I would also like to see a "cold room" exception. If you can show you invented the idea using completely independent thought, you don't violate the patent and the patent is invalidated.

Remember back in the 80s when AMD/Intel and others would clone each other and it was permissible because they came up with the features and functions completely independently? The same should apply to patents. If you didn't copy an idea, you came up with it on your own, then the idea should not have been patented in the first place. If multiple people come up with the same idea independently, that is the definition of obvious.

You should be given the right to your idea if you come up with it independently and any patents in place for that idea should be invalidated.

[...]

Independently derived ideas that are turned into products and can prove they are independently derived (Again, if multiple people come up with the same idea independent of each other, that should be as definite as it is obvious, and obvious cannot be patented), then it can not be patented, and all patents for those ideas are declared invalid.

"We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."

Regardless of the actual quality of the evidence gathering of DtecNet, copyright infringement is not a straight 'yes' or 'no' question. The Court has had to examine a very significant quantity of technical and legal detail over dozens of pages in this judgment in order to determine whether iiNet users, and how often iiNet users, infringe copyright by use of the BitTorrent system. The respondent had no such guidance before these proceedings came to be heard. The respondent apparently did not properly understand how the evidence of infringements underlying the AFACT Notices was gathered. The respondent was understandably reluctant to allege copyright infringement and terminate based on that allegation. However, the reasonableness of terminating subscribers on the basis of non-payment of fees does not dictate that warning and termination on the basis of AFACT Notices was equally reasonable. Unlike an allegation of copyright infringement, the respondent did not need a third party to provide evidence that its subscribers had not paid their fees before taking action to terminate an account for such reason.

The whole thing is nuts. I can't understand why our goverment allows this shit to go on. It's wrong and its bad for society to have this cancer growing inside our economy. Every time I get a meeting with a legislator or goverment employee working in and around the innovation sector, I bring up the patent system and in particular software patents. We need to change the laws. We need to eliminate software patents. This ridiculous Lodsys situation is the perfect example of why. We need to say "enough is enough."

"The basic problem with patents is that you're trying to assign property rights to something that doesn't deserve property rights. The fact that these property rights end up in the hands of financial owners as opposed to the original inventors just exacerbates the problem. The basic problem is that Chris [Dixon] and a bunch of engineers can be sitting at Hunch designing some amazing new feature and somebody unbeknownst to them has a patent on this feature and never actually implemented it and can now screw them over… It’s just not right, it shouldn’t exist."

Increasing activity by patent assertion entities (PAEs) in the information technology (IT) industry has amplified concerns about the effects of ex post patent transactions on innovation and competition. The business model of PAEs focuses on purchasing and asserting patents against manufacturers already using the technology, rather than developing and transferring technology. Some argue that PAEs encourage innovation by compensating inventors, but this argument ignores the fact that invention is only the first step in a long process of innovation. Even if PAEs arguably encourage invention, they can deter innovation by raising costs and risks without making a technological contribution

The result has been the creation of a shadow patent examination process through litigation. The grant of a patent is no longer the final step, in other words. The de facto examination really takes place when the holder tries to enforce the patent against an alleged infringer, and the defendant claims invalidity of the patent as a defense. When such cases go to trial, which they rarely do, a jury of laymen are then tasked with doing the work avoided by the patent examiner.

In effect, the patent office has outsourced its job to the judiciary and in particular to a jury of non-experts. If nothing else, that is a feature of the modern system that absolutely no one is happy with, or in any event that no one can justify.

The patent office should create a pool of programmers and keep a database of their related skills. When a software patent is submitted, the patent office searches the database for programmers with skills in those related areas, then selects three to five programmers to perform the blind study. The study would involve giving the selected programmers the problem that the patent seeks to solve and some amount of time (24-48 hours or varying based on complexity) to outline or pseudo-code a solution. If none of the selected programmers are able to determine the solution described in the patent, then the non-obvious prong of the patent would be met. This would prevent patents that do obvious things with new technologies from being granted.

Take Apple for example. Apple creates some new technology, say a touch-screen smart phone, that is rightfully protected by patents. Then it goes on to patent the software that interfaces with this technology. The problem with these second patents is that they are obvious. Apple has basically patented doing something with a finger on a touch-screen that people have been doing for years with a mouse on standard computers. I don't believe that just because the technology is patentable, various ways of interfacing with that technology are de facto patentable. A proposed blind study approach, using programmers willing to work for free just to ensure the quality of software patents, would prevent such obvious patents from being granted.

The problem is that if an applicant wants to appeal, the examiner, who may well be a programmer, has to defend his subjective judgment of what's "obvious" with some kind of explicit argument. And the result (says Tim) is that in practice the "non-obviousness" requirement has been largely conflated with a review of the "prior art" or previous related inventions. The upshot is that unless someone else has done almost exactly the same thing before, you've got a good shot at getting the patent. Maybe this is motivated by a version of the no-five-dollar-bills-on-the-sidewalk fallacy in economics: If nobody has done it before, it can't have been all that obvious. But, of course, in a rapidly evolving area of technology, someone's always going to be the first to do something obvious.

I think the source of the problem in the patent system may be linked to a point Friedrich Hayek made long ago about our tendency to overrate the economic importance of theoretical knowledge and vastly underestimate the importance of tacit or practical knowledge. The non-obviousness requirement, tied to the standard of an observer skilled in the appropriate art, is supposed to make the patent system sensitive to this kind of knowledge. But if examiners have to defend their judgments of obviousness, they're essentially being required to translate their tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge--to turn an inarticulate knack into a formal set of rules or steps. And Hayek's point was that this is often going to be difficult, if not impossible. Just as a loose analogy, consider that in the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead's attempt to provide a rigorous, formalized basis for ordinary arithmetic, it takes several hundred pages to strictly establish the proposition "1+1=2." It takes a fairly advanced mathematical education to understand the explicit elaboration of a practice (counting, adding) that we expect most children to master.

If you ask me how I knew the way to go about writing the translation program in question, I'm not sure I could tell you--just as we sometimes find ourselves at a loss when we're asked to give explicit directions for a route we know by heart. Things that are "obvious" are often the hardest to explain or articulate explicitly, precisely because we're so accustomed to apprehending them by an unconscious (and possibly itself quite dizzyingly complicated) process. The very term "obvious" comes from the Latin obviam for "in the way"--that is, right in front of you, where you can't help but see it. Except the visual processing system we "use" automatically is vastly more sophisticated than what we're (thus far) capable of designing. If you had to describe explicitly the unconscious process by which you see what's right in front of you, it wouldn't seem "obvious" at all. The same, I expect, goes for the knack of knowing how to go about solving a particular problem in coding or engineering--with the result that the patent system systematically undervalues the tacit knowledge embedded in those skill sets until it's embedded in a piece of "prior art." So knowledge that's widespread but implicit and inarticulate is routinely mistaken for the kind of innovation it's necessary to incentivize with a monopoly grant. In effect, the hidden value of dispersed tacit knowledge is redistributed to the first person to render it explicit.

A method for providing episodic media, the method comprising: providing a user with access to a channel dedicated to episodic media, wherein the episodic media provided over the channel is pre-defined into one or more episodes by a remote publisher of the episodic media; receiving a subscription request to the channel dedicated to the episodic media from the user; automatically downloading updated episodic media associated with the channel dedicated to the episodic media to a computing device associated with the user in accordance with the subscription request upon availability of the updated episodic media, the automatic download occurring without further user interaction; and providing the user with: an indication of a maximum available channel depth, the channel depth indicating a size of episodic media yet to be downloaded from the channel and size of episodic media already downloaded from the channel, the channel depth being specified in playtime or storage resources, and the ability to modify the channel depth by deleting selected episodic media content, thereby overriding the previously configured channel depth.