Fairytale for 2019: GNOME to battle a patent troll in court The GNOME Foundation, maker of the eponymous Linux desktop, has been hit with a sueball over how its Shotwell photo manager, er, manages photos. The plaintiff, Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC, has alleged in a complaint filed at the United States District Court Northern California that defendant, GNOME Foundation, has infringed …
Now why would a government bureaucracy be operated so as to maximise the amount of litigation generated?
Could it be due to the legal profession being such a dominant source of members and senators?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/26/opinion/sunday/paths-to-congress.html
I'd have expected the bureaucrats get paid whether they accept or reject applications. There's no commissions or incentive scheme, surely? It's not piece work?
In any case, I figured the application/processing fees were peanuts compared to what the lawyers are making.
They make far more income from accepting applications than rejection, also the idea is to not waste money checking, the people with prior art or money to prove it's not a patent anyway can easily take it to court, saving USPTO loads of expenses.
Patents good.
Copyright that expires in a timely fashion good.
Software patents bad. USPTO useless. DRM Evil. DMCA evil.
I'm not convinced in this era of "software defined x" where x is anything from network switches to radios that software is exceptional and shouldn't be patentable. Patents are a useful way to incentivise invention without reliance on secrecy, including closed source in the case of software; surely a good thing. The issues with software patents seem more to do with:
* Awarding patents for trivialities and failing to research/disclose prior art;
* Incorporating patented IP into global standards, hampering adoption (it's tricky to require free rather than FRAND licencing if you still want inventors to contribute their latest and best ideas to standards bodies); and
* reliance on expensive legal processes to settle disputes
All of which defects could apply to patents in general to a greater or lesser extent.
Would you still object to software patents if the above problems were solved?
I agree copyright with shorter terms would be better (but for performed compositions and hybrid works - e.g audio visual media, the multiple licencing parties is too complex. Maybe a back-to-back arrangement; i.e. broadcaster pays performer, performer passes some portion of the royalty to composer.
Misuse of the DMCA and Google's holding copyright violation detection hostage to lousy license terms is a scandal.
> They make far more income from accepting applications than rejection,
Also, if an agent rejects a patent application, they have to write a report explaining why. If they accept it nothing is required.
If an organization challenges a patent asking for a review, then they get to pay for that too.
It's primarily an instrument of economic imperialism. Grant lots of patents, and use them to block foreign companies competing with US companies, imposing patents via WIPO and via straightforward piracy (the latter as in NTP vs RIM).
It's not entirely coincidental that US companies were (are) way ahead of the rest of the world first in spamming patents whose 'invention' would be laughed out of court by a reasonable person, and then in making a business of using lawyers to ambush people who innovate in the real world.
Let me see: snap a bunch of pics, sort them into a pile, fling them across a room, do it on a computer.
Mayhaps that what has really happened at the USPTO is the all the "Reject" stamps have been stolen by the trolls. Thus, the examiners simply must pass them on. (Unless, of course, you are Gilbert Hyatt.)
What matters is whether there is an existing patent. For example you cannot patent the wheel because a patent for that was granted in 2001. Prior art may limit the amount of protection money you can extort from a patent as you can only target businesses with insufficient cash to defend themselves.
Prior art actually should be a reason, and is certainly a reason here in Europe. In fact, anything that is obvious to a skilled practitioner in the field should not be patentable. This is why any scientific paper produced within most collaborative consortia our university has with industry is first checked to see if there is anything which might be patentable. You must always first apply for a patent, and only then publish. A patent as broad as this, and for something which clearly seems to be prior art (I have been transmitting photos wirelessly from my camera to my phone from the moment I got a DSLR that supported it) would stand little chance under the European patent system.
A key problem seems to be the fact that AFAIK the current funding of the USPTO is based on the number of patents awarded, not the number of applications processed. This produces a very unhealthy incentive to pass anything that seems remotely patentable, and let the lawyers sort it out later in court.
"Yeah, but in the US they have granted patents on perpetual motion machines.. so i don't think a great deal of checking goes into these."
Have you actually seen any patents granted for one? Perpetual motion machines are actually an interesting exception in US patents, because they're considered so self-evidently stupid that they're the only claim requiring an actual working model be presented before a patent is granted (mainly due to a flood of such applications at one point). No other claim has any requirement to be physically possible, let alone to provide evidence you've actually done it. There are still plenty of crackpot patent applications that are effectively claiming to produce free energy, cold fusion being a common favourite, but they're always very careful to never say anything about perpetual motion or free energy because that would guarantee they'd be immediately thrown out.
At least cold fusion could theoretically bear some vague resemblance to a method that could conceivably exist. The working-model requirement needs to be a lot broader, to encompass e.g. US6025810A, which purports to describe a superluminal communications device. It doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to realize that this is causality violation and therefore just as impossible as a PMM.
Yep, piece of string in the bathroom/darkroom. Mind you, this was a long time ago, before this patent was granted.
I believe the Ancient Egyptions also had wireless technology, as no wires were found in any of the pyramids.
Later on, the Danes had Bluetooth of course.
Wisdom of the ancients, man.
and I will say it again : the only way to neuter patent trolls is to tie the amount of damages to the amount of money the patent troll is making with his patent.
In other words : if you're just sitting on your patent and not producing anything of value with it, then you get no money for someone else actually producing goods with it (or something similar).
That will sort the wheat from the chaff.
"... Europe. They looked at software patents and decided you can't patent software, as it is already adequately covered by copyright."
Don't think that's correct. I deal with lots of software patents (usually cast in the form of 'a computer with a program to do xyz'.) Just point your browser at
https://worldwide.espacenet.com/beta/search
enter the name of your favourite software slinger and you'll see lots of European patents (EP).
Example: EP0667573A1 - Incorporation of services written in one operating system environment into another operating system environment. That sounds rather softwary. (Note: does not relate to any of my clients.)
As of 14.09.2019, António Campinos (EPO president), along with Bristows, Managing IP and others were still lobbying for software patents, in violation of EPC rules.
http://techrights.org/2019/09/14/team-upc-boosters-and-swpats/
His writing is hardly unbiased, but it was the first link I got when searching for Europe Software Patents.
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