So I’m on the fence about patents. I see cases were they are good and I see cases were they are abused.

I think Ronald is right when he states that patents are there to teach. By getting a patent on an idea, you are showing the world how you figured out to do something. In a few years everyone can then also do it and build upon your idea after your time of exclusivity has expired. If you don’t want people getting your idea, and it is a complicated idea and/or process, don’t patent that idea, product, whatever.

However, if it is a rather simple thing to reverse engineer, then patent it, so you have the rights for a few years and then be glad that you won the race to get the patent before someone else stumbled upon this idea. However, I really wonder that if it was that simple of idea, should this be something that is patentable?

So two examples make me go back and forth with the whole patent system.

1) My dad is in the rope manufacturing business and has done R&D off and on for 25+ years. He’s not a PhD in polymers, he’s mostly in charge of the actual equipment. As such, he’s come up with a number of processes to make products that no one else has figured out how to make. I remember as a kid 15 years ago getting a tour of his plant. He showed me how he came up with process X that none of his competitors had figured out to make this rope, and that rope was very well received by the market. His company had the corner on that market. I asked him at the time if he had a patent on it since I thought it would be cool to know my dad had a patent. He told me no, he did not. It seemed that his bosses weren’t concerned with getting one. So fast forward 15 years to when I was back home this last Xmas. Once again getting the traditional tour of the plant and he once again was showing me process X. Come to find out that when the company had been bought out recently, the new management had decided to patent process X. My dad told me it was a good thing that they had, since now one of their competitors was seemingly copying the process. Now, my question, is it a coincidence that they just now started copying this process after the patent was filed, but had not been able too for 15 years before that? Did the patent help them corner the market or did it just give their competitor the jumpstart needed to make a similar product. But if a patent is there to teach and not just to claim exclusivity, then it was actually serving its intended purpose, just maybe sooner than desired. So is a patent in this situation a good thing or bad?? If you look at it from my dad’s company, I’d have to say a bad thing, because now they have shown the competitor how to make this product. But from a progress stand point, it was a good thing since it is now allowing other to take that idea and build upon it.

So now the simple example:
2) My cousin designs boxes. I never knew this was a profession before my cousin started doing it. So he designs a box for dispensing wine. Apparently there is a desire for boxed wine, but not the point of this discussion. So his company submits his design to the potential client to see if they would want to start ordering this box. The wine company does not order the box from them. A few months later my cousins company sees an ad from said wine company, talking about this new box design… and wouldn’t you know it looks just like my cousins design. Now, his company had made sure to patent ideas like these for just this reason. So now its to the courts to figure all this out. So in this case it would seem that the patent system is working as it should. However, I have to wonder if a NDA or some other type of binding contract not to take the idea and use it without their permission would have been enough to take the wine company to court with if they had decided to try and cheat my cousins company. Is a patent the only way to go about this?

So, with all that being said, I actually took the time to read the patent in question here. It seems to me to be an idea of how one could email out news to recipients based on their pre-selected preferences. Not a ground breaking idea, IMO. And even if you say that it doesn’t have to be groundbreaking to get a patent, I’m not sure it meets the non-obvious criteria. But some could, and probably would, argue that it wasn’t obvious at the time. The patent was filed in ’99, so this is early google as only a search engine days. Not a whole lot going on with news aggregate stuff yet. Not a whole lot going on with the internet in general. But I still say it’s just an idea. Not a product. Not something you invented but something you thought would be cool. I know some will still argue with that too, that ideas can be patented, but when can we have some common sense injected into the process?