Software patents are pitched as a policy choice that encourages programmers by giving them some financial incentive to invent more software.<p>That's how they have been pitched to programmers and the American people.<p>However, after having worked in the patent industry for a few years now, I can tell you software patents are really just a mechanism to redistribute the wealth of engineers to lawyers. Period. That's the end result. Nothing more.<p>I wish this was some sort of exaggeration. But it isn't in my opinion.
Is it normal in other areas of the law for the plaintiff to be able to choose the (extremely favorable) district and judge for the case? Cause I can't imagine this happening in any other area of law, either civil or criminal. It just doesn't seem right, especially when the bias is so clearly observable. IANAL though...
> reformed rules would have forced trolls like eDekka to actually explain how their targets infringe their patents. However, that's not currently a requirement<p>How is it even possible to sue somebody for something you can't show that they did?
If you look past the common rhetoric against ED Texas about bring patentee-friendly and look at the data, this is not really surprising.<p><a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1597919" rel="nofollow">http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1597919</a><p>ED Texas did get a bad rap for being plaintiff-friendly early on, but that didn't last long at all, as the data shows. These days it seems to be favored for being a relatively fast docket and having judges with more patent-expertise.
Heh. More evidence for something I've been hearing for a while, the mass quantities of patent lawsuits in this "rocket docket" has had the side effect of educating everyone in it about this area of law, and it's getting harder to win a bad case.
Progress is slow when it comes to patent reform. Judges have a lot of control over how fast it happens, since they're really the only ones who can make binding decisions.<p>Of course it would be great if the patent office had made better decisions in the first place, but that ship sailed long ago.
> the patent describes (...) routine tasks that could be performed by a human.<p>Is this a good way of defining when a patent is invalid? Isn't everything (i.e.: all computations) technically tasks that could be performed by humans alone given enough time?
It should be more such judges, until the politicians got some brains.<p>Many modern (software related) patents are bringing no advances at all, but are simply claim-pitching of corporations like in the gold-rush times.
Case after case we continue to see a pattern of apparent ignorance, incompetence or indifference on the part of the patent office.<p>I read through the claims. This patent should not have been granted. You can go back to the 1980's and find relevant prior art.<p>Are they playing "dumb" because of self preservation? In other words, if the patent office became really strict and only a handful of patents were granted every year they'd only need a fraction of the people, infrastructure and organization now in place. People would lose their jobs.<p>And so, if you want to keep your job, you issue patents like we are in the middle of a new scientific renaissance. More patents means more money being pumped into the system which, in turn, means you get to keep your job, your benefits and an amazing lifetime pension you did not pay for. You know you the patents you are letting through are crap but all you care about is your financial well being. You htink "Let the courts and those rich fucks sort it out" and move on.<p>Is it possible that the feedback loop at the patent office is such that volume, rather than quality, is what's remunerated? Never mind that this destroys innovation and causes huge financial losses across all kinds of businesses.<p>The fitness function might be such that optimization delivers exactly what we do not want as a nation but what the patent office, as an isolated organism, needs for survival.