[Pelham]

In a 1994 interview now on YouTube, a young, cocky, newly rich Steve Jobs succinctly described in the language of our times how he and Apple dealt with this innovation-driven gale. “Good artists copy,” he said, “Great artists steal. We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

[sparklite2]

I wouldn’t think google is MS’s greatest nightmare, but WDIK?

As to the patent question, how much of the decline could be due to the lower hanging (low tech) fruit already having been picked? Could it be that the more complex technology becomes, the more money and research is required to reach a new level?

[MarvinStinson]

The US Patent Office was instructed to harass and reject Nikola Tesla when he sent in patent applications.

Until he finally solved the situation by filing his patents in other countries.

[hecticskeptic]

Moreover, even if a patent claim is found valid in one challenge, another “any person” can challenge it again and another person yet again. Thus, wave attacks are now commonly used to invalidate or suppress the use of patents. Many investors refuse to license or invest in a technology while the patent’s validity is being challenged.

Such a sick technique that is seen over and over.... in a different field, this is essentially what Mueller is doing and the cost for all involved as they 'lawyer up' is off the charts and crippling.

[jpsb]

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.

NASA invented natural language searching in the early 90s. Google "borrowed" NASAs invention. I will admit the web crawler was a good idea for indexing.

[CodeToad]

The cost of patents is now prohibitive to the individual inventor.

[KarlInOhio]

The artcle focuses on percentage of patents to individuals dropping, but that looks like the total number of patents increasing while the individual count changed little. My last couple companies had policies where everything new, no matter how small, had to be passed upward and considerec for patent. Even if it was an "obvious" tweak to a standard method it wasn't the engineers' jobs to decide what was obvious.

Also, the patent attorney in one case broke a single invention into a half dozen applications to make it more likely one or two would be approved.

[Garth Tater]

What are the total numbers? Have the number of patents issued to individual inventors gone down?

Patent trolling is now a big business. Someone receives a patent that looks to be profitable and immediately companies setup specifically for this purpose will file numerous similar patents surrounding the technology with a wall of patents that will have to be paid off if the original tech is going to be advanced. Lots and lots of patents that until somewhere around the 1980's when this trolling began never would have been filed.

Why SCO is Like a Patent Troll

[morphing libertarian]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_telephone

[hecticskeptic]

Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2...... “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.

[onedoug]

Very interesting. Thanks for posting.

[Huskrrrr]

Have an idea? File a Provisional patent. Anyone can write a Provisional patent, good for a year (and renewable). This holds your place in time while you prepare a patent application. You can also search the USPO for patents similar to your idea, for free.
I wrote an SBIR grant for a new drug, while working in a company of three employees. SBIR grants are designed to fund the little guys. We exemplified one example of our new idea. Our grant wasn’t funded and we abandoned that idea.
You can “steal’ another companies idea if you can prove your product is a definite improvement over your competition’s product AND convince a patent examiner that your idea was not obvious to the original patent owner.
In reality most patents are written by small inventors with the expectation they will sell the rights to a larger company.

[PGalt]

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

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

Interesting. Thanks to all posters.

[dragnet2]

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