Fast Company: President Obama is expected, without delay, to sign into law the first large-scale reform to U.S. patent laws in 60 years. It brings U.S. law into line with most international practices, and is designed to quash patent trolling, cut red tape, and spur innovation.
Friday, September 09, 2011
What The New Patent Reform Act Means For Innovation
Fast Company: President Obama is expected, without delay, to sign into law the first large-scale reform to U.S. patent laws in 60 years. It brings U.S. law into line with most international practices, and is designed to quash patent trolling, cut red tape, and spur innovation.
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7 comments:
US patent law has been in need of a cleanup for a long time. Somewhere around the point that you were able to patent a software algorithm things started to become almost absurd, with some shady software companies patenting anything that they could come up with, letting the patents just sit there, and then waiting for someone else to take a similar idea to market. Once the "someone else" gets their product out there, or at least sinks a large amount of money into it the original patenter makes a claim that the new product is covered by their patent, something that might not hold up in court but is cheaper to settle than to defend. ```
Tom's thoughts are investigated in This American Life episode 441: When Patents Attack! (link: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack) The "patent trolling" issue really is an issue of idea vs. execution - shadow companies holding tons of patents and suing derivative products out of the market instead of actually developing the products and marketing them. The new law passed may actually make the problem worse - under an explicit system of "first one to file wins", the companies holding patents but not producing are actually justified in their actions, since they had the time, energy and funds to file quickly. The system still has major problems that de-incentivize innovation through devaluing the actual marketing of products.
In my opinion, this is exactly what the patent system needs. We need to support and stimulate invention in America! Hopefully this change will help those who deserve credit to benefit from the patent and encourage individuals to pursue patents for their ideas.
While I agree that the existing patent system needed to change, I am now even more confused by the new system then I was by the previous one. While this change should in theory be a good thing, I am willing to bet that the point the article brings up at it's end about how the new rules might make it harder for smaller companies to file since it still requires the resources and capital that it historically has. While I like that the system has now been changed to reward those who do the real work, I fear this may create a whole new era of large companies swooping in to buy out ideas rather then just suing for them later.
This legal reform is a token step toward equality in the corporate world. No matter what legal precedents are set the large corporations and conglomerates will always find a way around this and any other attempt to level the playing field through legal action. The large companies have an unfair advantage and always will. The legal system is not the problem. The problem is that we as a society have never and will never pay more than lip service to any attempts at true equality in commerce. Innovation only works for the little guy if they are coming up with a solution that is outside of the large companies radar. If the innovation has anything to do with large companies technologies it will be assimilated by large companies. They have copious amounts of high priced lawyers and the resources to develop or kill technologies as they see fit. It all goes back to giving credit where credit is due and that has not been in the human nature for centuries.
I was apparently ignorant of what the patent laws were before this new law, because I actually thought that the rules described I. The new law were actually already in place. This version of the law just makes so much more legal sense. The author of this article pointed out the possibility of a massive onset of lawsuits with this new law change. I wonder how far people will really be able to go back and if this law will retroactively benefit a significant amount of people. It seems to me that the cases would have been settled according to the law that was already in place, and that everything from here on out will follow the new law. Whether the law will work retroactively or not, though, it makes a lot of sense and wil hopefully prevent numerous subjective future disputes over who thought of an idea first.
I'm glad to see patents getting more media attention lately, but I wish it were for meaningful reforms, not the continuation of our wrongheaded approach. Much like copyright, I think the large scale exploitation of patents has lead to wide spread profiteering which is stifling innovation. While it would be really cool to incentivise new inventions better, I think that the current laws are failing to do that. Instead they are creating a maze of obstacles to creativity which cause small scale inventors to feel like they can't work on anything without an extensive legal team, which is very unfortunate.
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