<story><title>US patent chief to software patent critics: &quot;Give it a rest already&quot;</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/us-patent-chief-to-software-patent-critics-give-it-a-rest-already/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>manaskarekar</author><text>Maybe we should. Exhaust all combinations and verify them for time when this &quot;idea&quot; was conceived, then dump out the list on a website and have people come up with uses for it (and actually use them.)&lt;p&gt;Boom! Prior art to invalidate future bullshit.</text></item><item><author>IanDrake</author><text>Innovation?&lt;p&gt;The problem is that people are patenting non-innovative stuff.   At this point one could write an automatic patent generator, much like domain name generators.&lt;p&gt;Or we could have the Patent-libs (like ad-libs).&lt;p&gt;Software that runs on [DeviceType] that has [ShapeOfCorner] and allows the user to [DigitalVersionOfNaturallyOccurringAction] which produces [ObviousOutcome].</text></item><item><author>reitzensteinm</author><text>&amp;#62; He noted that during a time of growing litigation in the smartphone industry, &quot;innovation continues at an absolutely breakneck pace. In a system like ours in which innovation is happening faster than people can keep up, it cannot be said that the patent system is broken,&quot; he said.&lt;p&gt;Metric X is high, therefore disputed policy Y is boosting metric X.&lt;p&gt;If more people understood the inanity of this line of argument, the world would be a much better place.&lt;p&gt;The head of the USPTO isn&apos;t even willing to have an intellectually honest debate on the subject. It&apos;s pretty clear that change is not going to come from within.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jlgreco</author><text>&amp;#62; In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he&apos;s the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. &lt;i&gt;He&apos;s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain – not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps.&lt;/i&gt; Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he&apos;s the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.&lt;p&gt;Excerpt from Accelerando by Charles Stross (cstross).  Emphasis added.&lt;p&gt;I would love to see some sort of legal patent pool that grants free licenses only to entities that either do not have patents themselves, or which have granted licenses for all of their patents to other members of the pool.  The trick of course is getting such a pool to a critical mass that joining it and licensing all your patents to it becomes worth it.</text></comment>
<story><title>US patent chief to software patent critics: &quot;Give it a rest already&quot;</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/us-patent-chief-to-software-patent-critics-give-it-a-rest-already/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>manaskarekar</author><text>Maybe we should. Exhaust all combinations and verify them for time when this &quot;idea&quot; was conceived, then dump out the list on a website and have people come up with uses for it (and actually use them.)&lt;p&gt;Boom! Prior art to invalidate future bullshit.</text></item><item><author>IanDrake</author><text>Innovation?&lt;p&gt;The problem is that people are patenting non-innovative stuff.   At this point one could write an automatic patent generator, much like domain name generators.&lt;p&gt;Or we could have the Patent-libs (like ad-libs).&lt;p&gt;Software that runs on [DeviceType] that has [ShapeOfCorner] and allows the user to [DigitalVersionOfNaturallyOccurringAction] which produces [ObviousOutcome].</text></item><item><author>reitzensteinm</author><text>&amp;#62; He noted that during a time of growing litigation in the smartphone industry, &quot;innovation continues at an absolutely breakneck pace. In a system like ours in which innovation is happening faster than people can keep up, it cannot be said that the patent system is broken,&quot; he said.&lt;p&gt;Metric X is high, therefore disputed policy Y is boosting metric X.&lt;p&gt;If more people understood the inanity of this line of argument, the world would be a much better place.&lt;p&gt;The head of the USPTO isn&apos;t even willing to have an intellectually honest debate on the subject. It&apos;s pretty clear that change is not going to come from within.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>4rgento</author><text>I know you are joking, but I don&apos;t think this is a bad idea nor an imposible one.</text></comment>