[quote name='jfavela' timestamp='1346802043' post='4976611']I can see patenting an entire software product, sure, but not anything less than that.

This is what copyright law is for - the product can be protected under copyright.
There's no need at all for patents.
[/quote]
QFE.

[quote name='Heath' timestamp='1346821005' post='4976692']
So, let's everyone lay his own claim to some part of the Commons. Let's all plant our flags and say "I claim this [thing] in the name of [me]", and see what this all looks like after just a few generations. It becomes a minefield. And that's what it is today. It's not just that the laws need reform, it's a little worse than that. The whole premise itself seems a little bit off.

Don't patents die along with their owners, if nobody else picks them up within the legal period? I think you have one year in the USA to acquire orphan patents - with justification - before their object falls into public domain. Obviously this doesn't prevent important patents surviving through several generations, but it does mean that ultimately, the patent will almost certainly expire. I still agree with you though.
[/quote]
Aren't US patents only valid for ~20 years? But yeah, it's a complete minefield right now. If law wasn't so horribly boring, that's where I'd be majoring, 'cause those guys are raking in the money with our current state.

Yes, patents expire, so you get at least that bit of jubilee.

Good find Heath: http://9gag.com/gag/5254724

Now Braun should sue Apple for the rounded corners alike the last image.

20 years is to long and avoids competition. 5-10 years would be much better.

Originally it was 7, and you could apply for a 2nd term of 7 (making it 14) only in exceptional circumstances.
Then it was overhauled to just be 17 (a compromise between the existing 2 terms of 14 and a demand for a 3rd term, making it 21), and now it's standardised to 20 it almost all countries.

Also, go back 300 years and there was only about 10 patents granted per year.
A century later, it was up to 100 per year.
Another century later, up to 10,000 per year.
Today, it's up to 500,000 per year. That's about 1400 patents granted every single day... Every month, more patents are filed than the first few hundred years of grants combined. Abuse of the system is accelerating at an exponential rate... and this is apparently a good thing(tm). Economists and accountants use patent grants as a metric of "innovation", when it's actually just a measure of legalized monopolies - a weapon to be used against the free market.

There's no need at all for patents.[/quote]

I actually disagree. The idea behind patents is that companies can invest money in R & D knowing that for a limited time, they get exclusive rights to the results of that R & D. Without this protection for their investment, companies would be a lot less willing to spend large amounts of money doing the research. Why bother, if you spend millions developing something, and everyone else copies you immediately without the same research costs involved.

It's not the concept of patents that is the problem, it's the implementation.

There's no need at all for patents.

I actually disagree. The idea behind patents is that companies can invest money in R & D knowing that for a limited time, they get exclusive rights to the results of that R & D. [1]Without this protection for their investment, companies would be a lot less willing to spend large amounts of money doing the research. Why bother, if you spend millions developing something, and everyone else copies you immediately without the same research costs involved.

[2]It's not the concept of patents that is the problem, it's the implementation.[/quote][2] - in the end, this is all that matters. They're a huge problem.
Perhaps they can be tweaked to be less abusive, but IMHO they can't be fixed. Allowing the ownership of ideas in general (not specific creations or specific expressions of ideas - which copyright covers) is the legislation of thought crime.

Even if I come up with an obvious idea and develop it in isolation, my thoughts own thoughts can be restricted and deemed the property of some rival R&D group. My own R&D is thwarted completely due to lawyers claiming ownership over my own thoughts and ideas. This is a horrible abuse of personal freedom that only belongs in Orwellian fiction.

[1] - This is the common rhetoric of people who want to protect their stockpiles of these weapons. It simply is not true.
Take this thread for example -- Samsung is in trouble in the US for apparently copying the shape, interface design and usability of the iPhone (also n.b. the case was thrown out in the UK, and ruled differently in Korea, so the facts in the case are debatable).
If what you're saying is true, then if patents didn't exist, Apple wouldn't have come up with those shapes, designs and usability improvements. You're basically saying that Apple's designers and engineers would simply stop doing their job, stop taking pride in their work, and stop trying to make a device that's better than their competitors.
The whole point of commercial competition is that companies will try to make products better and/or cheaper than their competitors. Regardless of whether they could use the law to attack their competitors and create an artificial monopoly (i.e. apply for patents), they're still going to try and create a well designed product; that's what they do!
Even in the UK where the patent case was thrown out, Apple's still profited greatly from this R&D, by being first-to-market with their well-designed device. They've dominated the market in the time it's taken their competitors to catch up.
I used to work in a dedicated R&D branch of a huge corporation, and the amount of time we wasted in designing our own patents and going over our competitors patents with a fine-toothed comb to figure out how to legally circumvent them was a massive drain on resources. We shouldn't have needed an in-house team of lawyers to be working alongside our engineers. Also, if the patent system disappeared overnight, it would in no way have stopped our R&D efforts (if anything, it would have accelerated them) -- our core business was building new devices that required R&D, and all the companies in this sectors had to constantly work to keep up with each other already (while circumventing each other's patents). To stop performing R&D would have been to bow out of the industry and lose your market-share.

Lastly, close to home -- just look at the vast amount of R&D that's happened within the video game industry in the past 20 years. Thankfully, only a very small amount of it has been patented. By your statement, none of this R&D should have happened. I've done R&D on half a dozen games, without patenting any of it, because the R&D is necessary in order to create a well-selling product. Capitalism already incentivizes R&D. Conversely, patents harm R&D.

[2] - in the end, this is all that matters. They're a huge problem.
Perhaps they can be tweaked to be less abusive, but IMHO they can't be fixed. Allowing the ownership of ideas in general (not specific creations or specific expressions of ideas - which copyright covers) is the legislation of thought crime.

Even if I come up with an obvious idea and develop it in isolation, my thoughts own thoughts can be restricted and deemed the property of some rival R&D group. My own R&D is thwarted completely due to lawyers claiming ownership over my own thoughts and ideas. This is a horrible abuse of personal freedom that only belongs in Orwellian fiction.

This is a perfect example of the slippery slope fallacy.

The US patent system just got a sizeable overhaul last yeat that's scheduled to take effect in 9 days. They increased the cost of patents to companies, decreased the cost to individuals, allowed third parties to appeal for re-examination of patents after they are granted, and patent infringement trials are now allowed to have an expert board instead of a jury of laypeople at the defendants request.

All of those things would have a huge impact on the Samsung v Apple case, and will continue to have huge impacts in tech in general. Specifically inter-partes and post grant reviews. They'll also be forced to separate lawsuits instead of blanket suing ever person who could potentially violate a patent; this will have a huge impact on patent trolls.

No idea...? Ironically they probably picked that meathead because he was in tech... just the evil and totally biased side of tech. The rest of the jurors... who knows.

OK so he was sorta in the field

but heres something else about that guy

A holder of a patent on video compression himself, he said he recognized that the case represented a “landmark decision,” and that he was pleased he’d been selected “because I wanted to be satisfied from my own perspective that this trial was fair, and protected copyrights and intellectual property rights, no matter who they belonged to.”[/quote]
what? is this how the jury system operates in the US?
So eg say a girl is raped and murdered, is allowable to to have members in the jury whose own daughters have been raped/murdered as Im sure they can ignore their own experience and just focus on the evidence at hand. And this is OK, doesnt conflict of interest apply in the states.

The US patent system just got a sizeable overhaul last yeat that's scheduled to take effect in 9 days.[/quote]excellant so that means we'll see no more slide to unlock, one click to buy, store files on the camera in the order you take them etc patents

what? is this how the jury system operates in the US?
So eg say a girl is raped and murdered, is allowable to to have members in the jury whose own daughters have been raped/murdered as Im sure they can ignore their own experience and just focus on the evidence at hand. And this is OK, doesnt conflict of interest apply in the states.

They screen jurors before the trial and each side is allowed to disallow a certain amount of jurors and recommend a certain amount of jurors. They are picked based off of a round of questioning that happens beforehand. However, if a person answers in a way that doesn't show their bias it's easy for a clearly biased person to get chosen for the jury, which is what happened here imo. Samsung probably assumed that since he was a patent holder in a tech related field he wouldn't come to the conclusion that because you can't run programs on different OS's it makes prior art irrelevant.

The US patent system just got a sizeable overhaul last yeat that's scheduled to take effect in 9 days.[/quote]excellant so that means we'll see no more slide to unlock, one click to buy, store files on the camera in the order you take them etc patents
[/quote]
What possibly led you to that conclusion? It made patents much easier to dispute and more expensive for corporations. In what way does that correlate to more trash patents?

If what you're saying is true, then if patents didn't exist, Apple wouldn't have come up with those shapes, designs and usability improvements. You're basically saying that Apple's designers and engineers would simply stop doing their job, stop taking pride in their work, and stop trying to make a device that's better than their competitors.[/quote]

Actually, what I was saying is that they wouldn't have jobs because Apple wouldn't invest billions into something they didn't think they could control otherwise. Though in the case of the designers, I don't think things like shape should be covered by patents anyway.

That's what I meant by it's the implementation that is the problem. What should and should not be patentable needs to be strongly reworked.