The real damage has been done by the Patent Office accepting just about any claim, and letting the courts work it out, when they should have been rejecting obvious prior art.
Well they now have the PTAB and IPRs... you can have your patents challenged seemingly endlessly after they have been granted. The big boys like Apple will bleed a small company to death trying to enforce their patents and get paid. In the meantime other potential licensees will sit on the sidelines and wait and so the inventing company isn’t getting paid.
Bingo - the USPTO did move to implement a regional patent office system, which theoretically makes them more efficient in terms of research and reviews. But we’re talking about a bureaucracy here so you get what you budget for.
The problem with the court system is the ability to cherry pick venues by the plaintiffs in rocket docket jurisdictions such as East Texas or Delaware. I feel bad for this doctor in the article but the issue of NPEs is real.
“The real damage has been done by the Patent Office accepting just about any claim, and letting the courts work it out, when they should have been rejecting obvious prior art.”
Totally agree.
Not picking on anyone here, but Apple got a patent for “rounded rectangles”. Honeywell got a paten on a color green for use in their products.
I am an inventor of the zoom with details capabilities. As a computer zooms in on a map, there are more details. Yes, that is a patent. Dumb as it is, Boeing paid me well for filing that one and many others.
Patents have gotten out of control.
Apple once sued Samsung over rounded corners.
BS. Examiners are highly sensitive about such matters, and the examining corpse as well, making it even more difficult to gain meaningful claim scope.