| The main problem is not that patents exist. Especially in the distant past, there have been many patents that were really valuable and their inventors deserved to be rewarded. The main problem is that today patents are granted far too easily. Most patents contain in their claims only things that any competent professional could discover independently after a few hours of thinking about how to solve a problem. Other claims are for methods that have been known for a long time, but they were not applied for various reasons, e.g. of cost or efficiency, to the applications described in the patent. Then some unrelated technological progress happened, which may not be mentioned at all in the patent, which suddenly enabled the extension of the application domain of the old method, and then someone quickly filed a patent for the new combination of old methods. Other claims are far too general and cover all the ways that everyone could list about how to solve a problem, even if most of them are not practical at present and the inventor would not be able to demonstrate any functional implementation, but they are inserted in the patent claims for the case that someone will discover in the future a suitable technology, when it will become possible to claim that it infringes the patent. Many patents are just reformulations of much older patents, from decades ago, perhaps filed in other countries, but they use such an obfuscated language that it is difficult to determine that in fact the different patents claim the same things. I have read many patents, but the most recent they are, the less likely it is to find in them anything that I consider innovative or that would justify in any way to consider the patent as valid. Nevertheless, few individuals or companies would be able to bear the expenses and risks of trying to invalidate patents, so there are many examples when inferior technologies have been used for decades in order to circumvent bogus patents. Moreover, the days when most patent owners used the patents as a direct source of revenue are long in the past. Today few patent owners are willing to license them at fair and non-discriminatory prices. Most use the patents only as a means to prevent competition. |
Currently in the US, for better or worse, actual scrutiny happens when you try to claim infringement, not at application.
>Other claims are far too general and cover all the ways that everyone could list about how to solve a problem,
This is covered by the non-obvious clause.
>Today few patent owners are willing to license them at fair and non-discriminatory prices.
Plain wrong.