Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Crowd Sourcing Patents


There is an interesting article on crowd sourcing patents titled, "Obama advisers want to “crowdsource” patents, call again for new law" at arstechnica.

As the article by - Feb 20 2014, 5:37pm EST starts off:  

"In June, President Barack Obama called for action against patent trolls. Today the White House held a short conference updating what has happened in the arena of patent policy since then and announced new initiatives going forward—including one to "crowdsource" the review of patents.

"I don't think we felt like we had a choice but to take action on the issue of patent trolls," said Obama economic adviser Gene Sperling at today's event. "What we were seeing wasn't a trend upward [in patent threats], it was a hockey stick."

Patent trolls are killing innovation and the Obama administration needs to take serious action.  Personally, I would like to see that there would be NO patents for software because of the patent trolls are getting patents for absolutely obvious and non-innovative ideas.  These patent trolls are not creating any value, they are just trying to be the "mafia of the Internet".  They serve no useful purpose and only add tremendous cost to the equation.

Mr. Mullin brings out one of the fundamental problems:

"Unless the crowd-sourcing initiatives were to put major new burdens on applicants—which would be resisted—the fundamentals of patent examination aren't going to change. Patent examiners get an average of eighteen hours to review a patent. Most importantly, examiners effectively can't say "no" to applicants. They can reject a particular application, but there's no limit to the number of amendments and re-drafts an applicant can submit."
We will have to see if Obama follows through on this....