and printed for just under USD 3000.
For small clients on a shoestring budget we have information on how they can reduce cost as much as possible. Larger companies prefer to leave as much as possible to us in which case the application drafting is the largest part, at USD 5000 for a 20 page application (rough figures, complexities vary a lot). Then you get reporting of office actions and claims amendments, very roughly USD 1000 per round, so you get a total of USD 8000 - 10000.
(Now since I wanted to answer your question but do not want to make this into an advertisement for myself or my company (and certainly do not want to make the Editor grumpy...) I hope for understanding that I now cannot tell where this example is taken from.)
As for EPO the official cost is public: http://www.epo.org/applying/forms-fees/fees.html
>> [...] tests for non-obviousness or inventive step can be rather complicated.
The burden is already on the applicant once the official action is out. Examiners make their own analysis and it is up to the applicant to respond, no mater how strange the analysis in the official action may be. In by far most cases the first official action is a rejection.
> You will excuse me, but amongst professional developers (look all over the net for references) IPR is a tool for bureaucrats to extort money from innovators.
There are two thought behind the cost levels set. First of all there is a preference for the patent office in many countries/regions to be self funded. It is also intended so that if you do not make any money from the patent you should have an incentive to abandon the patent, leaving it open for everyone to use. Where that threshold should be can be discussed, nevertheless the figures shown above can hardly be called extortion.
> [...] Also, it's seen as a tool for big corporations to keep competition away from it's customers. Thus, looks like small applicants only option is to sell their patents to bigger fish, often for peanuts. Or get into big trouble.
As mentioned earlier in this discussion I will disagree here and my own experiences differ.
>> Many, perhaps most, in this business use expensive and huge systems to monitor IPR activity from competitors.
Marketing, who to?
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 16, 2012 4:39 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
> The burden is already on the applicant once the official action is out. Examiners make their own analysis and it is up to the applicant to respond, no mater how strange the analysis in the official action may be. In by far most cases the first official action is a rejection.
If the examiner has to do their own analysis, then the burden is on him, not the applicant. The applicant should be required to show _proof_ that their invention is not obvious. And face consequences if they lie about that.
> Where that threshold should be can be discussed, nevertheless the figures shown above can hardly be called extortion.
Sorry about the excessive hyperbole. Anyway, your argument do not make sense. A self funding patent office has a very good incentive for keeping approving patents, no matter if they bear any merit of society gets benefited from them in any meaningful way. All the other people living from that process (like yourself?) are incentivated to keep things that way, even it's clear that, at least in certain circumstances, patents are detrimental to innovation.
> Marketing, who to?
I meant Marketing in strategic sense, not in the propaganda sense.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 16, 2012 21:30 UTC (Mon) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
>> The burden is already on the applicant once the official action is out. Examiners make their own analysis and it is up to the applicant to respond, no mater how strange the analysis in the official action may be. In by far most cases the first official action is a rejection.
> If the examiner has to do their own analysis, then the burden is on him, not the applicant. The applicant should be required to show _proof_ that their invention is not obvious. And face consequences if they lie about that.
I am not sure how familiar you are with scientific theory and falsifiability but what you are asking for here is similar to proof that something is unique. You cannot. You can only say that of the samples seen so far this something is unique. The next sample or the one after that could be the same and the theory is shown false. There exists no total overview of human knowledge.
Secondly I have never come across a case where someone knowingly has filed a patent for something they knew was not new. Usually the inventor or the applicant knows the field fairly well and frequently a search for prior art is done, both to see if the application is viable and also to make sure that the applicant is not about to infringe rights held by others. In the US you have to declare your knowledge of relevant prior art through Information Disclosure Statements (IDS), not doing so can be catastrophic.
Nevertheless the Examiner has (usually, there are lots of special cases here but I try to keep this brief) to make an independent search and is a guarantee to third parties that the process has been followed through properly and independently. Examiners are specialists on searches and frequently bring up prior art that was not known when the application was filed. It is in view of this that the Examiner issues an Official Action and it to this that the applicant has to respond. Failing to respond can result in the death of the application.
Also if filing the application abroad a foreign Examiner could bring up fatal prior art in a language and character set you are not familiar with.
Lying in an IDS or when responding or committing fraud on the patent office is Inequitable Conduct and is grounds for loss of rights and can be a career killer for the patent attorney/agent. The consequences you ask for are already in place.
Then comes the law of unintended consequences. The idea behind patents is simple, the present implementation is far from simple. Fear of Inequitable Conduct has (through complex reasoning) resulted in that in the US one writes about prior art in the application only in very general terms.
> A self funding patent office has a very good incentive for keeping approving patents, no matter if they bear any merit of society gets benefited from them in any meaningful way.
Perhaps I am terribly old fashioned here but I like to think there is something called self respect and integrity. While the USPTO may have a skewed incentive here, the Examiners making the actual decisions in the first instance have a points based incentive system where out of control granting is not a problem. To the contrary, the old system was skewed towards excessive rejections. Other patent offices are partially funded by annuity fees that also cover applications which in theory could lead to doomed applications remaining half way processed in the archives. Finally there are international cooperation projects between USPTO, EPO and other patent offices that would not work if the system was out of control.
Some requirements for USPTO Examiners can be found here:
> I meant Marketing in strategic sense, not in the propaganda sense.
OK, but to what ends?
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 23:46 UTC (Tue) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link] So herein lies the problem. I'm a practising software engineer, whose academic background is computer science - I should be the sort of person who reads software patents (expired and current) to see what sort of interesting inventions are being disclosed, and if there's anything I should get my exmployer to license. I do sometimes read patents out of curiosity, as I'm not in a jurisdiction where that automatically opens up the idea of wilful infringement and triple damages. I can't read software patents the way I read electronic patents. You show me a patent on an electronic circuit, even a microchip level integrated circuit, and I can understand what they've done, and what's non-obvious about the patented invention. I can usually see how you'd generalise from the specific circuit described in the patent to similar circuits - or why it won't generalise nicely (e.g. because it clearly depends on some behaviour that's scale-specific, and only occurs on ICs with small enough feature size). That's with amateur knowledge, BTW - an A-Level in Physics, and reading resources found by Google to fill in the bits I don't know. Further, I can take a patented invention, discuss the problem space with colleagues who are professional electronic engineers, and generally find that they don't come up with the patented solution, or that they only manage it because they're aware of the patent. In the former case, when I explain the patented invention to them, they're impressed that anyone thought of that. In contrast, with software patents, either I cannot understand them at all, or I explain the problem to a colleague, and they promptly come up with the patented solution "because it's the obvious way to do things". When I discuss patents in general with other software engineers, they've had the same experience. There are a few exceptions to this (the RSA patent, for one), but they're rare. My conclusion from this is that software patents are failing to act as a useful disclosure mechanism; where they disclose something novel, they are obfuscated in language that means that I as a practising engineer can't use them to educate me. Where they don't disclose anything novel, they should be rejected, and yet I'm finding them out there. I don't know why this failure is happening in software patents specifically, only that it is, and that it's not happening to the same extent in hardware design patents.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 1, 2012 11:16 UTC (Sun) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
This is true, and an excellent point. I do not know -anyone- who reads software-patents in an attempt at finding new good ideas for software-development. There simply aren't any. Either the solution is as you say, obvious ("how would you make it possible for a customer to order something with a single click?"), or else the description is so blurry that it's impossible to understand what's being described at all. Even for very smart people with world-class understanding of the problem-field.
The "disclosure" pary of software-patents that theorethically benefit society and thus balance the harm done by the monopoly granted, is thus zero or close to it. Society hands out monopoly-power in exchange for nothing.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that some jurisdictions make you liable for triple damages if you're dumb enough to read the patents ("willfull infringement") thus the advice for software-developers tends to be *NOT* to read them.
If you think software patents are bad enough... Posted Jan 1, 2012 11:46 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Actually software patents are not the worst thing imaginable. You've mentioned "one-click patent" - but it's not software patent, it's UI patent. UI patents are worse then software patents: where software patents are "useful in theory but not in practice" these (as well as business patents) are unconditionally evil. They give no disclosure gain at all (because by necessity they are disclosed when they are actually used... and if they are useless even to the inventor then do we even need such inventions at all?) yet they still include all the negative sides from other kinds of patents. Modern patents were introduced by well-known act yet it's quite obvious that Industrial Revolution was enabled not by the part which gave limited monopoly for "new inventions" but by it's repeal of way-to-broad patents which existed before. Today slow creep of patent's scope brought us to almost the same position again: we don't yet have patents for salt sale, but we already have patents for rectangular piece of plastic...
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 19, 2011 22:07 UTC (Mon) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
> I wish BT good luck, now that Google owns the Motorola patent portfolio.
Does Google already own Motorola Mobility? The latest thing I can find on Wikipedia says "[...] shareholders voted in favor of the company's acquisition by Google Inc. [...]", but no word on whether the acquisition did already happen, or when will it happen.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 19, 2011 23:27 UTC (Mon) by aryonoco (subscriber, #55563) [Link]
No, the shareholders have voted but it's still waiting regulatory approval, both in the EU and US.
That shouldn't be too much of a problem (the regulators might put some strings on it, but they will certainly approve it), and the transaction is supposed to close in Q1 2012, probably in the second half of that quarter.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 19, 2011 21:42 UTC (Mon) by wdaniels (guest, #80192) [Link]
Utterly disgraceful behaviour. In what world can these things be considered "innovations"? Well, in the US, for one, which is the only redeeming point. Glad that we've managed to stave off software patents in the UK so far, but sad to see British firms engaging in the BS anyway.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 1:22 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
> but sad to see British firms engaging in the BS anyway.
Yeah, not just British. Australia is no better. In fact, CSIRO (which is national science agency here) was parading their people on TV recently, because they went to Texas courts to sue over Wi-Fi patents and won millions. Let's remind ourselves that tax payers of Australia already paid for this to be invented. Truly wonderful achievement.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 6:52 UTC (Tue) by Fowl (subscriber, #65667) [Link] The CSIRO isn't allowed to fund future research using the proceeds of past research? The patents were out in the open and under RAND terms during the development of the standard, all the manufacturers agreed, and then many decided not to pay.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 8:05 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
A government funded science agency should not engage in creation of private monopolies.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 8:17 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
And just in case it's not clear, the scientists involved in creation of all this, should, of course, be given full credit etc. No dispute there.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 9:59 UTC (Tue) by Fowl (subscriber, #65667) [Link]
I agree.
Are RAND terms not acceptable?
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 11:59 UTC (Tue) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]
Generally, no, they're not. Because they are none of the things that their name claims them to be.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 23, 2011 6:48 UTC (Fri) by jmalcolm (guest, #8876) [Link]
Well, the 'A' is pretty defensible. Otherwise, I agree with you.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 13:28 UTC (Tue) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
Well, they discrimate against Free software implementations, so their name is misleading..
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 21, 2011 4:30 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
> Are RAND terms not acceptable?
As others have pointed out, they are incompatible with open source, which is what most of us here are interested in.
But, in this particular case, what I have a problem with is this. The invention in question is based on something that was first done in 1977, by a person on essentially tax payers' payroll, in a relatively unrelated field. It was later patented by an organisation also on tax payers' payroll. People of Australia paid for this stuff to be invented by funding CSIRO. The lead inventor received $300,000 from the prime minister, which is great.
So, what is the $200,000,000 (or more?) for? Why slug consumers with this? They already paid for it with their taxes.
CSIRO income report shows about 60% is tax payers money and about 34% co-investment, of which 46% is from various Australian governments again. So, in total, 3/4 of money CSIRO gets is from tax payers.
They get about 2% from "intellectual property". I'll be bold here and claim that no scientist at CSIRO ever invented or discovered anything because they were chasing those 2%. They did it because they wanted to explain nature or solve a technical problem.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 12:31 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> A government funded science agency should not engage in creation of private monopolies.
You know that whole sentence is nothing but a series of contradictions.
How could a institution ran by involuntary payments of the general public (under threat of imprisonment and property seizure), created and ran by a monopolistic organization (government) be in support of anything but more monopolies?
It's like saying you are disappointed to learn that Mafia loan sharks are not supporting stronger usury laws.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 13:46 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Oh for heaven's sake, give it a rest.
Nobody cares about your insane cult.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 23:50 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Are you suggesting that there should be more than one government in any given country, each having to compete with the others? I think there's a term for that kind of political situation.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 21, 2011 6:09 UTC (Wed) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]
Don't argue with fundie marxists and fundie randians; you can't beat either on demagoguery and they are logics-resistant. _Any_ arguments along the lines of "why hadn't that worked in $PLACE" are met with "because $TENETS had not been implemented fully/in sufficiently orthodoxal way". This shit is unfalsifiable by design. Just don't step into them and if they look like they might come to power, get yourself a passport good for international travel and start looking for job offers elsewhere. If they really come to power, results will be ugly. And even if they don't, the odds are good that they are playing part of intolerable alternative making something nasty look reasonable.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 21, 2011 13:48 UTC (Wed) by gowen (guest, #23914) [Link]
Quite right Al. A handy rule of thumb is "you cannot reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into."
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 21, 2011 8:25 UTC (Wed) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> Yeah, not just British. Australia is no better. In fact, CSIRO (which is national science agency here) was parading their people on TV recently, because they went to Texas courts to sue over Wi-Fi patents and won millions. Let's remind ourselves that tax payers of Australia already paid for this to be invented.
OK, so people in Australia paid for this. Why then should people in Texas get a free ticket to the efforts paid for by Australian tax payers?
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 21, 2011 12:16 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Why single out the people of Texas specifically? Surely you meant to ask why the rest of the planet gets a "free ticket" to Australian taxpayer-funded work. You're surely aware that such patent litigation occurs in Texas only because it is the most compliant venue for litigators.
As for whether governments should try and "monetize" publicly-funded work, would you also advocate governments trying to claw back every dollar spent in their budget? The result of that kind of policy is protectionism and meddling of the highest order.
I find it depressing that people seek to put price tags on everything to do with publicly-funded research, ostensibly to ensure a "return on investment", when it is highly likely that just doing the research and moving on to more advanced work will provide returns of their own, both monetary and in terms of general societal development, and when such demands are less aggressively imposed (or even absent) on much larger parts of the public budget where waste and corruption often runs rampant.
I also find it offensive that terms like "free ticket" are used to make the natural sharing of knowledge and the benefits of general human progress seem like an illicit, even illegal, act, and that people in the affected disciplines should have their journals and their channels of communication turned into licensing catalogues so that people in the licensing and litigation industry can treat research and academia like a taxable province of their own greedy realm.
Why not withhold all technological progress from, say, the developing world until the people living there can afford to pay the ticket price? That's where this unhealthy obsession with "monetization" ends up.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 23, 2011 6:55 UTC (Fri) by jmalcolm (guest, #8876) [Link]
Thank you for this. It is not that I disagreed before, but your argument really laid out plainly for me what my position should be on these kinds of issues. Nicely done.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 23, 2011 10:28 UTC (Fri) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> Why single out the people of Texas specifically?
For no other reason than that the previous poster referred to Texas.
> Surely you meant to ask why the rest of the planet gets a "free ticket" to Australian taxpayer-funded work.
No. That would require a lot of assumtions on my part, something I prefer not to do.
> You're surely aware that such patent litigation occurs in Texas only because it is the most compliant venue for litigators.
Eastern District of Texas is well known to be a preferred venue for patent proprietors, which strictly speaking is not necessarily the same as litigators. One can take another party to court to get a decision that they do not infringe.
> As for whether governments should try and "monetize" publicly-funded work, would you also advocate governments trying to claw back every dollar spent in their budget?
I don't think clawing back (nice choice of words there) is practical, taxation is probably unavoidable. On the other hand I would prefer governments had more business sense and insight than most do. In this specific case it is clear that a patent application was filed, thus an active decision was made to monetize this invention. So EITHER they should follow through OR the application should have been abandoned or never filed.
> The result of that kind of policy is protectionism and meddling of the highest order.
Why? In this age of globalism much of the West cannot compete against emerging countries in tradable huge volume products. What I often see is offered as the alternative is high technology. IPR is one way of protecting your position. It is far from bulletproof as IPR is a matter of national law and IPR is frequently in tension with competition law.
> I also find it offensive that terms like "free ticket" are used to make the natural sharing of knowledge and the benefits of general human progress seem like an illicit, even illegal, act, and that people in the affected disciplines should have their journals and their channels of communication turned into licensing catalogues so that people in the licensing and litigation industry can treat research and academia like a taxable province of their own greedy realm.
I do not understand this argument. The core of the idea behind patents is exactly that you have to share the knowledge in order to get protection. Also in many countries you are allowed to work a patented invention if it is for learning or research.
> Why not withhold all technological progress from, say, the developing world until the people living there can afford to pay the ticket price?
Developing countries make their own laws. While for instance the US is influential, very few countries have a patent system like the US. And you have to file in each of the countries where you wish to obtain a patent, which in turn tends to be examined nationally.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 24, 2011 8:57 UTC (Sat) by jlokier (guest, #52227) [Link] I also find it offensive that terms like "free ticket" are used to make the natural sharing of knowledge and the benefits of general human progress seem like an illicit, even illegal, act, and that people in the affected disciplines should have their journals and their channels of communication turned into licensing catalogues so that people in the licensing and litigation industry can treat research and academia like a taxable province of their own greedy realm.I do not understand this argument. The core of the idea behind patents is exactly that you have to share the knowledge in order to get protection. You are right: You don't understand the argument. I think what you aren't understanding is "natural sharing of knowledge and the benefits of general human progress". In this context it doesn't mean writing the knowledge down where others can read but not use! It means making the knowledge available to others to *use*. It is a fact that a great many in-patent inventions are not licensable by everyone who would like to use them for a wide variety of reasons; money is not always the reason. And a great many are not even known about by those who infringe through independent invention, yet still have their work destroyed as soon as they are big enough to be noticed. If you're practically forbidden from using published knowledge, in some ways it has negative worth as knowledge. You're better off with a head that's not filled with those ideas, so when you solve problems there's a greater chance you'll stumble on a solution you're allowed to keep using. Wi-Fi patents do include some novel inventions. But let's not delude ourselves into thinking nobody else would have come up with similar solutions given the same problem to solve. Also in many countries you are allowed to work a patented invention if it is for learning or research. Not if you are learning and researching in the public arena with lots of people. It's too risky because there's no bright line between that and simply sharing work for others to use. You end up hoping the patent owner doesn't find out, or doesn't care, so you have to keep your project under the radar, in some ways trying to avoid being successful, which is silly if the objective is to advance the art. So it's suitable only for *private* learning and research. Which is only a small part of learning and research these days. That's only going to become more so as things like electronics-capable 3D printing come online, where "research" and "making useful stuff" blur together even more (as they did decades ago in software). If you inhabit a very commercially-minded world, that whole idea about sharing knowledge without use restrictions to facilitate general human progress may seem a bit alien. That's not meant to be personal; it is simply how it is.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 8, 2012 22:31 UTC (Sun) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> I think what you aren't understanding is "natural sharing of knowledge and the benefits of general human progress". In this context it doesn't mean writing the knowledge down where others can read but not use!
It seems you are moving the goal posts here. You are allowed to share as in telling everyone about the contents of a patent. In some jurisdictions you are also allowed to use the knowledge disclosed as long as it is not for commercial purposes.
> It means making the knowledge available to others to *use*.
Perhaps we disagree about the word "use". Part of the purpose of patent publishing is that others should be given access to gain the knowledge and even use that to invent something better which could also be patentable too. Also it is rare to file a patent application in every single country, which leaves places where you are quite free to use the knowledge also for commercial purposes (with some restrictions like not being able to export into countries where the rights remain secured).
> It is a fact that a great many in-patent inventions are not licensable by everyone who would like to use them for a wide variety of reasons; money is not always the reason.
Patent law and competition law are somewhat in tension, when the patent proprietor is unreasonable there is the risk of compulsory licenses. Having a patent does not mean a right to do everything with regards to the patent.
> And a great many are not even known about by those who infringe through independent invention, yet still have their work destroyed as soon as they are big enough to be noticed.
A great many? I would appreciate a reference. Personally I have experienced only one conflict that did not involve bad faith, and great care was taken to handle the case without causing destruction.
> If you're practically forbidden from using published knowledge, in some ways it has negative worth as knowledge. You're better off with a head that's not filled with those ideas, so when you solve problems there's a greater chance you'll stumble on a solution you're allowed to keep using.
Have you never seen something that didn't make you think "I can do better"?
> But let's not delude ourselves into thinking nobody else would have come up with similar solutions given the same problem to solve.
Delusion and rethorics aside, the question of obviousness or inventive step is the bar put in place exactly to prevent patents granted for inventions that a person skilled in the art would come up with given the same problem to solve. Since you use the word "delude" I would appreciate your view on the established methods, preferably the problem-solution approach.
>> Also in many countries you are allowed to work a patented invention if it is for learning or research.
Really? This is quite contrary to the laws I studied, please explain. The US, which in many ways is more restrictive here, nevertheless has the Hatch-Waxman exemption, exemptions according to TRIPS as well as special protection for smaller companies.
> If you inhabit a very commercially-minded world, that whole idea about sharing knowledge without use restrictions to facilitate general human progress may seem a bit alien.
Like many of my colleagues I spent many years in academia which is all about generating and sharing knowledge and less about commerce as well as research and development at various degrees of commercial perspectives. Progress and knowledge were very much discussed, so when you write " may seem a bit alien" I wonder just who you have met.
> That's not meant to be personal; it is simply how it is.
Yes? I don't know anyone in the profession who thinks the patent system after centuries of changes still has reached a state of perfection. Still, those opposing patents and those in the profession bark up different trees and dialogue seems limited and confused, which I find a little frustrating.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 10, 2012 15:39 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] Perhaps we disagree about the word "use". Part of the purpose of patent publishing is that others should be given access to gain the knowledge and even use that to invent something better which could also be patentable too. So the idea is to pile the paperwork high so that the production of every single trinket has to involve "licensing" from hundreds of different "rights holders", inevitably leading to cartels dominating whole industries? Guess where this creates the most jobs and revenue. Also it is rare to file a patent application in every single country, which leaves places where you are quite free to use the knowledge also for commercial purposes (with some restrictions like not being able to export into countries where the rights remain secured). That's a great argument, isn't it? Not everyone respects the monopoly instruments of the rich countries, but since those people are poor anyway, they can do what they like for now. Just don't let them actually take any rich people's money! This is especially interesting in the context of your earlier remark: In this age of globalism much of the West cannot compete against emerging countries in tradable huge volume products. What I often see is offered as the alternative is high technology. IPR is one way of protecting your position. It is far from bulletproof as IPR is a matter of national law and IPR is frequently in tension with competition law. In other words, the poor people should stick with fouling their environment making cheap products for the rich people and pay the rich people for their valuable knowledge. Except, as various nations are already discovering, that a lot of the knowledge comes from actually making stuff and the immediate demand for research around those very activities. I've seen the "knowledge economy as competitive edge" argument before, but I'll give you credit for phrasing it in terms of the "wealthy heir" protectionism that it typically advocates. Like many of my colleagues I spent many years in academia which is all about generating and sharing knowledge and less about commerce as well as research and development at various degrees of commercial perspectives. From what I've seen and heard, academia has a lot to learn about sharing knowledge, unless you believe that what I refer to as the "natural sharing of knowledge" must include in-fighting (best not to let anyone else doing something similar get to publish before you), empire building (only show the details of your work to people who formally collaborate with you, and certainly not to the public) and very high pay-walls whose blessings count for everything but whose role is obsolete, particularly since they add very little value themselves, getting everybody else to do their work for them.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 11, 2012 22:48 UTC (Wed) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> So the idea is to pile the paperwork high so that the production of every single trinket has to involve "licensing" from hundreds of different "rights holders", inevitably leading to cartels dominating whole industries? Guess where this creates the most jobs and revenue.
I see neither this being the idea nor that I have implied this. Furthermore an abuse of a patent will lead to conflict with competition law, a patent is not a license to run wild. Compulsory licensing is the threat that is part of the patent laws in many places.
As for jobs and revenue there are about 10000 European patent attorneys having very roughly the same number of assistants and other staff, and the same order of magnitude number of Examiners, also with a fair number of support staff. I don't think this can be considered a large number of jobs considering there are about 400 millions in Europe. As for revenue the patent offices are supposed to be self funded whereas for patent law firms it varies a lot; some have been in the red and had redundancies.
> That's a great argument, isn't it? Not everyone respects the monopoly instruments of the rich countries, but since those people are poor anyway, they can do what they like for now. Just don't let them actually take any rich people's money!
A sovereign state makes their own laws. Generally countries implement IPR laws only when it suits them and when a law is implemented makes provisions that suit them. That is part of being sovereign. Thus some countries have wide ranging laws on compulsory licensing that can come into play if you do not work the patent in their countries. Similarly some demand annual statement regarding the use of the patents. Rich or poor, as long as they are a sovereign state they can do what they like now, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.
There have been discussions that literally degenerated into shouting matches between industrialised countries and emerging market countries, nevertheless the latter were quite able to stand their ground.
> In other words, the poor people should stick with fouling their environment making cheap products for the rich people and pay the rich people for their valuable knowledge.
Really? I think you are not giving people in poor countries sufficient credit for inventiveness.
> Except, as various nations are already discovering, that a lot of the knowledge comes from actually making stuff and the immediate demand for research around those very activities. I've seen the "knowledge economy as competitive edge" argument before, but I'll give you credit for phrasing it in terms of the "wealthy heir" protectionism that it typically advocates.
IPR and knowledge do not exist in vacuum and I have seen and experienced many jobs going under because of unbalanced philosophies, and also outsourced production facilities aggregating support functions like a snowball downhill, ending with a larger research and development facility than at the European company that just wanted to outsource production alone.
I don't know "wealthy heir" protectionism so I cannot comment on that.
> From what I've seen and heard, academia has a lot to learn about sharing knowledge, unless you believe that what I refer to as the "natural sharing of knowledge" must include in-fighting (best not to let anyone else doing something similar get to publish before you), empire building (only show the details of your work to people who formally collaborate with you, and certainly not to the public) and very high pay-walls whose blessings count for everything but whose role is obsolete, particularly since they add very little value themselves, getting everybody else to do their work for them.
I spent a few years in academia and saw it from the inside. Politics was ugly and infighting did occasionally take place. Still, I never experienced myself any major problems regarding sharing knowledge. Huge libraries of scientific journals suggest knowledge is shared. Publications make up one of the most important metrics in academia and is crucial for advancement.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 12, 2012 10:02 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] As for revenue the patent offices are supposed to be self funded AFAIR, one problem with the current system is that the (US, at least) patent office gets to charge fees for patents that are actually granted, but not for sub-standard applications that are eventually refused. This creates a powerful incentive on the part of the patent office to wave applications through and let the courts sort things out later, even for stuff that any reasonable person skilled in the field would refuse at first sight – somebody once said that, to the patent office, »obvious« means »obvious to a person with an IQ of 60«. This suggests one obvious improvement to the system, namely to have failed applications incur patent office fees of the same order of magnitude as granted patents – so there is less bias towards granting rather than refusing patents. The fees for previous failed attempts could be reduced or waived if an application is improved to a point where it actually becomes patent-worthy, and the failure fees should rise in proportion to the size of the applying company's patent portfolio (since the more patents a company holds, the more it can be expected to know how to apply for another one). There should also be a hefty surcharge on the failure fee for companies trying to game the system and/or waste the patent office's time by attempting to patent stuff that is patently (!) obvious and/or non-novel, such as hyperlinks in 20xx.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 14, 2012 19:22 UTC (Sat) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> AFAIR, one problem with the current system is that the (US, at least) patent office gets to charge fees for patents that are actually granted, but not for sub-standard applications that are eventually refused.
First of all, there are many kinds of fees, also filing fees:
As for sub-standard applications, no patent attorney/agent I have met drafts sub standard applications. While the name of this person rarely becomes publicly known it is known to the applicant and we do have a reputation to maintain. Shoddy work can kill an application and that makes the applicant unhappy. Also a well drafted application can be refused simply because the Examiner found fatal prior art that was not known to the applicant.
> This creates a powerful incentive on the part of the patent office to wave applications through and let the courts sort things out later
At the USPTO, EPO and many other places the Examiners work according to a points system where sloppy work is not part of the objective. Previously at the USPTO the incentive system worked towards multiple rejections and continuations that apparently got out of hand and had to be amended. Even so getting a grant is not trivial, particularly after US Supreme Court decisions in Bilski and KSR. EPO has always been a hard nut and getting harder all the time.
> There should also be a hefty surcharge on the failure fee for companies trying to game the system
There already is something called Inequitable Conduct and that is fatal to the patent as well as the career of the patent attorney/agent who tried this. This is a profession where reputation is important and where ranking lists of patent law firms and individual persons are listed. I cannot see gaming the system could be a problem in light of sanctions such as these. You could in practice be barred for life.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 12, 2012 11:54 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] I see neither this being the idea nor that I have implied this. Furthermore an abuse of a patent will lead to conflict with competition law, a patent is not a license to run wild. Compulsory licensing is the threat that is part of the patent laws in many places. You wrote... Part of the purpose of patent publishing is that others should be given access to gain the knowledge and even use that to invent something better which could also be patentable too. Even if we ignore the problem of patents not really giving access to the complete knowledge behind someone's work, the consequence of building patentable things on top of other patentable things is a mountain of paperwork. Someone then has to administer this paperwork, making sure that no claim goes unnoticed. How big must an enterprise's legal department be? Does a one-person start-up require at least one lawyer/paralegal? What about a ten-person company? As for jobs and revenue there are about 10000 European patent attorneys having very roughly the same number of assistants and other staff, and the same order of magnitude number of Examiners, also with a fair number of support staff. I don't think this can be considered a large number of jobs considering there are about 400 millions in Europe. As for revenue the patent offices are supposed to be self funded whereas for patent law firms it varies a lot; some have been in the red and had redundancies. The issue is the effect these peripheral jobs have on the actual work being done and how much money is diverted away from research and towards staffing a bureaucracy. And what about the employment impact on individual enterprises? Attorneys and examiners are just the tip of the iceberg. In other words, the poor people should stick with fouling their environment making cheap products for the rich people and pay the rich people for their valuable knowledge.Really? I think you are not giving people in poor countries sufficient credit for inventiveness. That's a nice way of sidestepping the argument. Of course the developing world are "inventive": you have admitted yourself that an absence of patents in a particular place is a driver of innovation, and there are people who advocate doing research in places where you won't get sued straight out of the starting gate. Although those people argue that the opportunities lie in reading, say, US patents and then doing subsequent work in a "permissive venue", I've already stated that people in that venue will be motivated to do their own original work purely due to the challenges of making the stuff that the developed world increasingly refuses to make. I don't know "wealthy heir" protectionism so I cannot comment on that. The "wealthy heir" has his fortune from his ancestors' hard work but expects to remain rich throughout his life despite his reckless living. As I noted elsewhere, it's a classic Wodehouse character who suddenly needs to shore up his income when he realises that his situation is not sustainable. Patents and other instruments are the means by which our "wealthy heir" wishes to remain funded by everybody else; the challenge is persuading everybody else to fund that reckless lifestyle. Over time, we'll see the developing world use the same tactics: in China, the patent proliferation is just beginning, and we can expect to see the same short-sighted tactics used against the very organisations who advocated them in the first place. I spent a few years in academia and saw it from the inside. Politics was ugly and infighting did occasionally take place. Still, I never experienced myself any major problems regarding sharing knowledge. Huge libraries of scientific journals suggest knowledge is shared. Publications make up one of the most important metrics in academia and is crucial for advancement. If you can state particularly the last sentence without realising what the problem is, then you obviously don't understand the problem, particularly the relationship between the last sentence and the second sentence of that paragraph. I don't know whether those in the patent bureaucracy really listen to or care about what practitioners think in the industries affected by their endeavours, but for a long time there has been substantial doubt about the utility of the journals. Saying that "knowledge is shared" is like saying "money changes hands": just as the latter says nothing about whether an economy efficiently distributes wealth or goods, the former says nothing about whether knowledge is shared effectively and on the scale it should be shared to advance human society at a sufficiently fast pace to meet that society's challenges.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 14, 2012 21:26 UTC (Sat) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> the consequence of building patentable things on top of other patentable things is a mountain of paperwork
That is a statement I would like to see the basis for.
> Someone then has to administer this paperwork, making sure that no claim goes unnoticed.
The paperwork is in by far the most cases available on web. Administration of the publishing is to a large extent automated.
> How big must an enterprise's legal department be? Does a one-person start-up require at least one lawyer/paralegal? What about a ten-person company?
Starting a company in Europe frequently requires a lot of legal work, and around here you will get legal and other important updates that amounts to 1 - 3 cm paper bundle were you to print it out. Not knowing the law is rarely an excuse to go free. Where I got the cost figures my clients spent 10 times on general legal counsel than on IPR. The staff size you ask for I do not know and would no doubt depend on the productivity of the lawmakers in the country involved. Still, the question is interesting and I will see what I can find out.
As for IPR work most clients use outside firms like the firm where I work.
>> As for jobs and revenue there are about 10000 European patent attorneys
> The issue is the effect these peripheral jobs have on the actual work being done and how much money is diverted away from research and towards staffing a bureaucracy.
From my time in research and development, in academia and in industry my clear impression is that for many years research has not been much of a priority
> That's a nice way of sidestepping the argument.
Not really. While I am not always entirely sure what you mean my answers are sincere.
> you have admitted yourself that an absence of patents in a particular place is a driver of innovation
I am not sure how you got this impression. Also if someone reinvents something that is already patented it is by definition not new.
> Although those people argue that the opportunities lie in reading, say, US patents and then doing subsequent work in a "permissive venue", I've already stated that people in that venue will be motivated to do their own original work
The former is an opportunity but not to the exclusion of independent work.
> Patents and other instruments are the means by which our "wealthy heir" wishes to remain funded by everybody else; the challenge is persuading everybody else to fund that reckless lifestyle.
A patent can typically last until 20 years from the priority date (there are many special cases here). In cases like pharmacy it can take you 15 years to get new medicine fully tested and approved for sale, leaving far less time to recoup the cost. In the case of some of my smaller client it has taken them 10 years to get established in the market. In the case of fast moving fields such as software, electronics and mobile technology an invention can be superseded by something better after just 3 years. I have never met a client who could take on a Wodehouse lifestyle based on IPR. How big a problem do you believe this is?
> If you can state particularly the last sentence without realising what the problem is, then you obviously don't understand the problem, particularly the relationship between the last sentence and the second sentence of that paragraph.
On the question of what is the worse, national politics or academic politics, Henry Kissinger is credited with the answer that it is academia since there is so little to fight for. Lack of funding brings out unpleasant qualities in some, nevertheless publishing new results is important. Researchers literally risk their lives to do research and obtain publishable results.
> I don't know whether those in the patent bureaucracy really listen to or care about what practitioners think in the industries affected by their endeavours
They are supposed to.
> for a long time there has been substantial doubt about the utility of the journals
The role of journals as sole means of publishing has already changed dramatically. I believe the high energy physics community started the trend. The High Tc Update had a similar function. These days arXiv is important.
> Saying that "knowledge is shared" is like saying "money changes hands": just as the latter says nothing about whether an economy efficiently distributes wealth or goods, the former says nothing about whether knowledge is shared effectively and on the scale it should be shared to advance human society at a sufficiently fast pace to meet that society's challenges.
It is qualitatively known that reuse of knowledge leaves room for improvement, Examiners locating fatal prior art documents even after a search has been done is one aspect of this. I heard of cases where a university started a research project after others elsewhere had done the research and even filed patent applications. Getting a full overview would be interesting but probably very difficult.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 16, 2012 14:47 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] the consequence of building patentable things on top of other patentable things is a mountain of paperworkThat is a statement I would like to see the basis for. Each patented thing involves "paperwork". Build new things on top of those things and patent them at every step and you've got a mountain; that's the situation in computer science right now because of the way the discipline works and the possibility for independent discovery due to the sheer scale of the discipline. Starting a company in Europe frequently requires a lot of legal work, and around here you will get legal and other important updates that amounts to 1 - 3 cm paper bundle were you to print it out. I don't doubt this, but you don't start your company again every year. Not knowing the law is rarely an excuse to go free. That's a great argument for "do not disturb", but not really an adequate response to criticism of the patent regime. Where I got the cost figures my clients spent 10 times on general legal counsel than on IPR. The staff size you ask for I do not know and would no doubt depend on the productivity of the lawmakers in the country involved. Still, the question is interesting and I will see what I can find out. As for IPR work most clients use outside firms like the firm where I work. Don't forget the general overhead to businesses as well. Sure, this might create extra supposedly technical jobs, as in "we need someone to do the coding as X is now having to audit the product for potential patent infringement", but it's not really adding to the number of people actually doing productive work. From my time in research and development, in academia and in industry my clear impression is that for many years research has not been much of a priority Sure, people doing certain sciences in academia can be tempted to go and work in "The City" because the salaries are better. That's not an argument for sloshing large amounts of money on a bureaucracy to supposedly "monetize" the research being done on the off-chance that the rewards will trickle down into the average graduate student's salary, however. Naturally, such an approach would only lead to researchers being funded according to the number of patents granted, not publications made. At which point, the state of sharing is worsened still further because whatever is shared is explicitly encumbered, and the reward system behaves like a junk currency, as anyone alert to the granting of patents is only too well aware. In the case of fast moving fields such as software, electronics and mobile technology an invention can be superseded by something better after just 3 years. I have never met a client who could take on a Wodehouse lifestyle based on IPR. How big a problem do you believe this is? First of all, it's the Wodehouse character's attitude that's the crucial thing, not whether they manage to achieve the lifestyle. Secondly, the "wealthy heir" aspect mostly relates to the privileged developed nations who seek to penalise the people making the bulk of their consumer goods because they want to uphold the dynamics of the relationship without significant further effort. But I'd certainly be interested to hear how anyone can justify granting monopolies on "inventions" that are competitive for "just 3 years", especially when most of these "inventions" are likely to be independently made (actually "discovered") and improved upon by people who then have to pay for the privilege of using their own work, without any justification being phrased in terms of the usual vague claims of "rewarding innovation" and the like. How big a problem do I think it is? Ask anyone in the wireless industry, anyone wanting to make wireless products, anyone wanting to make software products that brush up against the realm of some of the most protectionist businesses on the planet. The slightest hint of litigation is enough of a risk that people would rather walk away than invest time or money in competing with such businesses. And the advice typically given that new entrants should pile up the patents in order to have a bargaining chip when they do get sued seems like an feeble apology for a market that doesn't function properly. It's like saying that we can only have renewable energy when the oil companies decide we're ready for it (and that isn't a hypothetical situation, either). Maybe nobody really makes any money in running or sustaining a patent bureaucracy. In which case, it baffles me that anyone would let such a supposedly unprofitable man-made mechanism cause so much financial uncertainty for investors. Anything else with such disastrous risk-amplifying properties would surely have been abolished a long time ago.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 17, 2012 21:10 UTC (Tue) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> Each patented thing involves "paperwork". Build new things on top of those things and patent them at every step and you've got a mountain; that's the situation in computer science right now because of the way the discipline works and the possibility for independent discovery due to the sheer scale of the discipline.
Patent law firms handle the paperwork routinely, using specialised docketing programs, this is not much of a problem. In sheer volume I see a larger number of documents handled in the accounting office. For smaller operations like solo practice any decent document handling system plus time keeper will do. Modern systems also have portals that lets client view documents without having to have his or her own private paper mountain. You can check out cases in PAIR or Epoline to see indications of the actual volume of documents involved.
>> Starting a company in Europe frequently requires a lot of legal work, and around here you will get legal and other important updates that amounts to 1 - 3 cm paper bundle were you to print it out.
> I don't doubt this, but you don't start your company again every year.
I forgot to mention that this is the monthly volume of legal and other updates. Particularly the EU seems to create new laws and rules as if their lives depended on it.
>> Not knowing the law is rarely an excuse to go free.
> That's a great argument for "do not disturb", but not really an adequate response to criticism of the patent regime.
This was rather a statement regarding the mindset of those that makes new laws. Personally I question the democratic qualities of a legal system everyone is meant to follow but few are expected to understand. Part of my work is to translate back and forth between a precise yet awkward "patentese" to and from the patent office and plain language with the client. I don't think anyone in the profession believe the patent system is perfect, and the large and ever growing complexity is high up on the list of criticisms. And it is rather interesting to see how different we view the problems of the patent system here in this forum.
>> As for IPR work most clients use outside firms like the firm where I work.
> Don't forget the general overhead to businesses as well. Sure, this might create extra supposedly technical jobs, as in "we need someone to do the coding as X is now having to audit the product for potential patent infringement", but it's not really adding to the number of people actually doing productive work.
Patent attorneys/agents in most countries have a technical degree, masters degree or higher, and are meant to handle the patenting issues with minimal disruptions to the operations of the client. Some times we get only articles to review and turn into patent applications.
> Sure, people doing certain sciences in academia can be tempted to go and work in "The City" because the salaries are better.
This isn't just a question of better salaries but of getting a salary at all. With the financial meltdown academia has not been spared. Research assistantships are only temporary so anything that looks like a permanent salary can be tempting. Research is also hazardous and the groups I have been in have experienced radiological incidents, poisoning with hospitalisation, and close shave with exploding equipment. In an office on the other hand you don't risk much more than stale coffee.
> That's not an argument for sloshing large amounts of money on a bureaucracy to supposedly "monetize" the research being done on the off-chance that the rewards will trickle down into the average graduate student's salary, however.
I have already outlined the costs involved, "sloshing large amounts of money" is a bit over board. In many countries the employer has a right to acquire the rights to the invention and for this the employee has a right to a reasonable compensation. Regrettably the employees rarely see this part of the obligation fulfilled, graduate students and research assistants are even more often run over and treated as cheap labour. In my time in academia patenting was not much of a topic or an incentive and money for this was unheard of where I worked.
> Naturally, such an approach would only lead to researchers being funded according to the number of patents granted, not publications made.
As mentioned earlier it has happened that research has started where others have completed the research in a specific fields and also filed patent applications. To avoid this a search for prior art can be made. Getting funding according to grants would mean funding would depend on how many countries you file the applications to and such foreign filings could take years before you get the results. On the other hand I have heard proposals that *filing* patent applications should count as a publication, which could results in doubling publication count since journal publications could be the basis for one or more patent applications. The law of unintended consequences is very much at work here.
> Secondly, the "wealthy heir" aspect mostly relates to the privileged developed nations who seek to penalise the people making the bulk of their consumer goods because they want to uphold the dynamics of the relationship without significant further effort.
First of all there are rules in place that under threat of compulsory licensing prevent abuse. Secondly the dynamics you refer to is already in play as research and development facilities built up around manufacturing sites have grown quickly and in some cases even further than in the home country of the company that outsourced the manufacturing in the first place. Also companies like Huawei and ZTE have already shown that large IPR portfolios are not the prerogative of industrialised countries.
> But I'd certainly be interested to hear how anyone can justify granting monopolies on "inventions" that are competitive for "just 3 years", especially when most of these "inventions" are likely to be independently made (actually "discovered") and improved upon by people who then have to pay for the privilege of using their own work, without any justification being phrased in terms of the usual vague claims of "rewarding innovation" and the like.
In some industries, particularly mobile communication technologies the product lifetime can be much less than 3 years. In this period when the application or patent is published they have only a short time to recover their investment.
If you believe most of these are likely to be independently reinvented I would very much like to see the evidence of this.
And it is not given that an improvement would result in a dependent patent where the later applicant would have to pay the first. This is a theoretical possibility but I have never come across such a case myself so I don't know how often it occurs.
> How big a problem do I think it is? Ask anyone in the wireless industry, anyone wanting to make wireless products, anyone wanting to make software products that brush up against the realm of some of the most protectionist businesses on the planet.
I had hoped you would provide some hard facts. As I have had large clients in the telecom business I might not be seen as entirely impartial here, so I ask rather than make a statement.
> The slightest hint of litigation is enough of a risk that people would rather walk away than invest time or money in competing with such businesses.
I have previously commented on patent proprietors preferring not to hammer small companies.
> And the advice typically given that new entrants should pile up the patents in order to have a bargaining chip when they do get sued seems like an feeble apology for a market that doesn't function properly.
Whose advice? My new entrants never had this problem.
> It's like saying that we can only have renewable energy when the oil companies decide we're ready for it (and that isn't a hypothetical situation, either).
What?
> Maybe nobody really makes any money in running or sustaining a patent bureaucracy. In which case, it baffles me that anyone would let such a supposedly unprofitable man-made mechanism cause so much financial uncertainty for investors. Anything else with such disastrous risk-amplifying properties would surely have been abolished a long time ago.
Allow me to introduce the idea that patents do work and for this reason my profession exists, investors like to see patent applications are filed and patents have not been abolished after all these centuries.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 19, 2012 13:05 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] In some industries, particularly mobile communication technologies the product lifetime can be much less than 3 years. In this period when the application or patent is published they have only a short time to recover their investment. Is the competitive advantage those companies get from innovating not enough? Or the basis that research has given for subsequent research? Instead, you're more or less advocating that the companies get two decades of licensing money for something that is already providing value, in effect allowing patent applicants to benefit multiple times from the same piece of work. I am reminded of aging pop stars who still wish to be paid for a day's work in the 1950s. If you believe most of these are likely to be independently reinvented I would very much like to see the evidence of this. It would surprise me greatly if two or more companies working on the next few generations of products did not do the same research, purely because they cannot leave it to their competitors to do it and then license it from them. By that point, their competitors have stolen a march on them. As for independent discovery, the poster children of the patent system - the patents that people who are not completely against the system regard as "valid" and not susceptible to challenge - are various cryptography patents that involve work that was done independently but not published for national security reasons. If those supposedly "hard" patents are susceptible to independent discovery, I don't see how the majority of patents are not also susceptible. And it is not given that an improvement would result in a dependent patent where the later applicant would have to pay the first. This is a theoretical possibility but I have never come across such a case myself so I don't know how often it occurs. So then you're saying that if someone does some work that is encumbered by a patent, and then they patent their own work, anyone using the latter work has to make sure that they pay both parties. That just shifts an increasing burden down the chain, meaning that someone could be confronted with a mountain of patent claims just for writing some code. That's the problem that faces the software industry. I had hoped you would provide some hard facts. As I have had large clients in the telecom business I might not be seen as entirely impartial here, so I ask rather than make a statement. I don't have any cases to hand, but it is on the public record that Sun Microsystems were practically shaken down by IBM when they entered the workstation business. In any industry where established players are threatened by competition, patents are a tool to impair that competition regardless of any merit those patents supposedly have. So that when you write... I have previously commented on patent proprietors preferring not to hammer small companies. ...it doesn't mean that much because those small companies are probably not enough of a threat. When they become enough a threat is precisely when they have difficult choices to make regarding cross-licensing. Allow me to introduce the idea that patents do work and for this reason my profession exists, investors like to see patent applications are filed and patents have not been abolished after all these centuries. Patents certainly "work" for some people, but the issue is not whether some people gain from their existence but whether they are the most fair instrument in encouraging work that leads to progress in human endeavour. That the system has not been abolished can be attributed to a number of factors (uncertainty over a replacement, for example, which is not the same as claiming that the patent system is fair, optimal and that a superior mechanism cannot be envisaged; bureaucratic inertia; lobbying from interested parties) that outweigh any argument for the merits of the system itself.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 20, 2012 22:50 UTC (Fri) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
>>In some industries, particularly mobile communication technologies the product lifetime can be much less than 3 years. In this period when the application or patent is published they have only a short time to recover their investment.
> Is the competitive advantage those companies get from innovating not enough?
Sometimes yes but that is increasingly rare. People enjoy buying cheap high tech items; the downside is relentless price pressure and ever decreasing margins. Some times a patent has a long useful lifetime, in many cases it outlives its usefulness within 5 years and perhaps not even gets to grant before it is abandoned and lapses due to annuities not being paid. The problem is that you do not always know which one is the winner so you hedge your bets by running with several projects in parallel. Patenting then is a way of reducing risks. In the case of smaller companies many believe that after a working prototype is done they have completed 90 percent of the work towards commercial success. Reality is normally that the working prototype comes around the 30 percent milestone.
> Instead, you're more or less advocating that the companies get two decades of licensing money for something that is already providing value, in effect allowing patent applicants to benefit multiple times from the same piece of work.
Not at all. Patenting is not immune to price pressure and eroding margins so many patent applications are abandoned well before 20 years. Exceptions exists, like fundamental patents and pharmaceutical patents.
> It would surprise me greatly if two or more companies working on the next few generations of products did not do the same research, purely because they cannot leave it to their competitors to do it and then license it from them. By that point, their competitors have stolen a march on them.
People can work on the same problem yet arrive at very different solutions. As an example, a rope can attach two items, and so can glue, two totally different solutions. I have worked with a few of the large technology companies that provide licensing. If a competitor filed an application for the same invention this should be found during the prosecution of the international application and classified accordingly. I never saw this really happened. Certainly, lack of proof is not proof of lack, it is just that not having seen it first hand I really wonder how often this occurs.
> As for independent discovery, the poster children of the patent system - the patents that people who are not completely against the system regard as "valid" and not susceptible to challenge - are various cryptography patents that involve work that was done independently but not published for national security reasons.
I would certainly like to see these. One possible explanation is that these are obvious in view of older published documents. There have been a few allegations of patent applications having been the result of industrial espionage.
> If those supposedly "hard" patents are susceptible to independent discovery, I don't see how the majority of patents are not also susceptible.
I can only offer you the meagre datapoint of not having seen this myself.
>> And it is not given that an improvement would result in a dependent patent where the later applicant would have to pay the first. This is a theoretical possibility but I have never come across such a case myself so I don't know how often it occurs.
> So then you're saying that if someone does some work that is encumbered by a patent, and then they patent their own work, anyone using the latter work has to make sure that they pay both parties.
No, I am definitely not saying this has to be so, to the contrary I state it is a theoretical possibility that I have never come across. To illustrate with metaphors: imagine a patent case in the stone age.
> I don't have any cases to hand, but it is on the public record that Sun Microsystems were practically shaken down by IBM when they entered the workstation business.
The most plausible story I find on the net is this one:
>> I have previously commented on patent proprietors preferring not to hammer small companies.
> ...it doesn't mean that much because those small companies are probably not enough of a threat.
One realistic threat even the smallest companies can make is to upset the relationship between licensor and a licensee having an exclusive license. No matter the size you have to do the analysis. One cost effective solution is to persuade the small infringer to make a small but sufficient change so that one can argue there no longer is an infringement. Smaller companies can be sufficient agile to make the changes and it is more cost effective to assist them in this rather than start litigation proceedings.
>> Allow me to introduce the idea that patents do work and for this reason my profession exists, investors like to see patent applications are filed and patents have not been abolished after all these centuries.
> Patents certainly "work" for some people, but the issue is not whether some people gain from their existence but whether they are the most fair instrument in encouraging work that leads to progress in human endeavour.
If we imagine a world without patenting many would turn to use of trade secrets to keep an edge over the competitors. Many companies I have been working at use trade secrets extensively and this would lead to less being published and then improved on. Particularly in pharmaceutics where secondary use is big this would have a big impact. For electronics/computing the fear is that big companies would steamroll small companies and investors would leave this market.
> That the system has not been abolished can be attributed to a number of factors (uncertainty over a replacement, for example, which is not the same as claiming that the patent system is fair, optimal and that a superior mechanism cannot be envisaged; bureaucratic inertia; lobbying from interested parties) that outweigh any argument for the merits of the system itself.
One big unknown is of course the maximum duration of protection. As for lobbying you could read through some of the major patent blogs and you will quickly see that many of the changes have been to the detriment of the patent profession and many feel that the rights of the small entities are under threat from the large companies. There are many interests pulling in more than two directions.
Do you envisage a mechanism superior to patenting that also gives protection to small entities?
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 21, 2011 21:16 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
> OK, so people in Australia paid for this. Why then should people in Texas get a free ticket to the efforts paid for by Australian tax payers?
That's easy. Because people of Australia already decided that they wanted to fund this research for everyone's benefit.
Trust me, there are no "special discount for CSIRO patent" on any of the Wi-Fi goods in Australia.
PS. Other tax payers fund scientific research too.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 21, 2011 15:58 UTC (Wed) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
wdaniels repeats a common misconception: that we don't have software patents in the UK. We do, hundreds of them, often for the same garbage granted in the US. The typical uselessness of these patents to engineers was eloquently explained by Farnz.
You can see what's coming up here: http://peertopatent.org.uk/
Here's one for displaying/encoding 'press the red button to download extra info' whilst playing videos: http://peertopatent.org.uk/patent/2463485/activity
But those aren't issued yet, so lets look for some that are:
Those sound quite softwarey patents to me. Just go to espacenet and search on 'browser' or 'filesystem' or any other term that takes your fancy and you'll find piles of software patents, mostly written in gobledegook, usually without implementations, and generally for pretty damn obvious things. It's all exceedingly depressing.
pboddie made a good post covering how the patent system is not keeping up its side of the social bargain in this sphere.
The UK peer to patent trail is due to end on 31st of Dec. Do spend a couple of hours before the end of the year if you can quoting prior art for the upcoming patents. It's usually not hard to find something, as it is nearly all 'bloody obvious'. At least doing this narrows the scope so that they become specific/contrived-enough not to do much harm.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 23, 2011 14:22 UTC (Fri) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> But those aren't issued yet, so lets look for some that are:
> GB2350973A covers fetching a web page and the linked pages (for wget or offline reading).
Are you sure? To me it appears to be a patent application (as opposed to a granted patent). Also it seems to have lapsed in 2002.
However the parallel EP1192778 is granted (and also lapsed in many countries). Looking at the characterising clause it seems to differ substantially from wget.
> GB2415797 is a symbian patent on sorting and caching file and directory pointers to speed up boot time.
Could you expand a bit on what you feel is the problem here.
I did some more checking and I see the corresponding EP application is still pending. That means you can file your own third party observations if you wish, free of charge.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 23, 2011 18:01 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
No, I didn't check the granted status - I hadn't realised that a simple search would show me lapsed applications as well as granted patents by default.
My point was merely to show that it's trivially easy to find software patents in the system and that many are granted in Europe.
My basic problem is that I don't believe software should be patentable. Copyright is sufficient protection. There is nothing wrong with re-implementing or independently inventing software. In fact it's a good thing, promoting progress, and interoperabilty. The arguments have been rehearsed over and over again so there isn't much point me typing them in again here and now.
The problem with filing my own observations is that my observation that the entire system is a travesty won't be considered useful. I can only file observations within the tenets of the system: on prior art as deemed sufficient by the EPO, for example. Writing in about my fundamental belief that claiming a monopoly on _any_ particular method of caching to speed up boot time is ridiculous, would be a waste of both my and the EPO's time.
This disconnect is no doubt why the system is almost entirely ignored by software engineers, who just keep hoping some sense will finally prevail and it will go away. That is probably a folorn hope at this stage, as too much money has now been pumped into this particular fake property bubble, for it to be easily dismantled even if everyone wanted to, and the approaches of peertopatent and OIN are perhaps more effective.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 29, 2011 21:49 UTC (Thu) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> My basic problem is that I don't believe software should be patentable. Copyright is sufficient protection.
Copyright is frequently used together with patent protection but has a very different and limited scope. It is relatively easy to work around. Some places it lasts until 70 years after the death of the creator, that is far longer than for a normal patent.
> There is nothing wrong with re-implementing or independently inventing software. In fact it's a good thing, promoting progress, and interoperabilty.
How do you propose small startups should protect themselves from being steamrolled by big established software companies re-implementing inventions?
> The problem with filing my own observations is that my observation that the entire system is a travesty won't be considered useful. I can only file observations within the tenets of the system: on prior art as deemed sufficient by the EPO, for example.
Correct. However if the patent was not new and if it lacked inventive step at the time you still have a chance to file your observations. It doesn't have to look like a full opposition filing from a professional representative, it just has to show relevant prior art. This has been put into place for non-professionals, it is a bit of a downer that you now just withdraw from this opportunity.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 30, 2011 0:13 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> How do you propose small startups should protect themselves from being steamrolled by big established software companies re-implementing inventions?
If you think that software patents somehow prevent this from happening you are living in a dream world. It takes years to get a patent, by that time the small company is either thriving, or dead.
I also question the premise that a small software shop is likely to be doing anything so innovative to qualify for a patent in the first place.
There are _very_ few programming ideas that are innovative enough to qualify as not being obvious to a skilled programmer (especially when presented with the same situation). If such ideas really were frequently a basis for software, you would have far fewer cases of "independent invention" where other companies come up with the same idea to solve the same problem.
Besides this, any real-world application is far more than a single solution to a problem. If a big company is motivated (and agile) enough to try and crush the small company, they can probably figure out a way to achieve similar results with a different process (and remember that a Patent is on a process, not a result)
But in reality, large companies tend to have software development processes that are anything but agile, and so while they may have far more manpower to throw at a project, they are going to be so much more inefficient that the small company can probably out develop them anyway.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 11, 2012 22:06 UTC (Wed) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> It takes years to get a patent, by that time the small company is either thriving, or dead.
Really? Most places offer accelerated procedure, and even without that I normally get a final decision about 18 months after filing. I see Google had one such process for US8078349: filed May 11, 2011 and granted December 13, 2011.
> If such ideas really were frequently a basis for software, you would have far fewer cases of "independent invention" where other companies come up with the same idea to solve the same problem.
How often are these independent inventions? To be relevant these would have to occur about the same time, after 18 months the applications are (normally) published, at which point one could argue that the publishing or the use of the first inventor was somehow communicated to the second. Independent inventions do occur, it is just the frequency I ask about.
> If a big company is motivated (and agile) enough to try and crush the small company, they can probably figure out a way to achieve similar results with a different process (and remember that a Patent is on a process, not a result)
Perhaps they can. Then again it is part of the intention of the patenting system that by publishing rather than using trade secrets you make it possible for others to build on what others have achieved.
I am not entirely sure what you mean by a patent "is on a process, not a result". You can have method claims and you can have apparatus claims in many places and you can also have protection for product by process.
> But in reality, large companies tend to have software development processes that are anything but agile
True, I have experienced such places. Then again they don't have to deliver anything close to a perfect product, time and time again we see cost trumping quality and heavy handed marketing keeping dire product in the market.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 30, 2011 10:28 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] How do you propose small startups should protect themselves from being steamrolled by big established software companies re-implementing inventions? Can you actually show me a small software startup that verifiably got steamrolled because one of the "big boys" saw their idea and copied it with entirely post-facto development, rather than because their management's business plan resembled that of the underpants gnomes or because the "big boy" either was already well on the way to implementing the idea, or had it lying around on someone's hard drive / brain / whatever but hadn't seen an application for it?
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 30, 2011 18:44 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
you could argue that Microsoft has done this sort of thing by 'integrating' features into windows that eliminated the need for third party software (and I believe they have several times done so by first licensing said software from the third parties), but even in that case it took years for microsoft to do so, which gave the small companies a chance to diversify, some did so, many did not.
Microsoft also didn't limit this to small software companies (see the current lawsuit over Wordperfect and Windows 95 as an example)
But if you exclude Microsoft's Monopoly abuse, I can't think of any examples.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 30, 2011 19:24 UTC (Fri) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]
On the other hand would Microsoft be able to stop any startup from doing anything, using their patent arsenal, so it's not like a startup getting a patent or two were safe...
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 1, 2012 11:34 UTC (Sun) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
Patents don't "protect smaller companies" anyway. The minute you as a small company wave your patent in the face of one of the big boys, they wave their thousands of patents in your face and say: "this is gonna be a messy fight, are you sure you can even afford to fight it?"
The answer to that is always no, unless you're a patent-troll, a company that produces nothing and does nothing - and is thus immune to a counter-suit.
The only small companies that can sue big companies over patents, are small companies that do nothing except for owning a patent-portfolio.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 8, 2012 22:41 UTC (Sun) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
Really? I have assisted a small company facing large competitors copying an invention, and while the big companies played the ""this is gonna be a messy fight, are you sure you can even afford to fight it?"-card my client won through. Undoubtedly there are many similar cases.
Why do you think all these patent applications are filed if they would not provide the protection intended? The alternative would be a switch to use of trade secret laws.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 9, 2012 9:05 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] I have assisted a small company facing large competitors copying an invention, and while the big companies played the ""this is gonna be a messy fight, are you sure you can even afford to fight it?"-card my client won through. Can you provide more details here? I'd think that if a small company says to a big company, »You're infringing on our patent X«, a reply along the lines of »So? You're infringing on our patents A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and I, among others« would be fairly effective. I'd be interested in finding out what approach the small company could take to counter this. Why do you think all these patent applications are filed if they would not provide the protection intended? Many software patents that are granted can only be charitably described as silly, but a patent is a patent. It may be worth having a patent on something silly (like having a text editor window and a calculator window open on the same screen at the same time, a revolutionary and unobvious invention if there ever was one, which AFAIR used to be patented by IBM) simply to counter other people's patents on other silly things that one might inadvertently infringe upon, when it comes to a »mine is bigger than yours« patent portfolio battle.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 9, 2012 19:54 UTC (Mon) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> I'd be interested in finding out what approach the small company could take to counter this.
Well, there is no fixed pattern to this but typically the party warms up with accusations and, as you say, counter accusations. Some times this goes to the press but while hard figures are hard to find my impression is that in the majority of cases the whole thing is kept low key. After rain comes the sun and after war one would hope for peace so there is no point in engaging in bridge burnings. There is a cultural aspect here too, some fields are a bit like the wild west while others are operating by gentlemen's agreements where you open by almost apologising for inconveniencing the infringing party with your patent while they in turn apologise for the mistake and it is all sorted out in a day or two.
In most cases you end up with claim construction: patent claims are broken down into features and you have to show where you find all features of at least one claim. The other party argues how this is all a mistake (mostly your mistake, supposedly) and it goes back and forth a few times. There will be lots of discussions and hopefully it will be solved at management levels. If not it goes to court, which is expensive for all involved and preferably to be avoided. Often you get an out of court settlement, the details of which trend to be confidential.
While there are examples of the opposite, innovations tend to be found in small companies so it is advantageous for the big company to get a proper license and possibly exclusivity for the invention and nurture a more productive relationship. The process itself is fairly similar for small and for large companies.
I could write a lot more about it but it is getting big already.
> Many software patents that are granted can only be charitably described as silly, but a patent is a patent.
Arthur Pedrick filed some bizarre applications but in the field of software I have not seen any silly patents myself. Mostly these are fare narrower than most people realise, protecting some very specific applications that can be avoided by most people. For instance all the first GSM mobile phone related patents have expired and you could use that technology. You could get by but you would miss out on improvements relating to reception, sound quality, battery lifetime and more
> (like having a text editor window and a calculator window open on the same screen at the same time, a revolutionary and unobvious invention if there ever was one, which AFAIR used to be patented by IBM)
Well, if it is in the US you get the frequent confusion with design patents (protecting visual appearances of the calculator) with utility patent (protecting how it works). If we are talking about a utility patent I would expect it protected how they were able to have both programs on the screen, not just the fact that both could be shown.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Jan 9, 2012 10:41 UTC (Mon) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
Patents are filed for many reasons. One of which is that some people consider it of value, i.e. you can use them as marketing towards both consumers and investors. Also, against similar-sized competitors they can be used both offensively and as deterrents.
A switch to trade-secret law would be very much preferable for software-patents, especially for user-interface-patents. These are by nature public, the patent-disclosure has zero value over a trade-secret. (having how to implement one-click shopping be a trade-secret, doesn't at all make it harder to re-implement it)
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 19, 2011 23:12 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Of course, when BT claimed to own the hyperlink they were riding high, the envy of the business world, embarking on adventurous international expansion. Now they pretty much don't have a market outside the UK, their fixed-line business is being eaten away at considerable speed, their monopoly of the local loop is under threat and they are pretty much universally reviled for utterly incompetent customer service and abominable fees, often charging astronomical fees to prevent people from taking up services that would be inconvenient. (I now know five people personally who've been hit with quotes >£250,000 to install a simple ADSL line: if the exchange is full BT charge the next customer to ask for anything needing exchange expansion the entire cost of upgrading the exchange).
So I guess they're a bit more desperate now than they were in the days of the hyperlink patent.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 23:56 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
I guess the incumbents (BT and Kingston Communications) wasted their inheritance like characters straight out of a Wodehouse novel.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 9:43 UTC (Tue) by mchazaux (guest, #64024) [Link]
"and choosing to stream at a different bandwidth"
Isn't it the whole point of TCP - Adapting the bitrate to the bandwidth of the underlying link ?
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 13:35 UTC (Tue) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
As shown by the bufferbload issue, TCP isn't doing a very good job in adaptating itself to the bandwith, so using different policy for different type of connection is sensible (well granting a patent for this is insane, but that's a different issue).
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 20, 2011 13:49 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
No, because TCP doesn't affect the data itself. This is about, for example, encoding an audio stream at a different bitrate so that less data is actually transferred.
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 21, 2011 0:11 UTC (Wed) by forlwn (guest, #63934) [Link]
"It essentially boils down to an app figuring out whether a phone is connected to the web via Wi-Fi or 3G, and choosing to stream at a different bandwidth"
Wonder if its only Google and Android apps who use this "invention"
BT Sues Google for Patent Infringements (Wired) Posted Dec 23, 2011 1:18 UTC (Fri) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link]
No, but apparently BT is scared of people having even a tiny bit of freedom. Makes sense given their history.
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