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Ralph Nader, Patent Buster
America's consumer watchdog has a bone to pick with the US Trade Representative. The USTR is lobbying foreign countries to adopt America's liberal approach to issuing patents and to honor US patents granted for business methods, such as Amazon's 1-Click ordering. Backed by his advocacy group, the Consumer Project on Technology (www.cptech.org), Nader argues that exporting a flawed policy is a mistake. We caught up with him in Washington to find out why he believes US patent evangelism is a problem.
WIRED: What's wrong with pushing US patent policy overseas?
NADER: The United States spends more than $1 billion annually to examine patents. Despite this expenditure, the Patent Office has become a glorified diploma mill, routinely granting rights that should never have been issued. The patents wouldn't stand up in court, but they're expensive to litigate. So why are we forcing developing countries to follow our lead when we don't do a good job ourselves?
The system must be working for someone. Who benefits?
The system protects two groups: software companies with weak products who use patents to harass competitors, and patent lawyers. The ease of getting patents makes it economically attractive to abuse the system in a number of unpleasant ways. People obtain patents and then ask businesses to pay licensing fees that are cheaper than the cost of mounting a legal defense. Also, firms are wary of investing in new products for fear they will be ambushed by an infringement claim that may or may not be valid but will cost millions in legal fees.
Limiting software patents might prevent abuses, but wouldn't that also limit the ability of genius inventors to profit from their own code?
Name one genius inventor who has gotten rich from a software patent. There must be some, but the system mostly benefits a handful of businesspeople and lawyers who don't write code. Look at British Telecom. It took years before BT's patent lawyers "discovered" the company had invented hypertext linking. Now General Electric claims it invented the JPEG file format. If GE is so smart, why did it take so many years to figure out it invented such a popular technology? Which genius inventors get rich on such claims?
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