IBM bathroom patent symbolic of US patent ills

The US Patent Office and system is a crock of shit. This is like the USA building a Great Wall of China around itself for technology and the USA will eventually be left behind in the tech world.

There is only one prerequisite for a patent to be approved in the USA...did they apply? This has been proven in many patent infringement suits in the USA to date. If you contest an Intellectual Patent, once they look at it, they overturn it. This is typical of spending the 4-5 hours on each case. They don't know Jack about the product.

I'd go for an inverse charge. No fee to apply. However, if anyone proves the patent invalid, the Patent Office must pay the "prover" $50K plus costs ;-)

In the past I've done a lot of expert witness consulting. This year, though, I've lost a lot of business by telling potential clients that their patent wasn't worth the powder to blow it to hell.

Unfortunately I sure they found themselves an alternate "expert" who would swear to anyth>The US Patent Office and system is a crock of shit. This is like the USA

...Jim Thompson

Ah, well, there we have it.

The US Patent Office and system are exactly what Congress desires them to be.

Hmm, maybe you ddn't read the OP's "Over the last 40 years, the USPTO granted 62-72 percent of all patent applications, but that number has been dropping. In the first quarter of this year, only 43 percent of applications have been granted."

Proven? Do you have any statistics concerning how many of the up 150,000 to

200,000 patents issued each year are challenged? Did you ever consider that maybe the relatively few patents that are ever challenged are the ones most deserving of challenge?

And just what is an "Intellectual Patent"?

There's certainly someone here who doesn't know Jack ... and, coincidentally, he might even be called Jack, since his stated name is John!

-- Larry (anti-patent, but in favor of a little bit of logic here and there...)

Indeed.

"We the people" seems not to factor into it, unless you're of the opinion that Congress serves the people, and not itself. Most of us would kill for a health care and pension system they voted for themselves while they were passing other, not so nice health care laws for common people. The problem with changing the USPTO is that it's probably not going to help Joe Citizen ad mush as it helps Big Business. It's much the same as what happened with changing copyright and DRM laws. It's obscure, highly technical stuff of virtually no interest to the common man until he hears "Your Blackberry may have to shut down because of patent issues." or realizes he can't record video without BigBiz's explicit permission.

Numbers are often deceiving. When I first read that I asked myself what it could mean. Did a fiat come from high above to change the end result? That's often the case for Federal programs. Like veteran and disability programs, the bottom numbers can change pretty quickly if the right kind of attention (i.e. the Walter Reed fiasco) is focused on the issue. Are they reviewing patents more thoroughly? Or are they just disapproving more based on some arbitrary standards change? Some of the stories told by former patent examiners aren't exactly heartwarming tales of an agency in continuous improvement.

Says "the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched a "Patent Busting Project" partially predicated on the notion that patents harmful to innovation were being issued by the office because it was doing an inadequate job of discovering prior art."

EFF has a hit list: Acacia Research Streaming Media Patent Clear Channel/Live Nation Live Concert Recording Patent Acceris VoIP Patent Sheldon F. Goldberg Online Gaming Patent Ideaflood/Hoshiko Personalized Sub-domain patent Neomedia Technologies Identifier/Directory Lookup Patent Test.com Online Test-Taking Patent (A personal favorite bad patent: ) Nintendo Handheld Software Emulation Patent Firepond/Polaris Natural Language Processing Patent Seer Systems Digital Music Encoding Patent

As long as a big company can wait out an inventor until he's near death, the rich and powerful will be able to game the system. Patents need to protect the little guy just as much as the big, something the Feds are now finding out with the mortgage crisis. Consumer protection protects the entire economy, eventually. So should a robust, reasonable and workable patent system.

I believe I read somewhere that Spain and Germany are out-patenting the living daylights out of us in the area of solar power, and that's pretty scary. We're losing the lead on important innovations because we're so addicted to oil.

The opposite of an "Anti-intellectual Patent?" (-:

coincidentally, he

What's the product? I thought this was about patents. And bathrooms. Eeeiiwww!

-- Bobby, (pro *reasonable* patents and *reasonable* copyright laws but willing to admit that's not the place we're in or the direction we're headed.)

Anyone who watched the OJ trial realizes that if you've got enough money, you can find an expert witness to tell you anything's possible. And if his trial didn't convince the world that "Justice may be blind, but she can sure smell money!" there's the Phil Spector trial. In that case, it was apparent the murder victim's "alleged" best friend reversed her testimony for the hint of a recording contract. I guess Hollywood lives by a different set of rules. Disney & Friends with the help of Senator "Disney" Hollings

(take your choice:

)

basically rewrote the US copyright laws to eliminate the concept of fair use with digital video and extend copyright cash cows like Mickey way beyond what the founding fathers and most other people thought until Sen Hollings (D-isney) came along and "helped" them.

"Picture a future where distributing Linux is a crime punishable by a hefty fine and a prison sentence. If that sounds ridiculous, then you haven't run into the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act. It's the very latest -- and most bizarre -- word in political back-scratching from one of South Carolina's U.S. senators. And he'd rather not talk about it, thank you very much."

-- Bobby G.

Something Mark_, Taz and Weiner can't get.