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Comment by axel205 | Hacker News Reader

I think the root of this problem is the US patent office that keeps approving this ambiguous and silly patents. Is there anything being done to stop this kind of patents from going through?

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Allowance rates cratered after Alice v. CLS Bank, and when they USPTO makes a mistake, there are stronger mechanisms to limit the damage. Cost/time to kill a patent is about 1/5 of what it was five years ago; the Eastern District of TX is no longer an option for most suits; and it's much easier to get the plaintiff to pay for your legal fees when you prevail in a frivolous suit.

Well one thing we could do is actually fund the uspto with more tax dollars instead of having like 99% of their budget come from fees. That the fees are higher for accepted patents creates some obvious conflicts of interest.

Good luck getting any politician to push for that.

I don't care about the general patents they give out. I think there should be patent categories like tech, physical, medical, etc

A tech patent should only last 3-5 years, which is a lifetime in tech to give you an upper hand.

I think that would help solve the problem. I mean its insane Amazon was able to patent a 1 click buy and just stop everyone else from using it for so long.

Nope nothing is being done. I feel the patent office has got a little better (just adding on a computer doesn't make it novel thanks to the Supreme Court), but they are self funded (funded by fees), so if they're not issuing patents they won't make as much money and Will face a budget crunch.

The patent office is not held financially liable for issuing bad patents either. So in the end they're just going to keep issuing bad ones until the rules are changed.

Why not abolish the patent system altogether? Don't allow private companies to use government force to monopolize ideas in the first place.

Patents were created because we believe that there’s a win-win to providing limited term protection for new inventions. There are fields, like IC design, where lack of IP protection would halt innovation pretty quickly - nobody is going to invest tens or hundreds of millions to build a new chip if a competitor can copy it in a matter of months.

That said, it’s a bargain made for the public good, and we should always keep that in mind. It’s pretty clear that there are abuses of the patent system, we need to think about how we can modify it to minimize those abuses while protecting valuable research.

Nobody's saying to get rid of copyright, things as specific as a chip design could still be protected.

I've only founded one startup that made a chip, and patents didn't help (or hinder) us at all.

Another example would be Intel: you're saying that Intel would stop designing chips if there were no more patents?

There might still be uses... But I would say granting of patents should be conditioned on the good they do society.

And limited in timed based on the investment made.

Still, it's tempting to think patents should only be permitted in certain areas...

> granting of patents should be conditioned on the good they do society.

Perhaps that's the standard, according to some, that is upheld today? Whose opinion shall we then use to uphold such a standard?

Yep. It's fairly recent too. The patent is from 2015.

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