Ralph Nader, Patent Buster

wired news ^ | 2/28/03 | Joshua Davis

[freepatriot32]

America's consumer watchdog has a bone to pick with the US Trade Representative. The USTR is lobbying foreign countries to adopt America's liberal approach to issuing patents and to honor US patents granted for business methods, such as Amazon's 1-Click ordering. Backed by his advocacy group, the Consumer Project on Technology (www.cptech.org), Nader argues that exporting a flawed policy is a mistake. We caught up with him in Washington to find out why he believes US patent evangelism is a problem.

[KarlInOhio]

I agree with Ralph Nader? It's a sign of the end times!

[bmwcyle]

Give the world freedom and a good Constitution the rest will follow.

[Rain-maker]

Al Gore invented the internet, AOL must owe him billions.

[narby]

I agree with Ralph Nader? It's a sign of the end times

Amen brother.

Patents are the biggest crock in town. I wouldn't mind if they were for "real" inventions. But in my business (GPS guidance), there are all kinds of patents granted for quite obvious things. Prior art is supposedly not patentable, but they grant patents on it all the time.

For instance, if someone had a patent for, say, using Loran C to navigate on a river. Then someone else can get a second patent to use GPS to navigate on a river. That's BS. If you could do it with Loran C, or any other electronic navigation system, then you can do the same with GPS. It's Prior art.

But the lawyers like the money, so they give patents for every thing under the sun and let companies spend money fighting it out in court.

[B Knotts]

Ditto to that. Software patents are just a big game whereby big software houses hold huge numbers of patents in a "detante"-like stalemate against each other.

A large proportion of the patents are really invalid, due to obviousness or prior art, but the patent office dutifully grants them anyway.

[supercat]

What do they say about stopped clocks?

[Tennessee_Bob]

They're right twice a day.

[boris]

The real problem is that patents are worthless. The reason they are worthless is that the Patent Office stopped requiring working models in the 1970s--claiming they had no more warehouse space to house the models.

With the working-model requirement gone, it is easy to patent violations of Newton's Laws of motion, etc. Heck, they may even allow violations of the Laws of Thermodyanmics.

U.S. Patents are trash because the 'examiners' can be easily hoodwinked. Sometimes I think none of them took Physics 101...

--Boris

[Tamzee]

Usenet was essentially invented for this very task by techies for techies LOL In the Internet's infant days, the only way to communicate was email. Very time-consuming and frustrating between several people. Usenet was then created in 1979 with it's efficient bulletin board style and the world hasn't been the same since ;-)