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Are We Heading for a "Subprime Patent Crisis"?

By Peter Zura

Alberto Barrionuevo, president of the anti-software-patent Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), seems to think so:

In many countries, many regulations (financial controls) were removed and so the market was finally flooded by what any common person would denominate "fake money". The same fake money as the one created with a fake notes machine, out just that much more complex and nicely sold.

But equally, and curiously roughly matching in dates, it has happened in the patent system during the last ten to fifteen years mainly. The regulations have been raised time ago. To get a patent has become almost for free. No innovation effort is almost needed. No innovative step almost. No disclosing of technical knowledge is needed. No invention "as such" is needed, using the patent jargon words. Artificial complexity of the system has reached levels where only the experts bureaucrats working on it understand it. The innovation of the bureaucracy reigns. Real inventors, formerly experienced and brightly engineers, have been replaced by patent technocrats and patent trolls. Those same patent technocrats who indeed decide, with little or no political implication, the patent policy of some of the biggest economical sectors of the
world.

The result of this is a patent inflation. The most important patent offices of the world (mainly the namely "Trilateral") have granted surely some millions of subprime patents? that at the end mean fake assets and fake money. Many of these patents are fake because imprecise, too wide and/or non inventive, but many others are fake because are just out of the limits of the patentability. Their subject matter never should have constituted an "invention", but they were granted. "Obvious" is a word who lost it sense time ago.

[S]o, Great Patent Sirs, just continue enjoying today the patent pollution party.

But remember that the hangover will come soon or later and the crisis will reach all the technology market but specially the patent establishment.

In Spanish we have an old saying for this: "A todo cerdo le llega su San
Martín".

Read Barrionuevo's post on Digital Majority here.

Full post as published by Two-Seventy-One Patent Blog on August 18, 2008 (boomark / email).