>>Robert Cringely has written a most comprehensive description of recent developments in the perverted patent reform process being funded by Big Companies out to steal your inventions.  I hope I’m not being too blunt about it, but this is a serious matter. Consider the following article, which I have liberally excerpted.  Click on this line to read the entire, excellent article by Robert Cringely, and tp permalink to it.

August 18, 2005

Patently Absurd

Patent Reform Legislation in Congress Amounts to
Little More Than a “Get Out of Jail Free” Card for Microsoft

>By Robert X. Cringely

Late last month, shortly before the U.S. Congress shut down for its
summer recess, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Intellectual Property
subcommittee held an unusual hearing — unusual because the only
committee member attending the hearing was the chairman, Orrin Hatch,
a Republican from Utah. Why would such a prestigious committee hold
a hearing in Washington attended by only one member? To slam through
some controversial legislation, of course. Senator Hatch was trying
to pass a new law “reforming” the U.S. patent system and apparently
felt it would all go much more smoothly without the presence of the
other committee members. And it might have gone smoothly, except
someone in the press noticed the unusual hearing and decided to
attend, essentially scotching the intended markup of the bill a week
later and passage just as an unwary Congress was heading home.

Lord save us from patent reform.

This is another in my occasional series of columns on “innovation,” a
term that — at least when used in the computer and software
industries — generally means “creative theft of ideas by big
companies.”

There are several forms of intellectual property protected by U.S.
law. Among these are patents, trademarks, and copyrights. The goal
of all three forms of protection is to encourage hard work through
the granting of some economic exclusivity, and thereby helping the
nation by growing the economy and through the good works made
possible by new inventions. Trademarks reduce ambiguity in marketing
and promotion. Copyrights protect artistic and intellectual
expression. And patents protect ideas. Of these three categories of
intellectual property, the ones recently subject to reform efforts
are copyrights and patents, and each of these seems to be headed in a
different direction, though for generally the same reason.

Copyright law is being tightened at the behest of big publishers and
especially big record and movie companies. The Digital Millennium
Copyright Act, for example, makes it a crime to defeat copy
protection of CDs and DVDs, thus helping to preserve the property
rights of these companies. At the end of some artistic productivity
chain, it is supposed to protect the rest of us, too, most notably by
encouraging the record and movie companies to make more records and
movies, which we will in turn be discouraged from copying illegally.

Patent reform works the other way. Where we are tightening
copyrights to help big companies, we are loosening patents, also to
help big companies. Certainly it isn’t to help you or me.

Do you feel helped by patent reform?

The bill at hand, which will take another shot at passage after the
current Congressional recess, is intended to discourage frivolous
patent lawsuits, which are reportedly ruining the days of big
companies all over America, thus denying the rest of us the fruits of
those patents — new stuff. That would be fine if most of our new
stuff came from big companies, but it doesn’t. Most patents aren’t
issued to big companies, but to smaller companies and to individual
inventors. Patent reform for the most part won’t help those groups
and will, in fact, hurt them.

If patent reform will hurt most of the people who receive patents,
why are we doing it?

Good question.

Patent reform appears to be based primarily on the idea that big
companies invent useful stuff that needs protection while smaller
companies and individual inventors use the patent system to suck
revenue out of big companies through frivolous patents and frivolous
lawsuits. Of course, it isn’t at all clear that this assumption is
correct.

The primary principles of patent reform are switching the U.S. system
from “first to invent” to “first to file” by replacing legal
challenges to patents with a more administrative challenge process,
and by practically eliminating injunctions through which a patent
holder forces an infringer to stop using his intellectual property.

Much of the rest of the world already uses “first to file” patent
systems. Of course, much of the rest of the world also ignores or
gleefully violates patent law. “First to file” gives the advantage
to any organization that has a good administrative system in place.
Absent-minded inventors lose in this system, which also encourages
patenting anything and everything just in case. We can see this in
recent Microsoft patents, for example, like 20050108349 — “Business
inquiries and operations using messaging service” — which seems to
cover looking up a number in the telephone directory. Does this
qualify as “innovation?”

“First to file” is supposed to be good for you and me because it
reduces frivolous lawsuits by people who may think they actually
invented looking up numbers in the phone book before Microsoft
invented it. But, hey, isn’t a patent supposed to be “non-obvious,”
which would make looking up numbers in the phone book unpatentable?

It’s just my opinion, but “first to file” looks like a good way to
screw small inventors, of which I know quite a few.

Moving to an administrative challenge system within the patent
office, rather than just filing a law suit in court, is supposed to
both make patents better and cheaper. It is supposed to make them
better because expensive lawyers are eliminated from the process,
thus allowing more challenges to be filed and improving the overall
quality of issued patents. There are only two problems with this
theory, and those are the false ideas that lawyers will be eliminated,
and that money will be saved.

Big companies with patent departments will continue to staff those
departments with lawyers, whether they are called that or not.
Little companies and individual inventors without patent departments
tend to be represented by lawyers who work on contingency — who
accept the financial risk of pursuing the case in return for a share
of any award the inventor gets in compensation for the infringement.
While there are some lawyers who are the patent equivalents of
ambulance chasers, most lawyers won’t take patent cases they aren’t
pretty darned sure they can win, which would seem to not be frivolous
cases at all.

So moving to an administrative challenge system eliminates lawyers,
yes, but only for small inventors.

Finally there is the elimination of injunctions except under extreme
circumstances. I find this part of the bill especially interesting
because it seems to effectively allow infringement under almost any
circumstance, reducing what is supposed to be a crime into more of a
forced license — forced on the patent holder. If a company
infringes my patent and I can’t get an injunction prohibiting them
from using my intellectual property, that means anyone can use any
patented technology, and all that’s left to be worked out is the
license fee.

I don’t want to be too petty about this, but what if I, as the
inventor, simply don’t like you, the infringer? What if I fear
you’ll be using my very peaceful invention to make weapons of mass
destruction? Can’t I stop you from using my property? Under the
proposed law, I can only do so if your infringement will effectively
put me out of business.

Under this bill, that which doesn’t kill us continues to annoy.

The point of all this reform, it seems to me, is to make it harder
for small inventors to make a living. If they are all thieves, maybe
that’s as it should be. But what if they aren’t all thieves? What
if they actually invent most of the stuff we value? Then all of us
are being ill-served by this legislation.

Microsoft loves it, of course. Under the proposed law it is almost
impossible to get the treble damages that are at the core of the
contingency lawyer-client relationship. That, alone, drops
Microsoft’s liability by a factor of three, from around $20 billion
down to $7 billion or so from the dozens of patent infringement cases
currently pending against the company.

Yes, Microsoft may well be a prime target for frivolous patent
infringement suits, but Microsoft historically has also shown itself
to be a consistent and willful patent infringer.

In short, the bill is bad. It reflects the worst kind of special
interest law-making that hurts us all. And I mean REALLY hurts us
because it will only act to discourage inventors. Record and movie
companies beating-up on music and film pirates don’t save or cost
lives, but discouraging new medical inventions literally does cost
lives.

That ought to be as obvious as looking up a number in the phone book.