[ILUG] ILUG sends s/w patents briefing document to Irish MEPs

[David Golden]

More on-topic bit:

> How it works in practice, I don't know.  I suspect it works pretty
> well for traditional inventions given that there is little outcry
> about the current system (or maybe people are just used to it). 

Well, that and the whole capital investment thing - most mechanical 
inventions require much more outlay than "PCs (3) plus geeks (3) plus 
pizzas (400)" to produce, and in the pharmaceutical sector harsh 
regulatory requirements (to avoid killing people) inflate the cost of 
drug development out of the reach of most*

 But just wait for the shit to hit the fan when/if 
universal-constructors/replicators happen. 


*though it must also be said that IMHO many drug companies use 
excessively dumb undirected brute-force search methods, and then claim 
the "research" costs of these ridiculously expensive and inefficient 
methods justify giving them patent monopolies, kinda like
a software developer using a BogoSort algorithm (keep randomly permuting 
elements and testing if they're sorted) and claiming the problem is
that you need to pay for a faster computer...  To be fair, until 
recently, the brute-force assay was sometimes the only method 
available, but nowadays molecular modelling (typically on linux 
clusters, yay!), allows designing and refining drugs, if still kinda by 
simulated rather than real brute force, research that e.g. AFAIK 
happens in UCD bioinformatics among other places...


> It  would appear, from popular reporting, that the system is a bit
> broken 
> down in the US.  However, I don't have personal evidence for this.
>

Indeed. AFAIK the USPTO is paid for every patent it grants (and has 
become a profit centre for the US Government).  People apparently 
thought that was a great idea in the 1980s, and in the 90s actually
cut other funding for it, so  the USPTO was entirely funded by granting
patents, then the US government started skimming off it's profits
for other lossmaking sectors like social welfare.

Handy stealth tax on innovation, and not exactly a motivation for the 
examiner to fulfil his duty in rejecting trivial patents or for the 
USPTO to be careful about restricting patentability to appropriate 
fields, particularly since the USPTO is not held accountable for bad 
patents it issues.   

The USPTO says the solution is for the government to stop draining its 
profits from it so that it can expand to handle the larger numbers of 
patents adequately.  I don't think that should happen, at least not  
unless the USPTO was also financially liable (along with the invalid 
patent holder) for the damages caused by any wrongly awarded 
patents.