The Harm Caused By Patent Disclosure
from the willful-infringement dept
Alan Wexelblat has an interesting post over at the Copyfight blog. After participating in a mailing list discussion about some new patents, he's rather stunned to learn that many firms forbid their employees from looking at published patents. He thinks the lawyers are confused about the difference between trade secrets and patents -- but that's probably not true. What's most likely happening is that the lawyers know that you get treble damages if you can prove willful infringement, and you do that by showing that the infringer knew of the patent. So, the way you avoid that is you don't look at any patents. This is exactly the opposite of what the patent system is supposed to be about. In fact, many patent system defenders insist that "public disclosure" is the key benefit of the patent system -- but that's a complete myth. David Levine and Michele Boldrin have already shown why patents are unlikely to increase the disclosure of inventions (because the only people who will disclose are those who know their "invention" would become public no matter what, otherwise they're better off keeping it secret), while other reports point out that patent attorneys are increasingly focused on filing vague patents that can cover lots of things, without actually disclosing anything useful. Now we can add this growing fear of willful infringement to the reasons that public disclosure isn't what it's cracked up to be -- and, in fact, may be hurting innovation by forcing those knowledgeable in a space to ignore the state of the art to avoid the possibility of huge fines for willful infringement.
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Filed Under: disclosure, patents
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Willy Wonka
He kept his trade secrets and look, he was the most successful candy man in the land.
Although, sometimes I think he could use a little more cowbell.
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People I have worked with view all kinds of patents. Because a few wrongheaded companies forbid it proves the rule?
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Old news
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This is standard in some buisnesses.
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Re: Willy Wonka
The pay chaeck should rule out in the end.
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Re: Re: Willy Wonka
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Define Many?
of the article. In fact I was paid
as a consultant to view patents and
figure out how to avoid infringement
if necessary. Perhaps as a direct
employee the policy is different?
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Re: Willy Wonka
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Wrong - both counts!
That doesn't make any sense - I wouldn't be surprised if MANY potential inventions simply died before they were ever born because the person who thought up the invention didn't bother to take the next step because they didn't have the resources to bring it to market.
But, if that person patented their idea, then at least it's out there for someone else to find who may think its a good idea and who has the resources to bring it to market.
You also said "So, the way you avoid that is you don't look at any patents".
Well, if a company would rather "risk" spending a ton of money on products without properly checking to see if that product is patented or not. Then, that's their mistake and NOT the patent systems'!
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Re: This is standard in some buisnesses.
a. general descriptions of concepts that have been around for years or decades, but were never patented because they were considered to be obvious;
b. minor updates of an older concept by the straightforward application of a recent technology.
This situation has become really noticeable in defense technologies. I think one motivation is that, in some jurisdictions, government R&D contracts and procurements can be sole sourced on grounds of proprietary IP.
The bottom line is that significant ideas that are in a usable form aren't that common.
Robert
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No patents at all
What about patents that struggle in the midst of the military and civil patentings?..
The problem is that the US changed their patenting after few years of WWII to increase the fast adoption of patents bought to third parties, and those third parties now are being killed by the patenting system itself from the US, so we have a deal that some sort of change might be done?
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