Reply to post: Re: This just underscores that patents are crap

Now you can tell someone to literally go f--k themselves over the internet: Remote-control mock-cock patent dies

eldakka

Re: This just underscores that patents are crap

With US patents the rubber approval stamp is pretty much automatic.

They rely on them being challenged in court to weed out the crap ones.

Which of course is completely impractical for the small inventor/innovator, and only benefits lawyers.

Where software/computer controlled devices are concerned, this isn't as true as it used to be.

Yes, during the late 90's and 00's (20 00's that is), the USPTO was granting patents that basically said "do this regular thing we've always been doing, but do it on a computer".

However, in the last 3-5 years there have been several cases handed down from the Supreme Court basically spanking the lower courts and USPTO for their acceptance of "on a computer" patents. The subject of a patent must be inventive, with or without an "on a computer" step. Taking something that already happens, even manually via filed paper work, and adding a computer system to do the same is no longer acceptable patent matter.

This returned the status quo to what is was prior to this 90's (or maybe late 80's) period. Accepting patents for software is an anomaly of the 90's/00's when the USPTO, unilaterally, decided to expand patent coverage. This is why software such as UNIX, MS-DOS, VMS, etc. never had patent protection, as it predated this period, so you couldn't get a patent for that sort of software. But the USPTO changed its mind in the 90's and started allowing it. Then in the early-mid 2010's the US Supreme Court disabused the USPTO and the patent appeals court of that notion.

The USPTO also introduced their inter partes patent review process, where, after paying the appropriate fee to the USPTO, a patent's validity can be challenged without a trial by basically asking the USPTO to have a second, harder look at the patent, based on additional information the requesting body has provided (there's no point asking for an inter partes review if you can't provide your own research/information to the USPTO).

Courts and bureaucracy are slow movers. So its taken a couple years for this to filter down. And with only a couple years to go (as of say a couple years ago) then no-one would have bothered to pro-actively try to get the patent in question here cancelled, if it could have been under the newer precedents, just wait a couple years and it has just expired anyway.

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