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1.  

   No Subject Given

   

   Anonymous Coward, Oct 30th, 2003 @ 3:52pm

   
   

   yep, but the courts are seeing more litigation regarding patents than at any time in the history of the system. I would imagine the court costs alone would total in the billions of dollars. Not to mention lawyers fees, processing fees, discovery, expert testomony fees, and so on. There is so much money coming from these useless patents right now that it is absolutely insane! Why would they want to change it? They're making a ton of dough.

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2.  

   no penalty for bogus patents

   

   aNonMooseCowherd, Oct 30th, 2003 @ 6:37pm

   
   

   One problem is that there is apparently no penalty for filing a bogus patent. The worst that can happen is the patent is declared invalid.

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3.  

   Publishing prior art

   

   Ed (not Yourdon), Oct 31st, 2003 @ 6:50am

   
   

   That's not how the system is supposed to work. If you come up with some technology and don't think it's worth the expense to patent it, you can just publish a description somewhere. That doesn't give you any patent rights, but it establishes prior art should anyone else come along and patent something in the same area. That's why for years IBM published a Technical Disclosure Bulletin. They stopped in 1998, for reasons that I don't know.

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4.  

   preventive patenting

   

   Anonymous Coward, Oct 31st, 2003 @ 1:42pm

   
   

   The company in your article is going to waste a ton of money. As your the last poster said, if you want to establish prior art all you have to do is publish it. I would add that the best way to publish it is in prominent journals and conference proceedings covering your field, in order to get knowlege of it disseminated as widely as possible among professionals working in that field. If appropriate, you might even give it a snazzy name and tout it in your advertising.
   I believe that most of the useless patents covering stuff that's been around forever result from two causes:
   One is honest mistakes by engineers who come up with ideas that are new to them, but who are too new to their field to know it's been done before, or are in too much of a hurry, too overworked, or too inexperienced do a proper patent and literature search. Case in point: all of the ridiculous stuff that has come out of the dot coms.
   The other cause is the attitude of many companies that they should dispense with the patent and literature searches, which cost time and money, and just let the patent office do it for them. Little do they know that the people at the patent office have less time for that sort of thing than they do, as well as less expertise in the field.
   The more widely your material is published, the more likely that people will know about it and not bother trying to patent it.
   

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