(Quote from article: "Even after dismissing for lack of standing, the judge decides to take on the issue anyway".)
Did I hear that right? If so, then there wasn't anything for the judge to decide except the dismissal for lack of standing. So surely everything else he said and wrote was irrelevant to the decision and ineffective as precedent, just [obiter] 'dictum'?
It's a bit hard to understand the motivation of the person who was actually affected adversely by the search that started this whole thing off: hard to understand why he didn't bring up his own injury as an element in the claim. But then again, if the judge was as hostile as it seems, and if there had been a real case for him to chew on, he might have been able to make a stronger and more precedential decision adverse to the freedom issues here -- oh well.
The patent troll problem is really only enabled by the patent office (PTO) falling down on its job of filtering out undeserving patent claims after giving them proper and judicious assessment.
So the PTO doesn't see its job that way, and talks of the 'productivity' of issuing patents?
There you have a big part of the problem, with patents that never should have been granted at all. Many of those patent claims are just wider in breadth than anything new for which the (nominal) inventor has made a practically useful contribution. That's how the patents undeservingly get to cover trivialities, enabling patent trolls to oppress honest businesses. It used to be well recognized as the job of the PTO to filter out patent claims of this kind before they were ever granted. The PTO needs to focus on properly training its examiners (and the examiners' bosses), give them enough time to do their jobs properly, and measure their performance on the quality of their assessments, not on the numbers game.
Easier said than done, though, to reach that state. There's a zillion excuses that both government and private lobby groups will use, to point attention to just anything else rather than make sure that undeserving patents are properly filtered out and aren't granted.
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a messup of a case?
(Quote from article: "Even after dismissing for lack of standing, the judge decides to take on the issue anyway".)
Did I hear that right? If so, then there wasn't anything for the judge to decide except the dismissal for lack of standing. So surely everything else he said and wrote was irrelevant to the decision and ineffective as precedent, just [obiter] 'dictum'?
It's a bit hard to understand the motivation of the person who was actually affected adversely by the search that started this whole thing off: hard to understand why he didn't bring up his own injury as an element in the claim. But then again, if the judge was as hostile as it seems, and if there had been a real case for him to chew on, he might have been able to make a stronger and more precedential decision adverse to the freedom issues here -- oh well.
'just' filter out the undeserving patent claims
The patent troll problem is really only enabled by the patent office (PTO) falling down on its job of filtering out undeserving patent claims after giving them proper and judicious assessment.
So the PTO doesn't see its job that way, and talks of the 'productivity' of issuing patents?
There you have a big part of the problem, with patents that never should have been granted at all. Many of those patent claims are just wider in breadth than anything new for which the (nominal) inventor has made a practically useful contribution. That's how the patents undeservingly get to cover trivialities, enabling patent trolls to oppress honest businesses. It used to be well recognized as the job of the PTO to filter out patent claims of this kind before they were ever granted. The PTO needs to focus on properly training its examiners (and the examiners' bosses), give them enough time to do their jobs properly, and measure their performance on the quality of their assessments, not on the numbers game.
Easier said than done, though, to reach that state. There's a zillion excuses that both government and private lobby groups will use, to point attention to just anything else rather than make sure that undeserving patents are properly filtered out and aren't granted.