The professor obviously cannot create value but does desire to invent a way to steal the fruits of someone else's value creation...that's why I call creatures like those....parasitical humanoids.
(humanoid, because they are nothing more than a retarded brain in a worthless body with no mind or conscience).

Hate to say it, folks, but a large proportion of patents dealing with software are actually the tools and weapons of looters.

In the software industry, patents allow anyone to become a tax-man. Even the simplest and most obvious ideas - the kind that everyone invents in their mind as a matter of course even in a single day's programming work, can be patented.

This means that it has become infeasible to perform a search of the patent registry for every idea one uses in a day's work. Even in just that 8-12 hours, you will infringe on at least a couple of hundred of vaguely-written patents, maybe thousands.

If attacked by a patent troll, you can agree to pay their unearned "tax" of thousands or millions of dollars, and/or a percentage of your own business revenues. Or you can spend thousands or millions to take them to court and try to get the patent invalidated as being not a true invention.

As a follow up...I did email the professor and he explained that while he agreed that we should not give up patents, the system, itself was in dire need of repair. With that, I could agree with him, but I told him that mentioning John Lennon's song about a Socialist Utopia was probably not the best way to begin the conversation.

He has a real point. Today the world is filled with "patent trolls" who simply file on just about anything with no intention of actually commercializing what they patent. They just lie in wait and pounce on whoever actually commercializes the idea (and the other person may have independently thought of it) in an attempt to milk them of whatever they can.

I think that if you think of something you should be able to commercialize that without fear of being sued by some patent troll. Otherwise, the patent trolls provide no benefit to society and actually retard inventors from bringing things to market.

I have seen paptents from a large tech company and it is getting really weird. If you take a trasistor, and change the angle of the part that serves as collector, then they patent it, and sometimes trademark it to boot, then they amass a huge number of patents. I have seen engineers with dozens of patents to their name, and none of them were huge breakthroughs. The definition of patent has warped over the last 40 year as "IP" becomes a commodity. Even copyright and paptent seem to have merged, the STar Trek Axanar thing showed that pretty convincingly when CBS sued for anything related to Trek as used and violating their "copyright", "trademark" or "IP".

the purpose of patents is beneficial for the government. I have been issued 4 and after the first one ended still no company came along to copy me. So I stopped paying the service fee to the government for the other 3 and still no copiers. in this day and age so much is NOT made in the USA a product can be copied in asia and when you find out its to late and the cost of a law suit is exorbitant. I recommend that one make their product and say nothing and just sell it.

Technically a patent is not insurance that can deny another party the right to develop a similar idea. In strict terms, only the party who brings the idea to concrete concept (a prototype) has solid grounds for challenge. Companies that cave to the trolls don't have a very good legal staff in my opinion. One of my friends had developed the concept of a metal plate form of heat shield for reentry and patented it. Lockheed later developed a prototype of the same kind of plate, and attempted to file a patent. When my friend challenged Lockheed in court, the judge simply said, "I recognize you filed the paperwork earlier, but where's your prototype?"

Johanna Blakely on TED Talks explains why the fashion industry eclipses all other protected sectors combined.
https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_bla...

We can all agree that intellectual property is valuable. The best means and methods of protecting it are not so well defined.

US Patent and Copyright laws have changed substantially since the Constitution was drafted. For many decades you could not get a patent without an actual working model.

It used to be - contrary to myth - that the rights belonged to the first inventor.. A few years ago, the US joined the rest of the world and now give rights to the first to file..

The basic theory of the patent is to provide "public benefit" to your idea: you have to publish what it is and how it works. In return, the patent gives you the right to sue anyone who infringes. You could just keep your ideas and methods secret. That works well for Coca-Cola. Note, therefore, that it is not the intended purpose of patents to protect your intellectual property. We can all agree that it should be but it is not. Therein is the fundamental philosophical flaw in the system.

The professor's points are cogent and considerable. You might not agree with the over-arching conclusion but the facts in evidence are real.

Why bother to create if there's no reward?Without patents the inventor could remain dirt poor, so why bother? So too with copyrights, Inventing may not be the single motivation for making money, but without it, there's not much reason to care.

Patents are NOW a problem. I agree with the concepts. But the implementation, and usage are insane.
IBM gets a LARGE portion of its money from its Patent book. Often times on OBVIOUS solutions.

Patents are supposed to be non-obvious. When Apple got these 2 patents, I died a little:
1) Slide to open (Available on bathroom stalls since I was a kid, and in Castles eons ago)
2) Rounded Corners on the glass (reduces fracturing, and less risk of injury: Available on glass tables for years)

Form and Material changes DO NOT get you a new patent, if the concept does not change.
One company was DENIED a patent whereby carbon and styrofoam are poured first into a mold. Then when
Molten Aluminum is added, their are no air gaps, and the carbon ends up strengthening the Aluminum, and
making it lighter.

The other side quoted the Bible: Add straw to the mud, and cook it. The straw will get cooked away, and the
resulting brick will be stronger and lighter.

The Judge bought it. Patent Denied.

==
The pace of implementation and turnaround has changed. 17 years used to be 1/2 of a lifetime.
Maybe we reduce it to 5-10yrs.
==

The other downside with Patents is that countries like China can literally look them up and use them. Good luck suing them in Chinese courts.

Finally, our government has been known to block some patents and either make them top secret, or make them public.

You can determine for yourself what would happen if you tried to patent making a small nuke based on common materials! I am thinking they wont give you the patent, and they might arrest you for demonstrating it!

The man may know patents, but John Lennen ultimately said he regretted writing "Imagine". He became fond of Reagan, and came to see things differently when he moved to NYC, not quite as spacey as he grew older.
I thought Clinton did all get could to give all patents to China. Some companies stopped registering for patents, and beefed up security, instead of laying their designs where they had to be shared.

The professor did mention the patent lawyers and Trolls who make considerable more money from the patent process than the inventors do. Then towards the end of the article he talks about China's weak Patent system; hell they steal and use industrial espionage to leap frog ahead of the US. There is really no protection by the US govt. I almost believe that there're trolls in the Patent Office that steal from inventors. Part of the problem that the gov't makes it too time consuming and expensive. My brother came up with a cargo stripping for ocean going oil tankers, I urge him to patent it and he said it was to expensive to patent it because of the cost of an atty and filing fee's.

Recommend that Texas anti-patent professor to move to Venezuela.

Other factors for an inventor are not only the application and other fees, there are patent lawyer fees, and ongoing patent renewal fees to keep the invention protected up to 20 years. Then you need marketing skills and other finances in order to get your product out there. There a tons of companies that will charge you money to simply send copies of your patent to other companies that might be interested in it, usually a total waste in my opinion. Some of those companies might show interest in your idea mostly in order to develop a similar product with enough changes to get their own patent, just pick your brain, and/or just build something that does the same thing with enough different attributes to make it differ enough from your patent, again more attorney fees, usually to no avail. Unless you have a world winning idea that you can afford to follow up on all the processes and legal loopholes, just go ahead and make them or have them made and flood the market as fast as you can. Flooding the market with a stolen idea or a patented device is another scheme with no consequences until they are court ordered to stop, and that is only if you can afford a lawyer bigger and more powerful than theirs. I can attest to all these facts. I've been there, done that. Yes I caved to the trolls, but should have never even tried especially as a simple individual. By having them locally made even at high expense, I was able to sell a few hundred locally at exorbitant prices, and maybe even made a few dollars, but not worth the time and effort. Several who bought them came back for another just to give to a good woodworker friend, or bought themselves another just to have two.

I was told many years ago by a patent attorney that if I apply for a patent, I will have to publish how I am doing it along with drawings, etc. All anyone has to do is modify my concept slightly and they can market my product as their product. His recommendation was to sell as many as I could as fast as I can. I do have Trademarks, which do provide some interesting protection. But even that is vage and not worth much unless you like to pay lawyers.

Fairness is not the issue. It's first past the post, and you lost.

The society that protects inventors with patents loses less from /actual/ re-inventors not doing adequate research before investing their efforts than by allowing /fraudulent/ re-inventors to climb onto someone else's gravy train.

Great TED Talk video about the Fashion industries lack of patents and copyrights.
https://youtu.be/zL2FOrx41N0

Below are completely original lyrics written by me dino, the inventor of the internet. Flake off, Al Bore.

Imagine~by His Excellency Dino Allosaurus, Esquire

Imagine no laws against stealing.
The streets will be road warrior reeling.
Imagine no possessions.
I wonder if you can.
You may say I'm a looter,
But I'm not the only one.
I hope some day you'll join us
For lots and lots of wicked looting fun.
And the world will be at one--for the taking.

I think his objection is misplaced. Patents last about the right length of time (20 years) to reward innovation without becoming a hindrance to follow-on innovation.

It's copyright (thanks to Hollywood) which goes way beyond that point of balance and perpetuates rent-seeking monopolies.

I would reform copyright by reducing it, after the first five years, to only a right to collect a standard royalty (similar to the "automated mechanical licenses" that already exist in music publishing) so that an author can no longer veto follow-on creators using his material. I would also let the user pay that royalty to the patent office, thus solving the orphan works problem.

I would also eliminate software patents and make them use copyright. Because in software as in music, after 3-5 years the amount of follow-on creation that IP stifles is much greater than the creation it protects.