A Modest Proposal

[unixronin]

So.  Enough of this bushwah of the USPTO granting ass-stupid patents because they don't know a useful tech innovation from a hole in the ground.  I have a suggestion.

Instead of continuing to try to get the USPTO to do a job at which it is demonstrably, utterly, totally and institutionally incompetent, to wit, the reasoned and informed evaluation of technology patent applications, let's create a second parallel office, the USCPO -- the US Computer Patents Office.  Staff it with people who actually know a computer from an ATM machine (well, yeah, I know, an ATM machine is a computer, work with me here) and a mouse click from a sharp stick up the ass.  I'm sure right now we can find lots and lots of out-of-work tech people to fill the jobs.  Then let's take away EVERYTHING to do with any form of computer-related patents for the USPTO and give them to the new agency, whose responsibility will be SOLELY to handle issuance or denial of computer technology patents, and which will have the authority to summarily reject any patent application on the grounds that, say, it's immediately obvious to a retarded wombat, or it's been common everyday practice for ten years whether or not it's ever been formalized, or it's simply a stupid patent with no possible reason for existence other than to provide a pretext for sueing people who violate it.

Oh yeah, and while we're at it, let's kill off these bloody submarine patents that people make preliminary filing on, then keep amending and amending and amending for ten or twenty years as other people come up with new ideas, without ever actually finalizing their filing of the patent, in an attempt to steal every idea that comes along that they can half-plausibly claim to have thought of first.  No more.  The buck stops here.  You make your preliminary filing, you can have no more than three revisions, all of which must be within a year of and germane to the preliminary filing, then that's it, game over, FILE IT or fuck off.  And give the examiners authority to summarily dismiss obvious submarine patents, too, while we're at it, just to be sure.

Think it'd help turn patents back into a device for innovators to protect their ideas with, instead of a device for ratfink weasels to use to profit from other people's inventiveness and the USPTO's ignorance and gullibility?

Comments

[elegantelbow.livejournal.com]

Both of those things sounds sane and rational to me.