No Surprise: Senate Approves Useless Patent Reform
from the moving-on dept
This is hardly a surprise, but the Senate has overwhelmingly approved Senator Leahy's "patent reform" bill. It's no surprise, because after many years of attempts to approve patent reform, the bill has been so watered down (from an already weak start) to be not just meaningless, but likely to do more harm than good. Basically, one by one, each aspect of patent reform that might actually help were removed from the bill. What's left is not patent reform. It's a minor patent adjustment, designed to serve the best interests of those who abuse the system. Of course, there's still no House patent reform bill, though it'll be coming soon. There are some indications that there will be some differences between the House and Senate versions, but there are no indications that the House bill will actually have anything useful in it. If this law does pass, it won't actually be patent reform. It'll just be a minor change to the patent system, including a switch to a "first to file" system, rather than a "first to invent." While it's true that most of the world uses first to file, all that really does is encourage people to file faster, rather than to actually innovate. This is not the patent reform we need. This is a joke.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: first to file, first to invent, patent reform, patents, senate
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Heh. That is weird. He comments here frequently, and I believe he's a patent examiner at the USPTO. While I don't always agree with him on this stuff, I actually find him (her?) to be quite knowledgeable and usually thoughtful.
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My block list includes:
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127.0.0.1 cdn.wibiya.com
127.0.0.1 edge.quantserve.com
There are still more, but at least I got rid of most of the crap (including that tracking toolbar that appears to know a little too much).
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Maybe you don't use Firefox, but I find the RequestPolicy addon much more effective and manageable than a host list.
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He said he was a patent examiner. I have not revealed anything he did not reveal himself.
BTW, where is the Techdirt.com privacy policy? You know, the one that tells us who all you are sharing information with
Same place it's always been. http://www.insightcommunity.com/privacy.php
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Look at the mobile phone lawsuits being flung left, right and center. All of them are big companies, and all of them spend big bucks on R&D. I can almost guarantee that NONE of them have stolen any patented material...yet every last one of them are going through million dollar lawsuits.
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A Small Improvement
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101129/01154212032/are-companies-scanning-open-so urce-commit-logs-patenting-what-they-find.shtml#c263
Of course the Supreme Court is going to have to do the heavy lifting, one way or another, and a heavy element of this will consist of reforming court procedure, and administrative procedure in the Patent Office. Congress can generally only deal with issues which have a clear political dimension, issues where the man-in-the-street has some kind of conviction, issues such as healthcare.
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Re: A Small Improvement
So it's good to know this might be an improvement.
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How do you know for certain it is useless? Or is that only an opinion? Hard to tell around here these days.
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fraud
Please see http://truereform.piausa.org/ for a different/opposing view on patent reform.
http://docs.piausa.org/2011PatentReform/
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