[MW Forums]

Apple has joined a Coalition for Patent Fairness in support of a bill that would reform the way patents are granted and litigated in the United States. more

[iron_chef]

i hope they do something about UI based patents. They are mostly pretty silly. (ie: amazon "OneClick" patent)

[doglesby]

Not likely, I'm sure quite a few of the over 200 patents on the iPhone are UI patents.

[lwdesign]

I'd like to know more about this "first to file" concept rather than patent rights going to the inventor. Wouldn't this open the way to increased corporate espionage or outright theft and opportunism? Suppose an inventor is incautious about who he tells about his invention and someone rushes to patent it prior to him. This doesn't sound fair or decent. Can the author provide more information on how this "first to file" is a good thing?

[lhudd]

Not part of the reform bill.

[lhudd]

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I'd like to know more about this "first to file" concept rather than patent rights going to the inventor. Wouldn't this open the way to increased corporate espionage or outright theft and opportunism? Suppose an inventor is incautious about who he tells about his invention and someone rushes to patent it prior to him. This doesn't sound fair or decent. Can the author provide more information on how this "first to file" is a good thing?

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"First to File" versus "First to Invent" is more about harmonization with the rest of the world than anything else. The US is the only country that doesn't follow a "first to file" system, and it makes things difficult.
First to file affects small inventors and large corporate inventors equally. On the one hand, a small inventor can lose out if a large company wins the race to the patent office, but on the other hand, that same small inventor may be "beating" a different large corporate inventor to the office. The system is cloudy now, because you can file for, prosecute, and receive a US patent, and then have it taken away because some guy (or some company) was working on the same idea in secret for years. First to File rewards those who are diligent and make the effort to patent their ideas. As for the david v. goliath thing, a small inventor can get a provisional application on file for $200 bucks. That provisional lasts for a year, during which the inventor can refine and perfect his idea and raise the capital to obtain a patent.
Patents "stolen" through espionage are not valid under 35 U.S.C. 102(f) anyway.

[Outdo13]

As with almost all federal legislation these days, money talks. This is a "great" reform if you are a large corporation, not a "little" inventor. (Just look at who is in the coalition; a 'little" guy couldn't even afford the dues). Everything from the restriction on where you can file a patent suit to the ability of have "granted" patents "un-granted" after the timely interval for public comment has passed, hurts the true inventors and small businesses who come up with something original, but could "adversely affect" the big businesses. Not at all balanced and fair. And shame on MacWorld for not pointing that out.

[samrod]

I wouldn't consider One-Click a UI patent. It's more like an intended use for of an existing technology: cookies. Cookies store user information between sessions on a site. Amazon's "One-Click" is the clear and obvious invented use of a cookie. It's like patenting the idea of using a word processor for something specific like making an invoice or writing an essay.
UI patents are specific methods and techniques for a person to operate a device, like replacing the rotary dial with touchtone buttons, the mouse, TV remote control, etc.
But I'm not sure if, for example, voice dialing in cell phones should be a patent onto itself, or if it's analogous to Amazon's One-Click, whereby speech recognition can be used for many things, one of them being dialing.
Samrod

[billmosby]

I hope this will improve the quality of software patents, although the best improvement would be to recognize that the vast majority of them involve the patenting of mathematical formulas and algorithms and should not be allowed at all. Thats the opinion of Donald Knuth, who wrote The Art of Programming, as well as the TeX program, which still seems to be in use in writing technical and mathematical papers, at least. In a 1994 letter to the PTO, he said he would not have tried to write TeX in the software patent environment at that time, and that software patents seemed to him mostly to consist of ideas and techniques that he routinely assigned students in his programming classes. The environment has only worsened since then. I suppose that, being out there on the web, the Knuth letter could be a forgery, but I think not.

[tallscot]

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Apple has joined a Coalition for Patent Fairness in support of a bill that would reform the way patents are granted and litigated in the United States. <a href="/news/2007/04/18/patent/index.php">[more]</a>

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I hope this doesn't affect my latest patent "A device that forms colors and shapes and radiates light to communicate information to the eye...".

[billmosby]

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I hope this doesn't affect my latest patent "A device that forms colors and shapes and radiates light to communicate information to the eye...".

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Lava Lamp?

[macnews]

I would be all for a change which prohibits stupid patent filing - like Amazon's One Click. I doubt makers of TVs, VCRs, etc. would have gotten as far as they did if how the controls were laid out was patented. Seems like many companies try to patent common sense and I just do not agree with that notion.

[Terrin]

First to file does not effect small inventors and large corporate inventors equally. Filing a patent is 1) complicated, and 2) expensive. Large companies, like Apple, have patent attorneys on retainer, on staff, or both. These attorneys sit around all day filing patents. A small inventor does not likely have that knowledge or financial capacity. While the application fee itself maybe only $200, that does not cover attorney fees needed to do a search, draft the patent in the best way to protect your idea, and to continue the approval process (e.g. defending your idea from big companies challenging your patent application). Two hundred dollars is also a big difference for a company like Apple who is making billions, and a guy struggling to pay his rent. The fee also doesn't cover other countries.
Moreover, there are countless of stories where legitimate patent filiers are ruined by big companies fighting their patents. It almost happened to the Wright Brothers, and RCA drove the guy who invented FM radio kill himself. Finally, many companies do not come up with ideas to actually use. They come come up with ideas to prevent competitors from competing with them (e.g. Verizon versus Vonage). Some companies merely sit on patents waiting for somebody else to actually try to make use of an idea that they thought original and then sue when the company beomces successful.
The only way I would support a first to file approach is if a second inventor is discovered to have been working on the idea at the same time and can prove it, neither get a patent. This is fair because an idea isn't novel if somebody else is already working on it.

"First to File" versus "First to Invent" is more about harmonization with the rest of the world than anything else. The US is the only country that doesn't follow a "first to file" system, and it makes things difficult.
First to file affects small inventors and large corporate inventors equally. On the one hand, a small inventor can lose out if a large company wins the race to the patent office, but on the other hand, that same small inventor may be "beating" a different large corporate inventor to the office. The system is cloudy now, because you can file for, prosecute, and receive a US patent, and then have it taken away because some guy (or some company) was working on the same idea in secret for years. First to File rewards those who are diligent and make the effort to patent their ideas. As for the david v. goliath thing, a small inventor can get a provisional application on file for $200 bucks. That provisional lasts for a year, during which the inventor can refine and perfect his idea and raise the capital to obtain a patent.
Patents "stolen" through espionage are not valid under 35 U.S.C. 102(f) anyway.

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[dinnerbell]

please see http://www.piausa.org/ for a different view on patent reform