Companies Feeling Obligated To File For Useless Patents

from the great... dept

Eolas responded today about the W3C's request for their patent to be invalidated. That's not very surprising or particularly interesting. However, this article about the response includes the quote from a software developer saying that they were so shocked that Eolas won such a patent with so much prior art that they now feel obligated to file for their own ridiculous patents - just as a defensive measure against the next silly patent claim that might cover something that they do. This isn't how the system is supposed to work. This isn't encouraging innovation. This is slowing down innovation, and encouraging litigation.
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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Oct 2003 @ 3:52pm

    No Subject Given

    yep, but the courts are seeing more litigation regarding patents than at any time in the history of the system. I would imagine the court costs alone would total in the billions of dollars. Not to mention lawyers fees, processing fees, discovery, expert testomony fees, and so on. There is so much money coming from these useless patents right now that it is absolutely insane! Why would they want to change it? They're making a ton of dough.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    aNonMooseCowherd, 30 Oct 2003 @ 6:37pm

    no penalty for bogus patents

    One problem is that there is apparently no penalty for filing a bogus patent. The worst that can happen is the patent is declared invalid.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Ed (not Yourdon), 31 Oct 2003 @ 6:50am

    Publishing prior art

    That's not how the system is supposed to work. If you come up with some technology and don't think it's worth the expense to patent it, you can just publish a description somewhere. That doesn't give you any patent rights, but it establishes prior art should anyone else come along and patent something in the same area. That's why for years IBM published a Technical Disclosure Bulletin. They stopped in 1998, for reasons that I don't know.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 31 Oct 2003 @ 1:42pm

    preventive patenting

    The company in your article is going to waste a ton of money. As your the last poster said, if you want to establish prior art all you have to do is publish it. I would add that the best way to publish it is in prominent journals and conference proceedings covering your field, in order to get knowlege of it disseminated as widely as possible among professionals working in that field. If appropriate, you might even give it a snazzy name and tout it in your advertising.
    I believe that most of the useless patents covering stuff that's been around forever result from two causes:
    One is honest mistakes by engineers who come up with ideas that are new to them, but who are too new to their field to know it's been done before, or are in too much of a hurry, too overworked, or too inexperienced do a proper patent and literature search. Case in point: all of the ridiculous stuff that has come out of the dot coms.
    The other cause is the attitude of many companies that they should dispense with the patent and literature searches, which cost time and money, and just let the patent office do it for them. Little do they know that the people at the patent office have less time for that sort of thing than they do, as well as less expertise in the field.
    The more widely your material is published, the more likely that people will know about it and not bother trying to patent it.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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