In his latest enewsletter, industry pundit Jim Pinto quotes a letter from an old friend, George H. Morgan, who is a patent agent. That is, he is a non-attorney who is approved by the patent office to help inventors file patents.
George writes:
“Many people like to ignore the reality that intellectual property really is property, the same as real estate, in many ways.
“Often the independent inventor cannot develop his creation, so licenses it, or sells it to someone who can. It is how he gets paid for his efforts.
“If he owned a patch of raw land, he could leave it undeveloped, and no one would object, except maybe the city that wanted to take it by eminent domain (illegally) for commercial development purposes. But, he would still get some compensation for it. Or, he could sell it to a developer who could make something of it.
“Intellectual property works the same way. When big companies get caught with their hand in someone else’s pocket, they scream ‘Patent Trolls’. The reason companies buy patents is because their legal experts believes the patents are good and represent valuable property.
“The true test of a patent’s validity is how it stands up in court. The definitive court is the Circuit Court of Patent Appeals that has the final say, before the Supreme Court gets it.
“People screaming ‘Patent Trolls’ are trying to fog up the issue of property rights. They claim the patents are not valid & shouldn’t have been issued. Well, all they have to do is show the prior art that invalidates it.
“For the independent inventor, it is a major ‘make or break’ issue. The major corporations have tried for many years to weaken patent protection for independent inventors, which is why they rally to fight such attempts.”
All well and good, George, and an excellent statement of how the system is supposed to work, and why.
But the system is broken. If you look at the celebrated cases of patent trolling, the Lemelson Patents, the Solaia Patents, and the RIM Patents among many, you can see that there are some holes in your argument.
The purpose of a patent is to protect the inventor and permit him to profit from the manufacture of his invention— not to permit a lawyer who does no manufacturing to profit from the invention of others, that might be construed as conflicting with a patent that has not been properly examined.
Software patents, even the patent office acknowledges, were issued in the 1980s and 1990s that should never have been granted, because the examiners didn’t understand them.
Inventors need to be protected, but the way to do it is not by giving credence, aid and comfort to trolls who don’t WANT to go to court, but whose preferred technique is to blackmail endusers of products into paying “hush money.”
Why is this not extortion, George? Just because a lawyer says it isn’t?
And I disagree with you, and have disagreed with you over this point for years: the true test of a patent is in the examination conducted by the patent office. If the true test of the validity of a patent is in the courts, why have a patent office at all?
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