Bush Admin Seeks Changes to Patent System

Ordinarly, I'd be encouraged, but I think that this HAS to be some sort of sweetheart deal to a supporter.

The following quote comes from the D-Squared Digest. I consider this to be the wisest thing yet written this century.

I believe that the following should apply any Bush admin initiative.

But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
   
2. It was significant enough in scale that I'd have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
   
3. It wasn't in some important way completely Fucked Up during the execution.

So while this patent overhaul sounds like a bad thing, I think that I can wait for 18 months until adults are in charge.

Bush administration seeks overhaul of patent system | CNET News.com

By Steve Lohr

Story last modified Wed Jun 06 19:55:16 PDT 2007

The Bush administration wants to reform the nation's patent system by requiring better information from inventors and allowing public scrutiny of applications, according to the director of the government's patent office.

The goal, said Jon W. Dudas, director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, is to improve the quality of patents, which should curb the rising wave of patent disputes and lawsuits. The legal wrangling is often over broad descriptions of ideas or activities, so-called business methods, or software that contains only incremental changes over prior work.

"There ought to be a shared responsibility for patent quality among the patent office, the applicants and the public," Dudas said in an interview yesterday. "If everything is done right at the front end, we'll have to worry a lot less about litigation later."

Some steps to improve patent quality will require changes in the law, said Dudas, who will present his views to the Senate Judiciary Committee today. Both the Senate and the House have introduced patent-reform legislation this year, amid concerns that the current overburdened, litigation-choked system is hampering innovation rather than encouraging it.

One key change, Dudas said, would be a legal clarification of what is required of patent applicants. Under current law, an inventor is required to explain why a new product is sufficiently original to deserve the exclusive rights that patent protection conveys. But the applicants have a lot of discretion. The supporting information, Dudas said, ranges from "almost nothing" to what he called "malicious compliance," which he described as boxes and boxes of background information intended mainly to obscure the nugget of an invention in the patent application.

Reform legislation, he said, should require the applicants to conduct a thorough search of related patents and technical journals, and then explain why the patent being sought represents a significant innovation beyond previous ideas in the field.

Dudas said the reform legislation should also make sure the search and information disclosures do not put an unfair burden on inventors who are not wealthy. Personal income, number of patents filed and other measures, he said, could be used to determine who would be exempt from certain requirements. "For the truly small inventor, we might do the search for them," he said.

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