Patent Owners Can Prevent You from Owning Anything

My name is on a pile of US patents, all assigned to whomever employed me at the time that they were filed. It's always been a condition of employment that I would disclose inventions and cooperate with the filing of patent applications. And now there's a bunch of good ideas that I know are not being exploited for value by anybody. I feel as if I have somehow betrayed the scientific Enlightenment by doing my duty by my employers.

We really need to get rid of the Federal Circuit. On first blush it seems like a good idea to have a court that specializes on technical patent issues. But it turns out that most lawyers interested and experienced in patent law are corporate lawyers who spent their whole careers creating and defending patents without ever thinking from the consumer point of view at all. So the patent court ends up packed with a bunch of over the top, maximal patent rights judges.

I don't really understand what is going on with the legal system in the US lately? We have all those nice protections for the buyer ... unless the seller chooses not to provide them. We have all those nice protections for consumers, like being able to sue in case something goes wrong ... unless the other party decides not to play this whole 'legal system' game and includes an arbitration clause in the initial agreement, which basically means "we can break the agreement but you don't". What's up with that?

This kind of bullshit is why I&#x27;m deeply scared of the TPPA. We <i>don&#x27;t</i> want this kind of rubbish in NZ.

Once the government grants a monopoly, no matter how limited or small, the foothold and motivation exist to expand it.<p>The system is: a small number of monopoly holders, each with strong incentives to expand it, versus the rest of the population, none of whom cares that much about a single case, and a court system that responds to the more motivated party.<p>The rest is a matter of time.

&gt; <i>And because patent infringement generally does not require “intent,” a consumer could be liable even if they never saw the notice or agreed to it (for example, if they bought the product used without the original packaging).</i><p>Can it? Who can prove that there was such a notice, long after the packaging is gone?<p>Maybe <i>almost</i> all units had such packaging, but I carefully inspected the box before opening the one that I bought, and didn&#x27;t see any such notice. Can you produce my original packaging to show me the notice?<p>Or how about: I got it out of box for a reduced price. At the time I completed the sale, there was no packaging. No implicit contract can possibly bind me to a time prior to the sale, when persons unrelated to me in any way removed the packaging.

This is deeply disturbing.

I think the bigger problem is the ability to sue unsophisticated end users, even when big fat suppliers, retailers or manufacturers exist and are easily sued. The only reason a patent holder would do that is to make the legal defense hard. This is a common troll tactic. Sue people with shady patents who can&#x27;t mount a defense and avoid the big pockets who would invalidate the patent.

&gt; But there is a very big reason to make such a distinction: consumers’ expectations based on long-standing law disfavoring these “restraints on alienability of property.” For almost 400 years, it has been widely accepted that those who manufacture goods shouldn’t be able to reach out and exercise a “dead-hand” of control over the goods once the manufacture has long passed ownership on to the consumer.<p>The EFF takes some artistic license here. The aversions to restraints on the alienability of property apply to <i>real property</i> (<i>i.e.</i> land), which is different than mass-manufactured chattel property for obvious reasons. The doctrine has nothing to do with &quot;consumer expectations&quot; but is instead a way to avoid land-use planning problems that result from use and transfer restrictions in wills.

&quot;in USA&quot;. Luckily such madness tend to stop at the EU borders.

Japanese and especially European car manufacturers are good examples of the problem. They load so much restrictive software onto their cars, that these cars are now deemed unusable by at least half the global population. This leaves a fantastic opening in the market for producers who offer an alternative. Car manufacturers which are either less reliant on software or else use free software are bound to win substantial market share.

Although I tend to be anti-patent, the circumstances around the case are important and the eff didn&#x27;t really provide them. The link, included, pointed directly to the ruling which I was unable to grok as a non-lawyer.<p>I found a more detailed explanation from a site that is &quot;pro patents&quot;. Ignore the bias, but it&#x27;s a good explanation of what happened here and I feel it&#x27;s made it no less distrubing: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;patentlyo.com&#x2F;patent&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;lexmark-impression-facts.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;patentlyo.com&#x2F;patent&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;lexmark-impression-facts...</a><p>The TL;(not-terribly-accurate)DR; is that Lexmark patented some elements of their toner cartridge and sold a &quot;regular&quot; and a &quot;single-use&quot; version at a discount with DRM to prevent its re-use. They sued a reseller that circumvented this single-use restriction and won on the &quot;license&quot; that states the single-use cartridge cannot be resold.<p>This is the kind of case that makes me <i>hate</i> the patent system when I&#x27;d otherwise be a proponent of it in spirit[1]. In the case of Lexmark, it appears they&#x27;re using the patent system in order to continue the lousy practice[2] of charging very little for the printer while gauging the customer on the ink, a practice that I wish the patent system didn&#x27;t enable. In all likelihood, they&#x27;ve patented some very tiny, novel part of the toner cartridge (perhaps the chip that prevents its reuse?) and are using it to enforce this sort of bait-and-switch.<p>I also hate the idea of enforcing a &quot;single-use&quot; rule via DRM and then suing to further push the idea that we don&#x27;t actually own the things we buy. I&#x27;ll avoid buying products that have these kinds of restrictions but if the practice becomes common-place, I expect I&#x27;ll begin to have trouble doing that.<p>It makes me think of the little plastic cups I purchased for a family party I had last year. I was surprised to see them adorned with &quot;U.S. Patents ####.&quot; So does this court order indicate that they can simply write a blurb indicating that they may only be used for a &quot;Single Drink&quot; and they can proceed to sue anyone for infringement if they fail to abide? That&#x27;s reductio ad absurdum, of course, but there&#x27;s many products&#x2F;scenarios in-between that which are possible and likely if restricting your customers is your business model.<p>[1] In theory, I like the idea of giving an inventor who has created something truly unique a brief period of protection against incumbents, who will likely do whatever they can to either prevent the new product from disrupting their existing sales or copy a small inventor out of business. This is provided that the barriers for entry are particularly high. In tech, they&#x27;re so low that it seems the <i>only</i> way patents are used is for predatory purposes by large companies.<p>[2] It&#x27;s a bait and switch of sorts in that people pay less attention to price-per-page than they do the initial investment. It&#x27;s this reason that I chose to buy a black-and-white laser printer the last time I purchased a printer (2005?). I&#x27;ve gone through two $35-$65 &quot;compatible&quot; toner cartridges since then.

File a patent on the generic supposed protection of intellectual, design and creative ideas to overworked, inconsisent and vague government entity that are then hoarded by lawyers with lots of money whom frequently visit Texas. Maybe that would wake up some folks to the fact that their ostensible protection process is right now a protection racket.