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Raid on Gibraltar: How the U.S. Patent System was Rigged Against Independent Inventors
IP Watchdog ^ | September 17, 2017 | Pat Choate & Joan Maginnis

Posted on 09/17/2017 12:36:55 PM PDT by Pelham

For decades, individual inventors were granted 25 percent or more of all U.S. patents. This creativity was the foundation of dozens of new industries, thousands of new companies and millions of new jobs.

Yet beginning in the early 1980s, their portion of granted patents begin to drop like a rock in free fall. By 2015, individual inventors received only 5.8 percent. A decline so great and so fast has profound consequences and is not an accident or fluke.

A useful place to begin the examination of this decline is a 1998 interview of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates who was asked, “Mr. Gates, what’s your biggest worry? What’s your business nightmare?”

Gates paused a bit and then said, “I’ll tell you what I worry about. I worry about some guy in a garage inventing something, a new technology, I have never thought about.”

Prescient and ironic? Certainly, because at that very moment two guys named Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working in a Menlo Park “garage” inventing Google, which quickly became one of Microsoft’s worst business nightmares.

What Gates really feared was described by economist Joseph Schumpeter as “the gale of creative destruction” – a process of economic mutation that “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” Inventors and their inventions most often drive this gale – a process that makes them very dangerous to established ventures such as Microsoft and Apple.

In 1776, Adam Smith described such ventures’ almost baked-in genetic reaction to this Schumpeterian gale: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

(Excerpt) Read more at ipwatchdog.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Government; Technical
KEYWORDS: apple; invention; microsoft; patents
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To: MarvinStinson
The US Patent Office was instructed to harass and reject Nikola Tesla when he sent in patent applications.

I have been trying now for months to tell all of you the federal agencies are running the country.

21 posted on 09/17/2017 1:29:58 PM PDT by MeneMeneTekelUpharsin (Freedom is the freedom to discipline yourself so others don't have to do it for you.)
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To: onedoug

You’re welcome.

This is a very important issue that has gone largely unnoticed by anyone not directly affected by it. But it has badly damaged the innovation engine that has always been the driver of American prosperity.

Incredibly, China is currently seen as having higher protection for patents than the United States. This can’t continue. But it will unless Congress scraps the monster that they created, or unless SCOTUS kills the PTAB in their upcoming Oil States case.


22 posted on 09/17/2017 1:34:51 PM PDT by Pelham (Liberate California. Deport Mexico Now)
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To: Garth Tater

https://cpip.gmu.edu/2017/05/11/explaining-efficient-infringement/

“In a recent New York Times op-ed, “The Patent Troll Smokescreen,” Joe Nocera used in print for the first time the term, “efficient infringement.” This pithy phrase quickly gained currency if only because it captures a well-known phenomenon that has been impossible to describe in even a single sentence. Unfortunately, some commentators are confused about the validity of this term. This is understandable, because no one has yet described exactly what it means, especially in comparison to the similar commercial practice of “efficient breach” in contract law.

“In a nutshell, efficient infringement occurs when a company deliberately chooses to infringe a patent given that it is cheaper than to license the patent. The reason it is cheaper is what makes it hard to explain briefly: a slew of legal changes to the patent system by Congress, courts, and regulatory agencies in the past ten years have substantially increased the costs and uncertainties in enforcing patents against infringers.

Accused infringers now can very easily invalidate patents, either in court or at the “patent death squad” known as the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. If a patent owner runs this gauntlet after several years of costly litigation and obtains a judgment in its favor, courts are increasingly refusing to award injunctions for anyone other than manufacturing companies. What is left for the patent owner is only damages, but changes in the legal rules for awarding damages have made damage awards very minimal compared to the actual economic harms suffered by a patent owner (a 2015 PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that median damage awards in 2014 were at their second lowest level in the past 20 years).

“The result of all of this is that a company economically gains from deliberately infringing patents. It pays less in either legal fees or in court-ordered damages than it would have paid in a license negotiated with a patent owner. This is efficient infringement....


23 posted on 09/17/2017 1:45:23 PM PDT by Pelham (Liberate California. Deport Mexico Now)
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To: sparklite2

Most garages in Silicon Valley are now rented out.


24 posted on 09/17/2017 1:46:06 PM PDT by spokeshave (The Fake Media tried to stop us from going to the White House, I am President and they are not. DJT)
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To: jpsb
NASA invented natural language searching in the early 90s.

News to me. I attended meetings in Chicagoland in 1984-87 where a mix of academics from Northwestern U, U of Chicago and from Fortune 100 firms, and small firms discussed their various efforts at NLP and specifically at search.

There were several different approaches and different products. They all were described as functional; but needing improvement.... sorta like google and apple products still need improvement.

One major concern was not in the NLP code development. It was in the fragmentation of information in many silos. There were several speakers who described Advantis, the first CLOUD, as a way to remove some silos and build bridges between other silos.

25 posted on 09/17/2017 1:47:55 PM PDT by spintreebob
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To: hecticskeptic

Here in Georgia, when Georgia was founded two things were prohibited: Slavery and Lawyers. The founders of GA were right the first time and made big mistakes in removing both of those prohibitions.


26 posted on 09/17/2017 1:54:00 PM PDT by spintreebob
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To: spokeshave

>> Most garages in Silicon Valley are now rented out <<

What about converting them into living quarters?


27 posted on 09/17/2017 2:21:20 PM PDT by Hawthorn
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To: Garth Tater

What is Mr. Darl all-Hat doing these days?


28 posted on 09/17/2017 2:22:34 PM PDT by Paladin2 (No spelchk nor wrong word auto substition on mobile dev. Please be intelligent and deal with it....)
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To: Pelham
Yep. They hit the little guy from all angles until he realizes he doesn't have the resources to continue the fight and is forced to sell his patent rights. The Patent Office could (and should) fix this problem but being part of the bought-and-paid-for Federal government, they never will.

I tried to talk my youngest into going into patent law - but she said she had too much self-respect. She's a good girl.
29 posted on 09/17/2017 2:25:29 PM PDT by Garth Tater (Gone Galt and I ain't coming back.)
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To: windcliff; stylecouncilor

Interesting article ping....


30 posted on 09/17/2017 2:29:29 PM PDT by onedoug
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To: Garth Tater

I’ve often wondered why people with ideas who appeared to have no particular need for Venture Capital capitulated to it anyway. Perhaps it was just to pay for legal fees in fighting off parasites.


31 posted on 09/17/2017 2:29:44 PM PDT by posterchild (Science makes the Dr. see what is not, and prevents him from seeing what is clear to everyone else)
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To: spintreebob

I didn’t know that....what an interesting bit of history.


32 posted on 09/17/2017 2:36:43 PM PDT by hecticskeptic
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To: posterchild
If you join up (sell your rights) to a big enough partner the patent trolls will probably leave you alone as they know they will be subjected to similar legal abuses in return.

Money has always ruled our world - except for a few short, bright periods. One of which was America.
33 posted on 09/17/2017 2:41:13 PM PDT by Garth Tater (Gone Galt and I ain't coming back.)
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To: rightwingcrazy

” I remember back in the 1960s the field of optics being considered a dead field for innovation.”

Maybe for you?


34 posted on 09/17/2017 3:54:56 PM PDT by TexasGator
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To: Pelham

Interesting.


35 posted on 09/17/2017 4:18:26 PM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: CodeToad

Correct.

You have to get a big money man or company to back you.

And in that process they often steal your patent.

See marylandcorruption.com


36 posted on 09/17/2017 4:24:52 PM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: Pelham; All

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

http://www.rense.com/general32/americ.htm

Interesting. Thanks to all posters.


37 posted on 09/17/2017 4:31:37 PM PDT by PGalt
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To: Pelham

Bookmark


38 posted on 09/17/2017 4:35:10 PM PDT by dragnet2 (Diversion and evasion are tools of deceit)
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To: MarvinStinson
How to Protect a Drug Patent? Give it to a Native American Tribe

Mylan calls Allergan’s patent deal with Indian tribe a “sham” transaction in PTAB hearing on sovereign immunity defense

USPTO admits to stacking PTAB panels to achieve desired outcomes

39 posted on 09/17/2017 4:58:56 PM PDT by Pelham (Liberate California. Deport Mexico Now)
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To: spintreebob

Natural Language Searching can be summed up in one easy to understand statement.

If two documents discuss the same subject they probably have a lot of words in common.

The hard part (not really) is indexing the docs and building a thesaurus. You can also weight words, but I never bothered with that.

I always wanted to do something with either Dewy Decimal or maybe even Library of Congress system to try and get a graphical representation of a document and them play linear algebra games but I never got around to it.

My boss at the time didn’t think much of searching, to her it was an after thought. I kept telling her searching is the key. If you can’t find it you can’t manage it. She was into configuration management. I was into searching.


40 posted on 09/17/2017 5:03:33 PM PDT by jpsb (Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied. Otto von Bismark)
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