Stupid Patent of the Month: A Drink Mixer Attacks the Internet of Things

The biggest legislative issue of the decade is probably Obamacare and that was basically a license to not change anything about billing or waste, but rather a subsidy for buyers and small concessions on eligibility.

The patent system serves a purpose: In the case of drug patents, it enables drug research to exist at all.

It's crazy expensive to bring a new drug to market. Unless we're going to have the government fund all new drug research, we need patent protection for drug development. I'd be happy to mass-invalidate all patents that don't actually have serious R&D dollars behind their creation (the idea of the patent protecting the small inventor hasn't been true for many years), but that becomes a difficult threshold to quantify.

And as the EFF points out, this patent is not valid under current law. It doesn't satisfy the most basic criteria of "novelty." No matter how much we improve the PTO, there will still be stupid patents that leak through. What's broken is that, once issued, such a patent is hard to tear down (and there are probably thousands of such patents already issued).

We need a vastly simplified and streamlined way to tear down obviously bad patents like this. The PTO has reached out in the past to get help from experts in judging patents; extend that to reviewing existing patents, and give the PTO an explicit mission to seek-and-destroy such patents since they are measurably hurting the tech economy.

Cut out the bureaucratic obstacles to destroying patents that show no novelty. Make a patent challenge a process that takes no more than a month, and that reliably invalidates or limits the scope of broad-reaching patents, so that if you get a bogus letter demanding payment for some patent that never should have been issued, you could potentially drag out the negotiations long enough for the patent to be rendered null and void.

That would destroy the Patent Troll business model.

And that judge gets about one fourth of all patent cases in the country.

The Federal Circuit abolished the law (still on the books but null and void) that required patent litigation to be brought in the district where a defendant was accused of infringing and allowed cases to be brought anywhere the plaintiff likes. Rep. Gilmore in the House of Representatives has introduced a bill, the Innovation Act, that would restore a weaker version of that statute, until the CAFC abolishes it again.