Senate Republicans are getting ready to declare war on patent trolls by Timothy B. Lee
From the post:
Republicans are about to take control of the US Senate. And when they do, one of the big items on their agenda will be the fight against patent trolls.
In a Wednesday speech on the Senate floor, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) outlined a proposal to stop abusive patent lawsuits. “Patent trolls – which are often shell companies that do not make or sell anything – are crippling innovation and growth across all sectors of our economy,” Hatch said.
Hatch, the longest-serving Republican in the US Senate , is far from the only Republican in Congress who is enthusiastic about patent reform. The incoming Republican chairmen of both the House and Senate Judiciary committees have signaled their support for patent legislation. And they largely see eye to eye with President Obama, who has also called for reform.
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“We must improve the quality of patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office,” Hatch said. “Low-quality patents are essential to a patent troll’s business model.” His speech was short on specifics here, but one approach he endorsed was better funding for the patent office. That, he argued, would allow “more and better-trained patent examiners, more complete libraries of prior art, and greater access to modern information technologies to address the agency’s growing needs.”
I would hate to agree with Senator Hatch on anything but there is no doubt that low-quality patents are rife at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Whether patent trolls simply took advantage of the quality of patents or are responsible for low quality patents it’s hard to say.
In any event, the call for “…more complete libraries of prior art, and greater access to modern information technologies…” sounds like a business opportunity for topic maps.
After all, we all know that faster, more comprehensive search engines of the patent literature only gives you more material to review. It doesn’t give you more relevant material to review. Or give you material you did not know to look for. Only additional semantics has the power to accomplish either of those tasks.
There are those who will keep beating bags of words in hopes that semantics will appear.
Don’t be one of those. Choose an area of patents of interest and use interactive text mining to annotate existing terms with semantics (subject identity) which will reduce misses and increase the usefulness of “hits.”
That isn’t a recipe for mining all existing patents but who wants to do that? If you gain a large enough semantic advantage in genomics, semiconductors, etc., the start-up cost to catch up will be a tough nut to crack. Particularly since you are already selling a better product for a lower price than a start-up can match.
I first saw this in a tweet by Tim O’Reilly.
PS: A better solution for software patent trolls would be a Supreme Court ruling that eliminates all software patents. Then Congress could pass a software copyright bill that grants copyright status on published code for three (3) years, non-renewable. If that sounds harsh, consider the credibility impact of nineteen year old bugs.
If code had to be recast every three years and all vendors were on the same footing, there would be a commercial incentive for better software. Yes? If I had the coding advantages of a major vendor, I would start lobbying for three (3) year software copyrights tomorrow. Besides, it would make software piracy a lot easier to track.