American Bar Association - 1 click patents

[Phillip H. Zakas]

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 struggling
with the trade-offs of filing for patents (relating to network routing
technology) vs. keeping the ideas trade secret vs. releasing a subset to the
public domain.  My attorneys have suggested filing "blocking patents" as a
defensive strategy to ensure you can continue to use your technology, in the
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 the
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 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 at Algebra.COM
[mailto:owner-cypherpunks at Algebra.COM]On Behalf Of Jim Choate
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2001 1:48 PM
To: cypherpunks at einstein.ssz.com
Subject: American Bar Association - 1 click patents



http://www.abanet.org/journal/mar01/fstate.html
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