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posted by mattie_p on Saturday February 22 2014, @10:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the it'll-never-happen dept.

Fluffeh writes:

"In June, President Barack Obama called for action against patent trolls. Today the White House held a short conference updating what has happened in the arena of patent policy since then and announced new initiatives going forward — including one to 'crowdsource' the review of patents.

Currently, getting a patent is a one-on-one proceeding between the applicant and the examiner. Two pilot programs that allowed the public to submit prior art were only applied to a tiny number of patents, and in the first program, all the patents were voluntarily submitted by the applicants. Applying such scrutiny to a few hundred patents, out of the hundreds of thousands issued each year, isn't any kind of long-term solution.

Unless the crowd-sourcing initiatives were to put major new burdens on applicants — which would be resisted — the fundamentals of patent examination aren't going to change. Patent examiners get an average of eighteen hours to review a patent. Most importantly, examiners effectively can't say 'no' to applicants. They can reject a particular application, but there's no limit to the number of amendments and re-drafts an applicant can submit."

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by dmc on Sunday February 23 2014, @01:16AM

    by dmc (188) on Sunday February 23 2014, @01:16AM (#5030)

    Your argument seems to hinge on the conflation of patent and copyright law.

    I disagree. I did mix patents and copyright, because you had already gone ahead and used the term "proprietary" which applies to both, and the digital film as represented by a long number was I think the easiest way to illustrate my point. If you look at the world as something of a 'Matrix', or close enough to it, any traditionally patentable process, e.g. how to make velcro, can also for the sake of how we are discussing it, be represented as a very long number (e.g. describe it in detail in ascii, or make a program that generates an atomic/voxel rendering the process etc). I do believe that the general idea of proprietaryness that is shared between copyright, software patents, and traditional patents, is basically all about the same thing "intellectual property". I think we probably agree more than your response suggests. I think IP rights should be limited much more than they are, fair-use and public domain valued highly. I very much liked another posters idea about the limits on the monopoly granted degrading with each resale. But yes, patents and copyright are distinct, but they are not as entirely distinct as your argument suggests. It almost sounds like you are getting on my case because any sympathy with 'the other side', which I agree, that we both agree, is doing heinous things... I remember the $222,000 judgement against the soccer mom. I see all the patents, the vast majority software being used to throttle innovation more than encourage it. I see all that. But I think you are entrenching as opposition too much. I think by denying the foundational value of them *completely* does a disservice to the progress I think we would both like to see. (seriously, reread your "absurd to any thinking person" sentence until you realize you were 100% guilty of an ad hominem argument...)

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