Start at the monetary and fiscal system, whatever you do with the patent system will fall short to the financial jamming coming from the first two. "Phillip H. Zakas" <pzakas@toucancapital.com> wrote:

I've been away on business and only now started to read this thread, so sorry for the lag...

The entire patent system needs an overhaul. I've been personally

with the trade-offs of filing for patents (relating to network routing technology) vs. keeping the ideas trade secret vs. releasing a subset to

public domain. My attorneys have suggested filing "blocking patents" as a defensive strategy to ensure you can continue to use your technology, in

event a competitor comes up with the same/similar idea. The patents themselves aren't really earth-shattering, but the fact that one has to file for patents just to stay in business in case a competitor files competiting claims in the future is extrememly frustrating, because the patent is essentially a blueprint for anyone to use the technology for himself. Here are some observations i've made:

- Determining patent infrigement of technology patents is extremely difficult without obtaining the source code of a competitor's product. How on earth can one determine if one is "borrowing" your routing algorithm or your mpls variation? This is almost impossible...so where's the patent protection?

- patent protection varies across the globe. the best strategy is to file in the US, Japan and EU. but even then the levels of patent protection vary in each area, and offer no defense in countries such as India (used for many outsourced development projects.)

- I would have preferred it if i could keep an idea a trade secret and register that trade secret with the USPTO so that it would be considered prior art and thus block future patent claims already covered by my trade secret.

- Biotechnology patents are especially troubling. On the one hand one can patent a gene sequence discovered to be vaguely related to, say, breast cancer. On the other hand that gene sequence is usually derived from some volunteer's dna, but that person has no rights to the resulting value of

patent! Worse still, claims in biotech are very vague and broad simply because biotech is an emerging science. I'd bet most of you haven't heard that proteomics seems to becoming more important than genomics over the last six months...does this mean a gene sequence, including all of the proteins it interacts with, are covered by the original patent even though

struggling the the the proteomics

was unknown even two years ago??

Anyway, this subject is very irritating. As current venture capitalist (temporary until i launch my own start up) I do understand the protection patents afford investors and the catalyst patents are for attracting capital. Without capital there would be no interesting technology or biotech developments at the rate at which we've enjoyed them over the last 50 years. However even venture capitalists would prefer my "register trade secrets" model for high tech projects OVER the current patent system. I still don't know what the right answer is for biotech patents.

phillip

-----Original Message----- From: owner-cypherpunks@Algebra.COM [mailto:owner-cypherpunks@Algebra.COM]On Behalf Of Jim Choate Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2001 1:48 PM To: cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com Subject: American Bar Association - 1 click patents

http://www.abanet.org/journal/mar01/fstate.html -- The Laws of Serendipity:

1. In order to discover anything, you must be looking for something.

2. If you wish to make an improved product, you must first be engaged in making an inferior one.

Tivoli Certification Group, OSCT James Choate jchoate@tivoli.com Senior Engineer 512-436-1062

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