paten

" Try a patent search for that phrase and see how many results you get.

Apple can sue them again and again and again for patent after patent.

A patent has to be publicly available for this sole reason.

See PG's footnote: [3] Applying for a patent is now very slow, but it might actually be bad if that got fixed.

If the lawyers says his last patent applications were granted on the first submission, that's a bad sign.

The whole idea of a patent is to preserve an idea, to write down what it does and how it works for future generations.

Not by moral virtue I think, but because their patents are far too insignificant to be required by a standard.

At the moment the time it takes to get a patent is conveniently just longer than the time it takes a startup to succeed or fail.

There is no evidence that patents help innovation in any industry.

I'm still fascinated that they managed to get thorugh with this, almost like the 1-click-purchase that Amazon trying to paten.

> Seems like a brilliant solution to this problemThe law students worked on this for months for free and the paten troll got away without any fee.

There was a terrific interview on NPR with the author of the recent NYTimes article on the patent wars among tech companies large and small.

A blogpost describing how to create Shazam in Java receieved a letter from the patent holder requesting it be taken down.

As a result, the number of researchers on a particular topic decreases, especially if the patent is broad.

Motorola also had 24,500 patents in its portfolio[2].

However, there apparently is academic research in the works that shows that patents actually slow down innovation in biotech.

The patent system as become directly hostile to startup companies and to innovation generally.

But that's after Apple and Microsoft violated their obligation to contract a license for the patents, and sued Motorola over their own patents.

Don't get me wrong, I love This American Life, but a week before the more recent episode aired the State of Vermont passed a law to clamp down on patent trolls and its attorney general started suing patent trolls.

The specific example we discussed was that there is increasing evidence that when a professor or company gets a patent in the field of genetics research, other researchers simply stop doing work in that specific area.

"Unlike patents and copyrights, which in theory are granted for one-off fixed terms, trademarks remain valid as long as the owner actively uses and defends them and maintains their registrations with the competent authorities.