Patent Reform Town Hall Meeting (Balt/Washington Area IEEE C

[Al Clark]

eric.jacobsen@ieee.org (Eric Jacobsen) wrote in news:4eac16c9.325269432
@www.eternal-september.org:

On Sat, 29 Oct 2011 12:20:34 +0200, David Brown
david.brown@removethis.hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 28/10/11 21:15, Rick wrote:
On Oct 28, 12:17 am, David Brown<da...@westcontrol.removethisbit.com
wrote:
On 28/10/2011 01:07, Thomas Womack wrote:

Personally I think patents for things like push up bras should run for
30 years to encourage development in that area.<sic

Patents /don't/ encourage development. That's the problem. A 30-year
wide-ranging patent like that stops development - no one can invent a
"push-up-and-together" bra because of that patent.

This creates an incentive to find another way to do it. If the new
way is innovative, it can be patented and provide a benefit to those
who sorted out the new way. I don't see how patents discourage
innovation or development.


Eric Jacobsen
Anchor Hill Communications
www.anchorhill.com

Patents do not necessarily encourage innovation. I filed my only patent
application when I was a junior in EE (about 30 years ago). I received it
several years later.

I haven't filed another one since, even though I have had many ideas that I
think would qualify. When I see an individual with many patents, I don't
assume that the person is brilliant or creative, I just assume that he has
worked for large companies.

I have owned small businesses for most of my career. I don't file patents
because they are expensive to file and maintain and impossible for a small
company to defend. Today we have bidding wars on bankrupt companies just so
that the large companies can threaten each other and keep anyone smaller
than Fortune 500 out of the game.

All a big company needs to do is threaten a small company, and they win. It
will bankrupt most small companies if they fight even when they have a
strong patent. Not all small companies want to be sold to larger entities.

I do look at patents from time to time and I am often amazed at how obvious
many of them are. Many are rehashed prior art that I already know about
(and I'm sure many others do as well). Patent examiners are rarely design
engineers, most don't have any real idea if something is new or not.
Software patents are even more absurd since most prior art exists as trade
secrets embedded in code.

No one is required to license a patent. If I had a patented method that
could cure cancer, I could let everyone die for the next 20 years or so if
I didn't want to share.

One of the worst things about patents is that no one knows how silly a
patent application is until in becomes a patent. This is why we have so
many junk patents.

If Congress actually wanted to do something useful, they would make the
expiration date for most patents about 5 years and speed up the actual
review process. Twenty years is almost forever in technology.

I don't think that first to file is an advantage. I just means that we will
see even more junk patent applications that haven't been thought out, just
filed to make sure someone else isn't first.

Most of the ideas that I have had that I think were patentable came from
trying to solve a new problem. Novel solutions can be easy when looking at
a problem the first time. The catch is that several people may be looking
at the same problem at essentially the same time. No one really remembers
the second guy who discovers something (or the second guy who files). This
gives the first guy more than a head start, it can be the game changer.

I have read many people say that the holder of the patent gets reasonable
royalties from licensing. That assumes that they want to license. I will
never understand the Polaroid/ Kodak case. Polaroid was basically granted a
permanent patent by constantly tweaking their existing patent and not
letting anyone else in the game. Digital cameras were the only way to kill
the Polaroid monopoly.

Thanks for reading my rant,


Al Clark

 

[Vladimir Vassilevsky]

Al Clark wrote:

If Congress actually wanted to do something useful, they would make the
expiration date for most patents about 5 years and speed up the actual
review process. Twenty years is almost forever in technology.

I agree. The reform isn't really changing anything.
They could make a patent support fee significant sum of money; say,
$100k per year. That would invalidate many worseless patents; leaving
only the important and actually working ones. Set a requirement that
the original inventor could waive the fee if he makes profit from his
patent within 3 years, either by making product or by licensing;
otherwise the patent goes into public domain.

VLV

 

[David Brown]

On 31/10/2011 07:24, Vladimir Vassilevsky wrote:

Al Clark wrote:


If Congress actually wanted to do something useful, they would make
the expiration date for most patents about 5 years and speed up the
actual review process. Twenty years is almost forever in technology.

I agree. The reform isn't really changing anything.
They could make a patent support fee significant sum of money; say,
$100k per year. That would invalidate many worseless patents; leaving
only the important and actually working ones. Set a requirement that the
original inventor could waive the fee if he makes profit from his patent
within 3 years, either by making product or by licensing; otherwise the
patent goes into public domain.

VLV

Alternatively, the fee could gradually increase with time. The first
year would be a relatively cheap $10,000 - enough to avoid most time
wasters, but cheap enough that a small company with a good idea can
afford it. Jump to $100,000 for the next year, and increase
geometrically each year after that. Patents that really are worthwhile,
and generate substantial licensing fees, would be kept for longer. Most
would be kept long enough to give the inventor a head-start over the
competition, then released to the public domain.

It may make sense for the increase factor to depend on the field - it
should be high (such as 2) for patents in fast-moving fields such as
electronics, but lower (maybe 1.25) in slower fields such as medicine.

Of course, for many actively used patents, this system exists already -
it's just that the steadily increasing fees are paid to lawyers and
other legal fees, rather than to patent offices.

 

[dp]

On Oct 31, 7:44 am, Al Clark <acl...@danvillesignal.com> wrote:

eric.jacob...@ieee.org (Eric Jacobsen) wrote in news:4eac16c9.325269432
@www.eternal-september.org:



On Sat, 29 Oct 2011 12:20:34 +0200, David Brown
david.br...@removethis.hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 28/10/11 21:15, Rick wrote:
On Oct 28, 12:17 am, David Brown<da...@westcontrol.removethisbit.com
wrote:
On 28/10/2011 01:07, Thomas Womack wrote:

Personally I think patents for things like push up bras should run for
30 years to encourage development in that area.<sic

Patents /don't/ encourage development.  That's the problem.  A 30-year
wide-ranging patent like that stops development - no one can invent a
"push-up-and-together" bra because of that patent.

This creates an incentive to find another way to do it.   If the new
way is innovative, it can be patented and provide a benefit to those
who sorted out the new way.   I don't see how patents discourage
innovation or development.

Eric Jacobsen
Anchor Hill Communications
www.anchorhill.com

Patents do not necessarily encourage innovation. I filed my only patent
application when I was a junior in EE (about 30 years ago). I received it
several years later.

I haven't filed another one since, even though I have had many ideas that I
think would qualify. When I see an individual with many patents, I don't
assume that the person is brilliant or creative, I just assume that he has
worked for large companies.  

I have owned small businesses for most of my career. I don't file patents
because they are expensive to file and maintain and impossible for a small
company to defend. Today we have bidding wars on bankrupt companies just so
that the large companies can threaten each other and keep anyone smaller
than Fortune 500 out of the game.

All a big company needs to do is threaten a small company, and they win. It
will bankrupt most small companies if they fight even when they have a
strong patent. Not all small companies want to be sold to larger entities..

I do look at patents from time to time and I am often amazed at how obvious
many of them are. Many are rehashed prior art that I already know about
(and I'm sure many others do as well). Patent examiners are rarely design
engineers, most don't have any real idea if something is new or not.
Software patents are even more absurd since most prior art exists as trade
secrets embedded in code.

No one is required to license a patent. If I had a patented method that
could cure cancer, I could let everyone die for the next 20 years or so if
I didn't want to share.

One of the worst things about patents is that no one knows how silly a
patent application is until in becomes a patent. This is why we have so
many junk patents.  

If Congress actually wanted to do something useful, they would make the
expiration date for most patents about 5 years and speed up the actual
review process. Twenty years is almost forever in technology.

I don't think that first to file is an advantage. I just means that we will
see even more junk patent applications that haven't been thought out, just
filed to make sure someone else isn't first.

Most of the ideas that I have had that I think were patentable came from
trying to solve a new problem. Novel solutions can be easy when looking at
a problem the first time. The catch is that several people may be looking
at the same problem at essentially the same time. No one really remembers
the second guy who discovers something (or the second guy who files). This
gives the first guy more than a head start, it can be the game changer.

I have read many people say that the holder of the patent gets reasonable
royalties from licensing. That assumes that they want to license. I will
never understand the Polaroid/ Kodak case. Polaroid was basically granted a
permanent patent by constantly tweaking their existing patent and not
letting anyone else in the game. Digital cameras were the only way to kill
the Polaroid monopoly.

Thanks for reading my rant,

Al Clark

Thanks for putting it all so well, reflects my attitude better than my
sole post on this did. I guess I would go even one step further, make
the 5
years 0. At least for a while until the big ones stop being able to
block progress by utilizing the patent system.

In other words, in a competition (such as life) it is OK to outrun
the others, and it is not OK to hold them back even if you have the
means.

Dimiter

------------------------------------------------------
Dimiter Popoff Transgalactic Instruments

http://www.tgi-sci.com
------------------------------------------------------
http://www.flickr.com/photos/didi_tgi/sets/72157600228621276/

 

[Eric Jacobsen]

On Mon, 31 Oct 2011 05:44:56 GMT, Al Clark <aclark@danvillesignal.com>
wrote:

eric.jacobsen@ieee.org (Eric Jacobsen) wrote in news:4eac16c9.325269432
@www.eternal-september.org:

On Sat, 29 Oct 2011 12:20:34 +0200, David Brown
david.brown@removethis.hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 28/10/11 21:15, Rick wrote:
On Oct 28, 12:17 am, David Brown<da...@westcontrol.removethisbit.com
wrote:
On 28/10/2011 01:07, Thomas Womack wrote:

Personally I think patents for things like push up bras should run for
30 years to encourage development in that area.<sic

Patents /don't/ encourage development. That's the problem. A 30-year
wide-ranging patent like that stops development - no one can invent a
"push-up-and-together" bra because of that patent.

This creates an incentive to find another way to do it. If the new
way is innovative, it can be patented and provide a benefit to those
who sorted out the new way. I don't see how patents discourage
innovation or development.


Eric Jacobsen
Anchor Hill Communications
www.anchorhill.com


Patents do not necessarily encourage innovation. I filed my only patent
application when I was a junior in EE (about 30 years ago). I received it
several years later.

I haven't filed another one since, even though I have had many ideas that I
think would qualify. When I see an individual with many patents, I don't
assume that the person is brilliant or creative, I just assume that he has
worked for large companies.

I have owned small businesses for most of my career. I don't file patents
because they are expensive to file and maintain and impossible for a small
company to defend. Today we have bidding wars on bankrupt companies just so
that the large companies can threaten each other and keep anyone smaller
than Fortune 500 out of the game.

All a big company needs to do is threaten a small company, and they win. It
will bankrupt most small companies if they fight even when they have a
strong patent. Not all small companies want to be sold to larger entities.

I do look at patents from time to time and I am often amazed at how obvious
many of them are. Many are rehashed prior art that I already know about
(and I'm sure many others do as well). Patent examiners are rarely design
engineers, most don't have any real idea if something is new or not.
Software patents are even more absurd since most prior art exists as trade
secrets embedded in code.

No one is required to license a patent. If I had a patented method that
could cure cancer, I could let everyone die for the next 20 years or so if
I didn't want to share.

One of the worst things about patents is that no one knows how silly a
patent application is until in becomes a patent. This is why we have so
many junk patents.

If Congress actually wanted to do something useful, they would make the
expiration date for most patents about 5 years and speed up the actual
review process. Twenty years is almost forever in technology.

I don't think that first to file is an advantage. I just means that we will
see even more junk patent applications that haven't been thought out, just
filed to make sure someone else isn't first.

Most of the ideas that I have had that I think were patentable came from
trying to solve a new problem. Novel solutions can be easy when looking at
a problem the first time. The catch is that several people may be looking
at the same problem at essentially the same time. No one really remembers
the second guy who discovers something (or the second guy who files). This
gives the first guy more than a head start, it can be the game changer.

I have read many people say that the holder of the patent gets reasonable
royalties from licensing. That assumes that they want to license. I will
never understand the Polaroid/ Kodak case. Polaroid was basically granted a
permanent patent by constantly tweaking their existing patent and not
letting anyone else in the game. Digital cameras were the only way to kill
the Polaroid monopoly.

Thanks for reading my rant,


Al Clark

I tend to agree with most of what you've written here. Patents are a
minefield with all sorts of downsides that go with the upsides, and
sometimes the upsides aren't so great unless conditions are exactly
right.

In my experience most big companies have large patent portfolios
because their competition does, too, and they need a defensive
position. A defensive portfolio is required not only to keep one
safe from the big competitors, but from the independent, submarine, or
troll inventors/companies that are happy to come out of the woodwork
and try to tap the deep pockets.

So when a big company sees itself moving strategically in a particular
technology direction, there is incentive to try to think of, and
potentially patent, anything that might turn out to be useful in that
arena as far ahead of time as possible. This does mean that a lot of
speculative patents get generated, sometimes for things that don't
work, aren't the best way to do something, or just wind up being bad
ideas. Sometimes there's benefit in quantitiy, and often there are
enough genuinely useful patents that come out of the exercise to make
it worthwhile.

The game is entirely different for small companies. Often it makes
more sense to do what Al does and not bother with patents. Every case
is different, and defensive portfolios aren't all that important if
you're not big enough to show up on anybody's radar (e.g., don't have
enough $$ to make it worthwhile for anybody to come after you).


Eric Jacobsen
Anchor Hill Communications
www.anchorhill.com

 

[rickman]

On Oct 29, 6:20 am, David Brown <david.br...@removethis.hesbynett.no>
wrote:

On 28/10/11 21:15, Rick wrote:

Personally I think patents for things like push up bras should run for
30 years to encourage development in that area.<sic

Patents /don't/ encourage development.  That's the problem.  A 30-year
wide-ranging patent like that stops development - no one can invent a
"push-up-and-together" bra because of that patent.

You can make the above statement, but that doesn't make it true.
Patents provide a means for an inventor to profit from the invention
with protection from the government. You can talk about the problems
about patents, but that doesn't make them 100% bad. The problems are
with the implementation and not the concept.

Patent attorney where I worked once leaned back in his chair and
laughed "I hope people do infringe, the more the merrier! Standard
royalty for patent infringement is 7% so we would make 7% of what
everyone else sells for doing nothing! Great business to be in!"

And there you see who benefits from the modern patent system and its
usage.  Occasionally, a real inventor will get lucky and make some money
- but mostly it's an overall loss for the inventor, and a loss for
others, and as the money flows back and forth between the patent owner
and licensees, only the lawyers get paid regularly as they grab their cut..

How is it a loss for the inventor? Yes, money flows from the
licensees (the ones who feel the patent is worth paying for) and the
inventor (the one who spent the time and effort to create the
invention that others didn't or couldn't.

What would happen if there were no patents? Small companies would be
limited to low cost manufacturing making virtually no profit while the
large companies are able to reduce their cost of production and make
much larger profits. The playing field will never be level, but
patents help to even it out. Otherwise the small companies have only
one choice, tiny niche applications that aren't worth the trouble of
the big companies.

Rick

 

[rickman]

On Oct 31, 1:44 am, Al Clark <acl...@danvillesignal.com> wrote:

Software patents are even more absurd since most prior art exists as trade
secrets embedded in code.

This is not really correct because a trade secret does not qualify as
"prior art". For it to be prior art it has to be published or visibly
used in an existing application. If you protect an invention with as
a trade secret by definition it is not "prior art".


Rick

 

[Al Clark]

Since we have been all talking at length about patents and I for one (and
probably many others) need to update my map as to actual costs in today's
world.

Can anyone share what is really costs to patent something?

1. Initial filings? Assume that you don't have in house lawyers.

2. Maintenance costs?

3. Litigation (Not necessarily the really big cases like Apple vs Samsung)?

Al Clark

 

[Al Clark]

rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote in news:581b0c05-090c-4cae-b846-ca2aad5b9d82
@n38g2000yqm.googlegroups.com:

How is it a loss for the inventor? Yes, money flows from the
licensees (the ones who feel the patent is worth paying for) and the
inventor (the one who spent the time and effort to create the
invention that others didn't or couldn't.

Patent filings are not free. There are up front costs and maintenance.

If you own a useless patent, it probably isn't worth the up front costs. If
you have a really good patent, you probably can't afford to protect it.

What would happen if there were no patents?

We would use trade secrets. This is precisely how software has been protected
historically since most of the IP is hidden in object files.


Small companies would be

limited to low cost manufacturing making virtually no profit while the
large companies are able to reduce their cost of production and make
much larger profits.

Small companies can be more agile


The playing field will never be level, but

patents help to even it out.

How?

For example, Not so long ago, I reviewed a patent on a PGA/Attenuator
circuit held by Hewlett Packard. It was incredibly obvious and certainly
exists in many earlier designs. I think I knew this circuit approach 25 years
ago.

That said, I don't dare use it. They could sue me into bankruptcy even if I
could prevail in the courts.

If you are a DSP specialist, read Microsoft's partioned convolution patent.
They list prior art and then seem to claim that they are patenting the same
prior art.

There is a great discussion about this patent by Angelo Farina if you are
interested.



Otherwise the small companies have only

one choice, tiny niche applications that aren't worth the trouble of
the big companies.

This may be true. Its a good reason to have much shorter life cycles for
patents.


Al Clark

 

[rickman]

On Oct 31, 2:20 pm, Al Clark <acl...@danvillesignal.com> wrote:

rickman <gnu...@gmail.com> wrote in news:581b0c05-090c-4cae-b846-ca2aad5b9d82
@n38g2000yqm.googlegroups.com:

How is it a loss for the inventor? Yes, money flows from the
licensees (the ones who feel the patent is worth paying for) and the
inventor (the one who spent the time and effort to create the
invention that others didn't or couldn't.

Patent filings are not free. There are up front costs and maintenance.

If you own a useless patent, it probably isn't worth the up front costs. If
you have a really good patent, you probably can't afford to protect it.

I have never worked on an invention where I thought the cost of
getting a patent would be more than the cost of creating the
invention. Sure, an inventor might be discouraged from applying
because of the cost of the patent, but if the invention is significant
enough to deserve protection the patent process is there to use. You
are not forced to use patents. As you say, you can always use the
"trade secret", but that does not stop someone from reverse
engineering your design or independent invention. For the small
business operator the lack of a patent can be fatal.

What would happen if there were no patents?

We would use trade secrets. This is precisely how software has been protected
historically since most of the IP is hidden in object files.

"Hidden" is not much protection. Among the biggest trade secrets are
the software license keys and code which are regularly cracked. If
the FPGA companies didn't give away their tools they would still be
freely available. The same is true for software development tools.
Trade secrets are one of the worst ways to protect an invention.

Small companies would be
limited to low cost manufacturing making virtually no profit while the
large companies are able to reduce their cost of production and make
much larger profits.

Small companies can be more agile

Yes, and they have to live and die by being faster than the foot stomp
of big companies or even just the other small knock off companies. If
they have a patent on an invention they have a level of protection
from competition. Sure, this can be challenged, but without it they
are the infringer when the other company gets the patent. If there
are no patents they are just "out" when everyone else takes the
invention.

If you have to live by inventing and giving it up every year or two
that is a huge burden to bear. I wouldn't bother to create the
invention if I didn't have any means to protect it.

The playing field will never be level, but
patents help to even it out.

How?

For example, Not so long ago, I reviewed a patent on a PGA/Attenuator
circuit held by Hewlett Packard. It was incredibly obvious and certainly
exists in many earlier designs. I think I knew this circuit approach 25 years
ago.

That said, I don't dare use it. They could sue me into bankruptcy even if I
could prevail in the courts.

You are talking about a bad patent. Yep, they exist. A contrary
example is the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper. He
persisted over a long period and won. An example of a good patent and
its protection is Velcro. The inventor got a patent in 1955 after
working on the invention for over ten years. It took much of the life
of the patent for the invention to be made practical and then
popularized. Some could argue that this was not much of an invention
since it is really just a hook and eye fastener on a smaller level.
Hook and eye fasteners have been around for a long, long time
establishing a lot of prior art.

A decent patent system is not easy to create. It is easy, however, to
criticize a patent system be pointing out flaws.

If you are a DSP specialist, read Microsoft's partioned convolution patent.
They list prior art and then seem to claim that they are patenting the same
prior art.

There is a great discussion about this patent by Angelo Farina if you are
interested.

No, I don't have any interest in any one patent. There are lots of
problems with patents, but that doesn't invalidate the concept. It
just means we need to address the problems.

Otherwise the small companies have only
one choice, tiny niche applications that aren't worth the trouble of
the big companies.

This may be true. Its a good reason to have much shorter life cycles for
patents.

How does the size of the market for the invention relate to the life
of a patent? I would love to have a patent on an invention that
addresses a small market but for the next 21 years. I would retire
today! In fact, that is my goal, to come up with something that will
give me some continuing revenue that I can protect. Not many of my
ideas have been patentable, or at least protectable by patent because
there is more than one way to skin a cat.

Rick

 

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

In comp.arch.fpga Al Clark <aclark@danvillesignal.com> wrote:

(snip)

For example, Not so long ago, I reviewed a patent on a
PGA/Attenuator circuit held by Hewlett Packard. It was incredibly
obvious and certainly exists in many earlier designs.
I think I knew this circuit approach 25 years ago.

That said, I don't dare use it. They could sue me into
bankruptcy even if I could prevail in the courts.

I was recently reading (and not related to this discussion)
about a patent on a special movie camera lens. The patent
application included a movie supposedly made with the lens, but
later it was found not to be true. In court, the patent was
overturned due to the deception. Strange business.

-- glen

 

[David Brown]

On 31/10/11 17:27, rickman wrote:

On Oct 29, 6:20 am, David Brown<david.br...@removethis.hesbynett.no
wrote:
On 28/10/11 21:15, Rick wrote:

Personally I think patents for things like push up bras should run for
30 years to encourage development in that area.<sic

Patents /don't/ encourage development. That's the problem. A 30-year
wide-ranging patent like that stops development - no one can invent a
"push-up-and-together" bra because of that patent.

You can make the above statement, but that doesn't make it true.
Patents provide a means for an inventor to profit from the invention
with protection from the government. You can talk about the problems
about patents, but that doesn't make them 100% bad. The problems are
with the implementation and not the concept.

Al answered you better than I could.

I agree with you that the implementation is the biggest problem with
patents, rather than the concept.

Patents in some form /may/ be a good idea in some fields - though
definitely not software - if they were implemented better. So no, not
100% bad - just very far from 100% good.

 

[Eric Jacobsen]

On Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:47:50 GMT, Al Clark <aclark@danvillesignal.com>
wrote:

Since we have been all talking at length about patents and I for one (and
probably many others) need to update my map as to actual costs in today's
world.

Can anyone share what is really costs to patent something?

1. Initial filings? Assume that you don't have in house lawyers.

In my experience initial filing runs about $5k - $12k depending on the
patent. Simple patents take less preparation time.

That's just for filing, though, and generally prosecution costs to see
the patent through to granted status may incur another $5-$10k or
more. The usual number I hear quoted for total costs to grant is
$15k-$20k.

So the bar is fairly high. You need a pretty good reason to pursue a
patent to make the expense worthwhile if you're a small business.
Those reasons do exist, though, depending on the nature of the
business, the overall strategy, and the long-term goals.

2. Maintenance costs?

The USPTO fee schedule is here:

http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee092611.htm

Maintenance is due at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years and the fee depends on
whether or not you qualify as a "small entity". An individual or
business with fewer than 500 employees qualify as small entities
(generally).

Maintenance costs in foreign countries (e.g., Europe) can be much
higher, around $1k - $2k / year.

3. Litigation (Not necessarily the really big cases like Apple vs Samsung)?

That depends entirely on the case but can clearly be very expensive.
I think just about everybody, including the big companies, want to
avoid litigation whenever possible due to the expense. Among the big
companies they often just wind up signing cross-licensing agreements.

FWIW, I am not an attorney or a patent agent, I just have some
experience in the area. Others experiences may not match mine.
Proceed with caution.


Eric Jacobsen
Anchor Hill Communications
www.anchorhill.com

 

[Al Clark]

eric.jacobsen@ieee.org (Eric Jacobsen) wrote in news:4eaf1463.521263955
@www.eternal-september.org:

A good technology with basic patent protection can attract good VCs,
although one certainly doesn't have to proceed via the VC route, it's
just a path that's often taken. If you don't already have patent
protection on something like this, the VCs routinely require that you
get it, and will often help in the process.

I think the VC argument is not very compelling. Less than 1 out of 2500 US
businesses are funded by VCs. The average investment is in the millions of
dollars.

Sure VCs want to see patents. They have deep enough pockets to go to war.
They are also all about harvest in the 5-10 year period where the potential
payback is huge for a few of their bets. I don't fault VCs. I just
recognize that most companies (including companies with patentable ideas)
are not actually funded by VCs.

Erik, lets say you have a good patent and some big company wants to
challenge you. Do you have a few extra million dollars to sustain a fight?
(If you do, give me a call) What if you don't want to be owned by the big
company?

I bet that Samsung & Apple will end up spending a $100 million dollars
before somebody gives up.

Apple makes some great products. Aren't we all glad Xerox didn't wipe them
out when Apple commercialized most of the Parc Place ideas. I like my
mouse.

Polaroid held a monopoly on their camera technology even though the
original idea went back to the 1940s. I think this might have been due to
the fact that if you have the basic patent rights completely tied up, there
is absolutely no incentive for another entity to make further improvements
on a technology they can't commercialize for 20 years. So Polaroid just
kept making incremental improvements, that effectively monopolized the
technology until a paradigm shift obsoleted the whole method (digital
camera). (This is speculation on my part, someone can explain it if I am
wrong)

Actually, I am not anti-patent. I just thing the game is completely rigged
to favor the large companies at the expense of small innovative companies
and individuals.

Real patent reform would make the filing process more transparent (like
disclosures before some 20 something engineer grants the patent), had
actual peer review, were written in English (or for a technical patent,
engineering or science English as opposed to lawyer obfuscation),
automatically expired in a reasonable market period like 5 years, and
didn't take 3 years to grant.

Imagine if disclosure happened before a patent was granted. All someone
might need to do is identify the same invention already exists as prior
art. This would eliminate a huge number of the existing application and
backlog. This would be especially true for software patents since many of
these are "invisible" without close inspection.

There is a tremendous amount of prior art that exists that was never
patented. A patent examiner might make an assumption that if they can't
find prior art in the patent record, that somehow this means that an idea
is new.

I don't fault the inventor. I am sure that many of us have reinvented
things without intentionally stealing someone else's idea. Tukey & Cooley
rediscovered the FFT in 1965, but Gauss invented it first in 1805. I don't
think anyone thinks that Tukey & Cooley were stealing Gauss's invention.
Fortunately, we didn't have software patents or the FFT and probably all
its derivatives would have been held hostage for 20 years, or at least
until the historians corrected the record.

Al Clark

 

[Al Clark]

Thank you Erik.

Al Clark







eric.jacobsen@ieee.org (Eric Jacobsen) wrote in news:4eaf1259.520742163
@www.eternal-september.org:

On Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:47:50 GMT, Al Clark <aclark@danvillesignal.com
wrote:

Since we have been all talking at length about patents and I for one (and
probably many others) need to update my map as to actual costs in today's
world.

Can anyone share what is really costs to patent something?

1. Initial filings? Assume that you don't have in house lawyers.

In my experience initial filing runs about $5k - $12k depending on the
patent. Simple patents take less preparation time.

That's just for filing, though, and generally prosecution costs to see
the patent through to granted status may incur another $5-$10k or
more. The usual number I hear quoted for total costs to grant is
$15k-$20k.

So the bar is fairly high. You need a pretty good reason to pursue a
patent to make the expense worthwhile if you're a small business.
Those reasons do exist, though, depending on the nature of the
business, the overall strategy, and the long-term goals.

2. Maintenance costs?

The USPTO fee schedule is here:

http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee092611.htm

Maintenance is due at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years and the fee depends on
whether or not you qualify as a "small entity". An individual or
business with fewer than 500 employees qualify as small entities
(generally).

Maintenance costs in foreign countries (e.g., Europe) can be much
higher, around $1k - $2k / year.


3. Litigation (Not necessarily the really big cases like Apple vs
Samsung)?

That depends entirely on the case but can clearly be very expensive.
I think just about everybody, including the big companies, want to
avoid litigation whenever possible due to the expense. Among the big
companies they often just wind up signing cross-licensing agreements.

FWIW, I am not an attorney or a patent agent, I just have some
experience in the area. Others experiences may not match mine.
Proceed with caution.


Eric Jacobsen
Anchor Hill Communications
www.anchorhill.com

 

[Rick]

On Oct 31, 2:33 pm, eric.jacob...@ieee.org (Eric Jacobsen) wrote:

On Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:47:50 GMT, Al Clark <acl...@danvillesignal.com
wrote:

Since we have been all talking at length about patents and I for one (and
probably many others) need to update my map as to actual costs in today's
world.

Can anyone share what is really costs to patent something?

1. Initial filings? Assume that you don't have in house lawyers.

In my experience initial filing runs about $5k - $12k depending on the
patent.   Simple patents take less preparation time.

That's just for filing, though, and generally prosecution costs to see
the patent through to granted status may incur another $5-$10k or
more.   The usual number I hear quoted for total costs to grant is
$15k-$20k.

FWIW: Company I worked for said ~$50k per with overhead. Of course
they were all prepared by in house patent attorneys. If you want to go
to the trouble of filing it yourself and doing your own drawings, it
can be done on the cheap. I know someone who did this for maybe $100
years ago and as has been pointed out, it wasn't worth the cost so
even $100 was to much to spend.
<snip>

3. Litigation (Not necessarily the really big cases like Apple vs Samsung)?

That depends entirely on the case but can clearly be very expensive.
I think just about everybody, including the big companies, want to
avoid litigation whenever possible due to the expense.  Among the big
companies they often just wind up signing cross-licensing agreements.

Here's one of the ways it works: We did contract research for clients.
The first thing the clients do when you are successful is take a look
at your patents. If you have a weak position they try to reduce the
amount of money you are paid and royalties. If you have disclosed
anything not patented there is a good chance they will patent it
themselves.

FWIW, I am not an attorney or a patent agent, I just have some
experience in the area.   Others experiences may not match mine.
Proceed with caution.  

Ditto. I see the CIPs as evil incarnate. There is no pressure to
innovate as long as you can just keep refiling the same patent with a
different cast of characters. The current laws are that you are 'paid
to invent' so everything you do is property of the company you work
for. The company I worked for used to give you a dollar but stopped
the practice when it was pointed out it established a reward system
where employees could take you to court since rewards should be based
on value. Lockheed eventually won the 'superzip' but the nothing
special for inventors stayed in place.

The system is set such that
1) You don't see squat for any invention, you are treated exactly like
the co-stooges at your level.
2) The patents will eventually leave the real inventor off with CIPs
filed in suits names.

Rick

 

[Eric Jacobsen]

On Tue, 01 Nov 2011 03:54:20 GMT, Al Clark <aclark@danvillesignal.com>
wrote:

eric.jacobsen@ieee.org (Eric Jacobsen) wrote in news:4eaf1463.521263955
@www.eternal-september.org:

A good technology with basic patent protection can attract good VCs,
although one certainly doesn't have to proceed via the VC route, it's
just a path that's often taken. If you don't already have patent
protection on something like this, the VCs routinely require that you
get it, and will often help in the process.




I think the VC argument is not very compelling. Less than 1 out of 2500 US
businesses are funded by VCs. The average investment is in the millions of
dollars.

My point of bringing up the VCs was just that it's an example that
there is strong evidence that patents can benefit small companies, and
those with financial interests often prefer them for that reason.

Sure VCs want to see patents. They have deep enough pockets to go to war.
They are also all about harvest in the 5-10 year period where the potential
payback is huge for a few of their bets. I don't fault VCs. I just
recognize that most companies (including companies with patentable ideas)
are not actually funded by VCs.

I'd venture to say that most companies (certainly not all) are funded
by some sort of investor entitity, and many non-VC entities (in my
experience) will also want to know about patent status on key
technologies. Investments into technologies that don't have patent
protection will generally present more risk to the ROI than those that
don't.

It's just something that's been very routine in my experience, and I
think is a strong indicator that even big companies making investments
want to see small companies have patent coverage on their key
technologies. It reduces the risk that the advantage of the research
being invested in doesn't just fly over to a competitor and ruin the
ROI.

Erik, lets say you have a good patent and some big company wants to
challenge you. Do you have a few extra million dollars to sustain a fight?
(If you do, give me a call) What if you don't want to be owned by the big
company?

It's rare for a big company to challenge a small company's patent
unless the small company is getting bright on the radar as potentially
having a big impact in a market. If that's the case then there would
likely be others willing to take the other side of the bet, i.e.,
you'd probably not be alone in defending the patent. You might have
to give up a piece of it, but you may not be alone.

Not sure what you mean by being owned by the big company. Big
companys often buy little companys to get their patent portfolio. Is
that what you mean? For many that potential exit strategy is one of
the big reasons to patent the technology in the first place, so it's
often a success when that happens.

I bet that Samsung & Apple will end up spending a $100 million dollars
before somebody gives up.

Apple makes some great products. Aren't we all glad Xerox didn't wipe them
out when Apple commercialized most of the Parc Place ideas. I like my
mouse.

My understanding is that Apple actually licensed everything they got
from Parq from Xerox. Xerox evidently didn't think it was all that
important at that time.

Polaroid held a monopoly on their camera technology even though the
original idea went back to the 1940s. I think this might have been due to
the fact that if you have the basic patent rights completely tied up, there
is absolutely no incentive for another entity to make further improvements
on a technology they can't commercialize for 20 years. So Polaroid just
kept making incremental improvements, that effectively monopolized the
technology until a paradigm shift obsoleted the whole method (digital
camera). (This is speculation on my part, someone can explain it if I am
wrong)

Actually, I am not anti-patent. I just thing the game is completely rigged
to favor the large companies at the expense of small innovative companies
and individuals.

And I'm just saying I've seen a lot of the other side of that, where
small businesses have greatly benefited, often at the hands of big
companies, by owning patents. I spent a number of years where a
pretty good chunk of my time was spent just doing technical due
diligence on startups for the capital investment arm of my
household-name employer at the time.

It was more or less in conjunction with the standards work I was doing
at the time (i.e., the big companies and VCs were making bets on who
would be contributing or influencing the standards and the related
markets). So I got to see it from the VC's point of view, the big
company's point of view, especially regarding capital investment, and
from a lot of the little companys participating in the standards
arena.

It's the same sort of thing with M&A into big companies...there's
almost always a patent portfolio involved or the deal won't make as
much financial sense if the technology isn't somehow protected. M&A
often involves small companies with key technologies getting absorbed
by big companies. That's often the desired exit plan for the founders
of the small company, so it's a win for them.

That being said, I've also spent a good chunk of my career at small
companies that eschewed patents, and were, at the time, successful at
it. That's not rare, either. Patents certainly aren't a requirement
to have a successful technology business, it just depends on what
you're doing or want to do or how you want to do it. There's
certainly a good deal of expense and risk related to patents, and
avoiding that when your business doesn't need it is often a good
thing.

Real patent reform would make the filing process more transparent (like
disclosures before some 20 something engineer grants the patent), had
actual peer review, were written in English (or for a technical patent,
engineering or science English as opposed to lawyer obfuscation),
automatically expired in a reasonable market period like 5 years, and
didn't take 3 years to grant.

Imagine if disclosure happened before a patent was granted. All someone
might need to do is identify the same invention already exists as prior
art. This would eliminate a huge number of the existing application and
backlog. This would be especially true for software patents since many of
these are "invisible" without close inspection.

I think that's why publication at 18 months is the default now.

There is a tremendous amount of prior art that exists that was never
patented. A patent examiner might make an assumption that if they can't
find prior art in the patent record, that somehow this means that an idea
is new.

I don't fault the inventor. I am sure that many of us have reinvented
things without intentionally stealing someone else's idea. Tukey & Cooley
rediscovered the FFT in 1965, but Gauss invented it first in 1805. I don't
think anyone thinks that Tukey & Cooley were stealing Gauss's invention.
Fortunately, we didn't have software patents or the FFT and probably all
its derivatives would have been held hostage for 20 years, or at least
until the historians corrected the record.

For a little while there was a website call Bounty Quest where people
posted bounties (usually $5k - $10k) for prior art on specific
patents. I often wish that were still around, but it went away a
long time ago. Interestingly, it came about partly as a result of
the controversy over Amazon's 1-click patent.

As a small business person I see the benefits and dangers of patents,
but there can definitely be benefits depending on what one wishes to
do. It's like most things, there are risks, and sometimes the ones
that take the risks get the rewards, and sometimes the ones that take
the risks get burned, and sometimes the unburned ones that didn't take
the risk at all do okay, too.


Eric Jacobsen
Anchor Hill Communications
www.anchorhill.com

 

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

In comp.arch.fpga Rick <richardcortese@gmail.com> wrote:

(snip)

Ditto. I see the CIPs as evil incarnate. There is no pressure to
innovate as long as you can just keep refiling the same patent with a
different cast of characters.

Sometimes you don't even need to do that.

There is in Consumer Reports today an article on how to save money
on prescription drugs by buying cheaper versions. One is to
buy Prozac or generic Fluoxetine instead of Sarafem. When the
patent on Prozac ran out, they renamed it Sarafem (for $243)
instead of $4 for the generic.

-- glen

 

[rickman]

On Oct 31, 11:54 pm, Al Clark <acl...@danvillesignal.com> wrote:
....snip...

Actually, I am not anti-patent. I just thing the game is completely rigged
to favor the large companies at the expense of small innovative companies
and individuals.
....snip...
Al Clark

What in business in not slanted to the large company? They get the
big money makers and the rest of us get the crumbs or what we can
snatch off their plate. Even mid size companies have to think about
what they are doing if they want to produce a BIG product regardless
of the patent issues. What would be the point of ramping up to design
and build millions a year of something that a much larger competitor
can produce for $5 less?

Is the reason why there are still just two big FPGA companies
patents? No entirely, it is as much an issue of the enormous cost and
time required to build such an infrastructure.

Patents are the mainstay of large high tech companies, but what about
high tech isn't slanted to the big companies? I just think
"completely slanted" is an overstatement. There are plenty of
individuals and small companies who have benefited greatly from
patents.

Rick

 

[Noob]

rickman wrote:

Noob wrote:

Steven Hirsch wrote:

My employer forbids engineers and software developers from reading patents
as a matter of policy (unless specifically requested to by legal).

"[The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and
useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the
exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

What a travesty.

Where's the progress when the wheel is reinvented every other month?

One way out of this mess is for the EU to start ignoring US patents;
that might make the US "snap out of it".

This is exactly why patents are granted. Not only is the inventor
able to benefit financially from his invention but the invention is
made public. Once the patent expires the world is the recipient.

Can I have some of what you've been smoking?

In the real world, for all intents and purposes, patents are NOT
public, because

1) they are written by lawyers who are deliberately trying to
communicate as little information as possible,

2) many employers "forbid engineers and software developers from
reading patents as a matter of policy"

The system is borked.