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Print Edition StoriesWednesday, October 7, 2009
It's time to bring some sanity to intellectual property
By James M. Connolly
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The ugly atmosphere surrounding the patent business certainly isn’t new — just think back to the 19th century and the tales of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, their various rivals, and the stories of races to the patent office, allegations of idea theft and myriad lawsuits.
More recently, patent-related activity has been marked by inventors’ fears that their ideas will be misappropriated; or that one-time friends will seek “collaborator” standing; or that patent trolls will buy up related IP, not to advance it in products but to leverage it to draw settlements (“extortion” is such an ugly word); not to mention court-shopping for an IP hanging judge in East Texas.
Heck, it’s enough to give lawyers a bad reputation.
What gets lost in all of the suits, countersuits and threats is the purpose of the patent system. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office itself says its role is “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their respective discoveries.” Maybe we’ve lost sight of that goal. Too often, patents have sparked street brawls that definitely aren’t about promoting science and are barely about protecting the rights of inventors. The new leadership at the patent office has been talking about speeding up patent-application processing and significant patent reform. Perhaps those changes, along with a few signs from judges that they want to stop the madness, will serve as first steps back to the original concept of patents, to protect (and where possible, reward) the people who do the real work of inventing and commercializing great ideas.
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