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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday June 14 2018, @06:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-thorns-just-lawsuits dept.

Those interested in the patent system have long complained of patent thickets as a barrier to efficient production of new products and services. The more patents in an area, the argument goes, the harder it is to enter. There are several studies that attempt to measure the effect of patent thickets, with some studies arguing that thickets can ease private ordering. I'd like to briefly point out another (new) one. Charles deGrazia (U. London, Royal Holloway College), Jesse Frumkin, Nicholas Pairolero (both of USPTO) have posted a new draft on SSRN, called Embracing Technological Similarity for the Measurement of Complexity and Patent Thickets.

[...] The authors use natural language processing to determine overlap in patent claims (and just the claims, arguing that's where the thicket lies) for both backward and forward citations in "triads" - patents that all cite each other. Using this methodology, they compare their results to other attempts to quantify complexity and find greater overlap in more complex technologies - a sign that their method is more accurate. Finally, they validate their results by regressing thickets against examination characteristics, showing that the examination factors more likely to come from thickets (e.g. pendency) are correlated with greater thickets.

https://writtendescription.blogspot.com/2018/06/measuring-patent-thickets.html


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday June 14 2018, @07:21AM (4 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Thursday June 14 2018, @07:21AM (#692746) Journal

    What the hell are they talking about!? Ease private ordering.

    Is this a method of finding patent thickets? Or is it something else?
    Is it to help patent applicants do their due diligence?

    Or is it just a story mentioning patents to stir up nerd rage?

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday June 14 2018, @07:35AM (1 child)

    by anubi (2828) on Thursday June 14 2018, @07:35AM (#692752) Journal

    I didn't understand it either.

    You know, we have countries that set themselves up as "tax havens" to attract the wealthy and give them an out as far as paying tax.

    I wonder why some countries don't set themselves up as "patent-free havens" to attract the manufacturing crowd?

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    • (Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:00PM

      by stormwyrm (717) on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:00PM (#692973) Journal

      I wonder why some countries don't set themselves up as "patent-free havens" to attract the manufacturing crowd?

      Sadly, it doesn’t quite work out that way. Say we had a country that was a “patent-free haven”, you’d be able to manufacture widgets infringing on any patents you like with impunity, but you’d only be able to sell those widgets locally and in other jurisdictions that likewise don’t recognise those patents you've infringed either. Once you try to export your widgets somewhere where the patents are considered valid, be prepared to get hit by a lawsuit. I remember a few years back there was a spat between Samsung and Apple where they wanted to ban Samsung’s products from sale in the USA [soylentnews.org] for patent infringement That would be the likely response against nations that try to opt out of this system.

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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @07:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @07:48AM (#692755)
    https://www.city-journal.org/html/identity-politics-sciences-15967.html [city-journal.org]

    "... Every academic department in the sciences, whether it is engineering, computer science, physics, is under enormous pressure from the diversity bureaucrats on their campuses – these are the vice chancellors of diversity equity inclusion sometimes they have internal diversity enforcers – to both interview and hire by race and gender. If a faculty search, as happened several years ago at the University of California, San Diego, in the electrical engineering department, after spending long months trying to find the most qualified candidate, the three finalists were all male – not all white male but all male – these were the most competent published researchers in their field. If those three finalists, they were all male, they were ordered, the department was ordered by the dean to tear up the results, go back to the drawing board and absolutely interview as one of the final three candidates, a female. So, they brought somebody up from the much lower tier of the candidate pool to interview. She did not do well. She was not chosen. The dean once again said this is not acceptable; we need more females in our department – ordered them back to the drawing board. They did it again. She still didn’t pass. Rather than accepting the fact that the engineering faculty at UC San Diego was interested in one thing, and one thing only, scientific competitiveness, to bring in somebody who would advance their own research, advance their standing in the academic world, be able to bring in federal grants, the administration could not accept this and hired her anyway. They create a position with the Orwellian name of an excellence candidate, and hire people based on lower standards simply for the totally irrelevant mission and criterion of race and gender diversity ..."

    The assumption, though, is that this woman was not hired because there was some kind of unconscious bias on the part of the committee choosing her?

    "... That is the assumption and I completely disagree with it. I think it is such a disservice and insult to scientists to say that they are so blinded by prejudice that they cannot recognize scientific talent where it is found. And it also ignores the fact that if they were acting on this alleged implicit bias they would be overriding what are incessant, enormous pressures to diversify, that somehow this very invisible idea of implicit bias is so vast that it overrides the fact that internally and externally everybody is counting by race and gender now, interested only in the diversity profile of scientific departments rather than their academic competitiveness. And we are supposed to believe that implicit bias overrides those pressures. To me it’s a completely fantastical conceit that is counterfactual and contrary to what we know about institutions ..."

    https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-identity-politics-harming-sciences-15826.html [city-journal.org]
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday June 14 2018, @08:50AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 14 2018, @08:50AM (#692770) Journal

    Ease private ordering?

    But of course!
    But... nothing comes for free, this is achieved at the expense of a hardened general shuffling.

    (you know that what I said makes as much sense as TFS, dontcha?)

    (grin)

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