Saturday, December 7, 2013
Supreme Court to decide in software patent case...
Supreme Court to decide in software patent case... It's a curious lineup on both sides. Our software patent system is badly broken, but ... I haven't thought of a solution that I liked, nor have I read any. I'm not opposed to tinkering with the current system, though, because I don't see any politically-attractive changes that would actually make it worse...
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This will be interesting. Large companies, like HP, IBM, Microsoft etc. accumulate patents at a tremendous rate. Thousands upon thousands and they will patent anything they think they can get away with.
ReplyDeleteI took a class of sorts at HP where the attorney told us that we should fill out this online form for anything we came up with. The attorneys would look at and decide if they could use it for a patent and if not there is a type of filing they do that prevents others from subsequently trying to patent it. If they submitted you'd get a hundred bucks and if it became a patents you'd get 500. something like that. They also explained that they try to write the patent submission as broadly as possible to begin with to encompass as much as possible, and that the patent office will push back to narrow it. but their strategy was to patent everything possible to give them competitive advantage and also leverage for cross-patent agreements with other large companies. Additionally, if a small company did attempt to sue them, there was a very good bet that SOMETHING that company produced would infringe on something HP had patented. This gave them tremendous leverage to counter. I'm not sure what the right answer is, but this may end up pretty fascinating.