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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No Subject Given
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no penalty for bogus patents
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Publishing prior art
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preventive patenting
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.
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