> "The result is a flood of low-quality, vaguely worded patents that act as a tax on innovation."
All true, but this doesn't quite hit the core of the issue. Taxes are predictable and feel somewhat legitimate. What actually happens with patents, has the subjective feel of criminal activity. When I hear about someone in our industry being litigated by a patent troll, it's like hearing about someone in our community being mugged. Regardless of all the technical legalities, it feels like being exposed criminal activity. And it does, in fact, have many of the properties of a criminal shakedown: attackers operating in the shadows, a small probability of large loss, targets selected based on strength.
We have a government agency overtly support something that is, on the emotional level, a form of banditry. This is seriously undermining the US government's perceived legitimacy.
The tactics are basically identical to those of mobs doing protection rackets. That's true whether it's a small "patent troll" or a large company with tens of thousand of software patents doing the same against competitors.
I was curious, so I briefly looked at job listings on usajobs (the govt job site), and rough descriptions of the organization of patent examiners.
They are divided by disciplines, most or all of which require 4 year degrees and some experience in the discipline. "Software" would fall under electrical engineering, there is no specific computer science discipline, I imagine in part because there are no software patents, only "on a computer" patents.
I also noted that they append "I.T." to their jobs that would seem to have a focus on software.
The thing that mostly struck me is that these are four year technical/science degree requirements, and these people are the first line of anything you might call "defense" against aggressive patent lawyers. Yes, a patent is touched by more than one kind of person in the PTO, including lawyers, but it doesn't sound very adversarial to me.
All true, but this doesn't quite hit the core of the issue. Taxes are predictable and feel somewhat legitimate. What actually happens with patents, has the subjective feel of criminal activity. When I hear about someone in our industry being litigated by a patent troll, it's like hearing about someone in our community being mugged. Regardless of all the technical legalities, it feels like being exposed criminal activity. And it does, in fact, have many of the properties of a criminal shakedown: attackers operating in the shadows, a small probability of large loss, targets selected based on strength.
We have a government agency overtly support something that is, on the emotional level, a form of banditry. This is seriously undermining the US government's perceived legitimacy.