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| Authored by: Wol on Tuesday, September 04 2012 @ 05:56 PM EDT |
It is a major fault in the US system that it makes no attempt whatsoever to make
innocent victims of false accusations whole. Fix that, and a lot of the problems
with the American system would go away.
And no, design patents are NOT "watered down standard patents". They
are (in intent) a *completely* different beast. A standard patent is intended to
protect new functionality. A design patent, inasmuch as it protects
functionality, is *invalid*.
A design patent is meant to protect the "look and feel" of a device,
and is part of trademark - intended to protect the customer from being defrauded
and sold something that wasn't what they wanted (and intended to protect
manufacturers from having their reputations ruined by fake products).
The word "patent" comes from "letters patent" - a grant of
monopoly - so both uses of the word are perfectly valid historically.
imho, together with my above fix of making victims whole, I think merely
*requiring* that patents *must* be re-examined between filing suit and the case
proceeding, with the re-exam concentrating on "is the patent correctly
submitted, ie does it describe a genuine invention sufficient to enable the
mythical POSITA to reproduce it" would do an awful lot towards getting rid
of much of the problems.
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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