China Files A Million Patents In A Year, As Government Plans To Increase Patentability Of Software
from the those-who-cannot-remember-the-past-are-condemned-to-repeat-it dept
Techdirt has been following for some years China's embrace of patents, loudly applauded by Western companies who believe this will give them more power there. The country has just passed a notable milestone in this area:
China is driving Asian-led growth in innovation worldwide, becoming the first country to file 1 million patent applications in a single year, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said on Wednesday.
Reuters gives its story the headline "China top innovator with one million patent requests in year: U.N." But as Techdirt has pointed out again and again and again, more patents do not lead to more innovation, just to more patents. And it seems that is precisely what China wants. A report on Bloomberg notes that China is planning to make it even easier to get patents for both software and business methods:
Chinese innovators filed most of their 2015 applications in electrical engineering, which includes telecoms, followed by computer technology and semiconductors, and measurement instruments, including medical technology, the U.N. agency said.[Proposed patent examination guidelines] seek to address concerns that some examiners have been too cautious in treating all references to business models or computers as red flags that signal unpatentability. A sentence in the draft explains that claims relating to a business method are not excluded from patentability if they contain sufficient technical features.
China's move to embrace software patents and business methods comes at a time when both have become less patentable in the US thanks to the Alice decision, which is well on the way to killing software patents in the US. Of course, patent maximalists are drawing exactly the wrong conclusion here:
Meanwhile, another change clarifies that apparatus claims relating to software can contain both hardware and "program" components. And the draft changed language that some examiners have interpreted as barring nearly all computer program references. The guidelines clarify that inventions relating to "computer programs per se" are not patentable because those are rules and methods for mental activities.Critics in the U.S. have long argued that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International has made many genuine software-related inventions unpatentable. At the same time, they say an improving environment in China means that patent holders should consider going there to enforce and monetize their IP.
Good luck with that. As the book "Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk" by James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer chronicles, software patents and their associated lawsuits have imposed a huge net cost on the US technology ecosystem. It's mostly patent trolls and lawyers who have benefited from the thicket of intellectual monopolies that has threatened to strangle innovation. The same is likely to happen in China as it foolishly follows the US down the path of allowing patents on everything under the sun.
That may be good news for the West in the long term, as the Chinese tech industry descends into an orgy of patent infringement suits that saps its resources and energy. But in the short term, many of the Western companies that are operating in China are likely to get caught up in this expensive, pointless mess too.
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Filed Under: china, innovation, patents, software patents
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Folly of the Globalists
At the end of the day, China is more than making it clear they intend to use every process and rule we build to crush us without a single ounce of remorse.
Additionally, another revelation that it is actually NOT a global community like so many "tool-aid" drinkers claim.
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Re: Folly of the Globalists
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Anyway, no matter how this goes it'll be interesting to watch.
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Folly of the Mercantilists
Patents are a tax, with the purpose of keeping others out of the market.
And a lot of the other ideas propagated by so-called "free trade" agreements are nothing else than thinly veiled mercantilism either.
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Re: Folly of the Mercantilists
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Patents should be abolished completely
Patents effectively work to help create a servitude society. They do exactly the opposite of what they were intended to do. They should be completely abolished. All of them!
Patents and for-profit insurance entities are the primary causes of rampantly rising healthcare costs of goods and services.
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Re: Patents should be abolished completely
Patents on the machines themselves should be okay to go even if they deal in biology.
But no patents on how to discover a gene, or how to splice, or how to any fucking thing!
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Re: Re: Patents should be abolished completely
And what's your reasoning for this?
Because, actually, patents on machines don't work either: The legal fees are (on the whole) bigger than whatever is earned by licensing; so basically, it's a tax which only serves lawyers.
And I don't see any use for something that is only a money-making scheme for lawyers, and whose main use is to kill off competition.
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Re: Re: Re: Patents should be abolished completely
That's not a useful argument either way. The appropriate question is whether they promote the progress of useful arts. Patent-holders can significantly restrict the progress of specific people, so there should have to be a large net gain to justify them. We'd have to be learning about new techniques that would otherwise not have been figured out (invented or reverse-engineered) for decades otherwise.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Patents should be abolished completely
In most cases the "techniques" would have been reinvented or reverse-engineered by others long before the patents expired. Patents actually hinder "the progress of useful arts."
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Re: Patents should be abolished completely
Patents and copyright should both be abolished, period.
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It'll be a while before the fallout begins but when it does it's popcorn time. I like mine lightly salted.
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This will be an interesting experiment to watch. If what we all expect will happen, it will be proof positive that patents hinder innovation. Let's see how they are in 5 years?
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Don't forget about Chinamart.
I mean Walmart.
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I've seen sentiments echoed along the lines of "if all electronics from the US and China are equipped with bugs/backdoors by both governments, I'd rather the Chinese spy on me than the US government." The Chinese government must be thinking of the same thing. If we can just curb those pesky western electronics, we'll have less impediment to surv... umm... keeping our citizens safe!
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Overtake and surpass America...
Similarly, patent quantity was a rough indicator of inventiveness a century ago, but not in this age of trolling.
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