Intel settles to escape $4b patent suit with VLSI Intel and SoftBank-backed VLSI Technology have agreed to end a $4 billion patent dispute, according to documents filed in Delaware District Court this week. The decision marks a victory for Intel, which has already lost $3 billion in failed patent disputes to VLSI over the past few years. The case in question [PDF] dates back …
Not sure how many officials are employed by the USPTO but I suspect if you have to trawl through almost 300,000 patent applications each year things will slip through the cracks. They probably grant a lot of patents and then let the public fight it out in the courts; only review the patents when a major incident occurs.
There's no "probably". For a very long time the USPTO policy has been to grant almost everything and let the courts decide validity afterwards.
The only general exclusion to that seems to be for perpetual motion machines, where they still require a working model.
> perpetual motion machines, where they still require a working model.
Has no one patented that yet, it is very simple. You get some toast, butter it and strap it to a cats back. Throw the cat off a building and it will levitate there spinning rapidly between butter side down and cat landing on their paws. Oh no, sorry I was thinking of anti-gravity. It you listen to any UFO you will generally hear a purring like sound, that is from the large number of moggies.
I guess you could have a sub patent of perpetual motion, since the cats and buttered toast are spinning. But in the real world, eventually the cats will lick the butter off the toast and then ...
You remind me of the "Cat bathing as a martial art" story.
:)
My source was the Internet Oracle, which I think I originally read on NNTP (rec.humor.oracle) in the early 90's:
I was using a borrowed VAX account at the time (was not in the right department to be granted an account), and I can remember accessing it in a room filled with second hand vt100 terminals, all of which had some stock company or bank logo etched into their phosphor screens. I do not think that I heard anyone at the time call it usenet, it was just "news" or sometimes you heard someone said check this out, on "NNTP", it is brilliant.
So not ?Eadon?
Used to have a kitten we name Leper cos it made bits of you fall off. One morning I was making breakfast in my trollies (underpants) and had a piece of toast in my mouth and a pot of tea in one hand pouring into a half full cup of tea in the other other when Leper saw his chance and climbed all the way up my bare skin (seemingly knowing I couldn't hit him with either container of near boiling tea) easily took the toast from my nearly screaming mouth, climbed back down and legged it. Only ever come across such sharp claws when a squirrel caught in our chicken shed did several rounds of wall of death via my face before remembering the pop hole it was quite close to when I stepped in. There's something about very sharp points and human flesh that some things in nature (nettles, blackberries) have somehow learned to evolve to stop even pissed humans jumping into them. I've seen videos of people diving into cacti but never a bramble patch or bucket of kittens or squirrels!
.. whereas drunkenly sticking plasters on objects that will really tell you screwed up when you're trying to later remove them were probably already part of literature well before the late Tom Sharp's "Wilt" books*.
:)
* I'm referring to the incident of drunkenly peeing in the rose bushes - I'm certain nobody needs any help with the rest. Fantastic writing :)
The USPTO has been trying to retain talent for some decades. Typical route for most Examiners was to spend a few years at the USPTO learning the ropes and then jump to private industry, where they are paid orders of magnitude more to challenge their former colleagues.
Isn't the problem with parents that you can submit and be awarded a patent for items like,"an object whose function is to yield calculations using digital logic circuits, but it's blue instead of red."
AND THEN you have grounds to sue when someone comes along and makes a chip that is purple, magenta, plum, fuchsia...
The USPTO is so underfunded they have made it their policy to no longer investigate every patent. By default they will approve patents unless somebody else shows them a reason not to. After that they usually consider it the courts problem to determine validity.
I have worked as a civil servant for quite some time and it is not generally laziness or I have been very lucky. Sure, you can find some lazy people but you can find that anywhere.
It is almost certainly budget restraints. We spend a huge amount of time tracking money, talking about budgets, creating budgets and finalizing them is a several month long process and money is always an enormous restraint in low budget departments. Which is fine by me, it is public money and it should be carefully used on things with the most impact.
You probably need to look at it more politically from career civil service perspective. The USPTO is almost certainly underfunded for the amount of work they do and even patent fees probably recover only a percentage of the actual cost of filing patents. I have worked in fee recuperated departments, getting more than 60% of you operational expenses recovered would be good. The fact is people will complain to the politicians about fees and because fees and budgets are controlled by politicians, you can rarely actually recuperate costs But appliciants less likely to complain from a general ledger line for the operational budget. While 2000 USD for a fee seems like a lot it would actually only pay personnel expenses for a single clerk for only about a single work week, no money for capital projects or copier paper.
Patent clerks are probably faced with the choice of getting through the queue or researching each fully. If the length of time to get a response on an application increases significantly then you'll have applicants ringing the politician. Most politician are there to showboat and don't have a grasp of operations, so their response would be to cut budgets which only makes the problem worse. Meanwhile, the companies that are targetted by patent trolls are targetted because of their money. These companies can afford these battles and to them the costs of the legal battle are often small compared the amount of money the generated through ownership of a patent. It is daft, but everyone is happier politically (which is more important) if the USPTO churns out patents than spends x3 longer carefully researching.
It's got to the point that corporations use patents as a form of trademark registration, so they can then use in their promo materials that they use a patented technology.
Then when you find actual patent, you'll see that it is nothing new or ground breaking, but likely was a result of many brown envelopes travelling under the table - as you say they are underfunded, so they need those envelopes.
Currently very much anything you do technology wise is patented, but you may not be big enough to get sued and milked.
The right thing to do would be to just scrap USPTO altogether. That organisation is way past their use by date.
This changed, in 1993 or 1994 under Vice President Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" garbage. I cannot be bothered to look up the name. One of the more ballyhooed changes was to "update" the charter of the USPTO from "Issue valid patents" to "Help our customers get patents". At the time, some of us referred to it as "The Lawyer's Full Employment Act", because it was blatantly going to move patent examination into the courts. Because jurors make the very best patent examiners.
"Because jurors make the very best patent examiners."
Especially jurors in Texas, apparently. The judges there must be specially trained to instruct the jurors in the fine points of each patent. I wonder how much that training costs ... and who pays, and who gets paid, and what the going rate is.
The problem precedes that by a few decades (under Reagon, if I recall) when the USPTO's working mandate went from "Why should we grant you this?" to "Why should we deny you this?". Applicants became "customers" and all sorts of other garbage came down.
Patents primary purpose is to advance USA inc, because it can never match labor costs. The theory goes as USA was the best of everything, any serious disputes would be settled by cross-patenting for no money, thus other countries had no chance...However China now exceeds USA in quality research papers, and patents, and exposing fake or ever-greened patents. The USA tried the software/closed firmware cost on China route. Meanwhile Taiwan showed it got things right. In all, China will win long term, and overcome the trade landmines placed before it. Do not forget Sanyo, Sony and NEC suffered, LG and some Japanese cos failed, possibly Blackberry when cost of patent included a % of final retail price.
\
VLSI and SCO were both founded in 1979. Both companies made some really awesome hacks, used all over the industry. Later in life they were sold, and then sold again. Along the way, they stopped being useful in the technology world. Both now only exist as shadows, just names on paper that are used to sue people for using technology they claim as their own.
Patents shouldn't exist at all, as they favour the rich who have money to make an application and defend it and then they gatekeep it.
Someone poor who comes up with something has no chance to do the same.
Many techniques or technologies were "invented" by many people at the same time, but only one can get a patent and then can use it so that others cannot use their inventions.
As you work on something, the inventions come naturally as often there is no other way to achieve the goal. Then once one person file a patent, they basically get a monopoly.
It's extremely frustrating - like try to buy a mouse with a flywheel for fast scrolling from different company than Logitech. You can't because Logitech has a patent for such a basic thing. Now Logitech, in my opinion, makes poor quality mice (for instance the surface finish gets sticky after a year or two, as it degrades, and you have to buy a new one), but if you want that scrolling unfortunately no manufacturer that makes better quality products can offer it.
There is of course a trade involved.
The "public good" is the disclosure of the patent -- the method, techniques, etc etc. for public use after the patent expires, 20 or 22 years later, or whatever.
However, any system invented by humans will always be gamed by other humans. It's the natural way of things.
So the patent attorneys invent "ring-around" patents that provide (possibly) useful features and methods surrounding some-one else's patent.
And other variant games like minor modifications of formula.
The most egregious example I can think of is a pharmaceutical patent describing a pill where the dose was merely doubled over an existing patent and another (inert) substance added, and that patent was successfully defended in court. (don't have reference, unfortunately),
At least software patents are largely off the table.
As you can tell, I am generally in favour of patents but not in favour of the games.
When I talked to people who support patents, the common theme is always their insecurity - they think that someone is going to steal their idea and make millions while they'll starve.
They forget that the product idea is just a very small % of overall success. You can have the best idea in the world, but if you can't make it right, your marketing team sucks, the resulting product is too expensive and so on, you'll starve anyway. But because the idea is patented, nobody else can make it. This is a loss to the world.
Another problem is that 99.999% of patents don't actually cover anything ground breaking, just stuff someone got first to and actually thought of patenting it or had money to do it or both.
4 times I have independently invented physical devices, built and tested them. (One was a device that looked about the size of a Yorkie Bar, but that when held in the hand had 5 buttons that when pressed in combinations, used voice synthesis to speak. The processor was Z80, just to show how long ago this was!)
All 4 times I have approached manufacturers who have performed patent searches to find that each of my inventions might possibly infringe an obscure patent or two (none of which have been taken into production by the patenter, as far as we could tell.)
Patents are often used just to stop innovation or a complete marketplace!
Also, I made a clockwork radio for Craft, Design and Technology 'O' level submitted coursework at school. Prior art that might have annoyed Trevor Baylis, but probably not, as he seemed such a nice guy. RIP
"Patents shouldn't exist at all, as they favour the rich who have money to make an application and defend it"
Or even worse stolen - Alexander Graham Bell - I'm thinking of 'your' telephone here!
Only patented after Antonio Meucci couldn't pay the $10 to renew his caveat.
Meucci eventually recognised by the US House of Representatives in 2002.
"Many techniques or technologies were "invented" by many people at the same time..."
My wife is (whisper it quietly, Russian) and whenever the topic of "who invented..." crops up she's never hear of the name I know but does have the name of a Russian who invented it. It quickly becomes a game wireless, TV, Lightbulb, telephone etc. On investigation the Russian name does turn up some evidence that they worked in the relevant field so who knows... but it's hard to find something they didn't invent implying that the rest of the worlds "innovators" are incompetent or plagiarists .
For those us in that land referred as the United States of America after hearing numerous pitches by legal firms for an action due product liability that force the feel of a rise in blood pressure causing possibly blurring vision or not, nausea or not we might have case against these firms. After reading here about Sofbank coupled with the Dupont Silicon boob cause where no research found the effect to be general nor the Johnson Baby Powder case where the claimed problem took 35 years for that product to present the problem, we my be able join in this free for all and get our fair share after 17 mil for just one case is non taxed money to us in most states.
Another get rich plan for the proletariat
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