Facebook founder Eduardo Saverin has decided to renounce his US citizenship. A bunch of self righteous politicians are going to complain that Eduardo has a duty to stay in the US and that he is being unpatriotic by leaving. These same politicians ignore the Constitution, regularly trample the Bill of Rights, and tell us that people don’t create things, society does. These politicians are immoral hypocrites. By the way the IRS will be demanding that Mr. Saverin pay an exit tax that could amount to millions of dollars – only a cynically corrupt government would have an exit tax for it citizens.
Many people have speculated that Saverin is making this
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There has been a lot of talk about an explosion in the number of patents that were issued in the last decade. But the number of patents issued to US inventors has grown at about 1.6% per year as shown in the chart below. The chart shows the three year moving average of the number of patents issued to US inventors and 1.6% trendline.
This next chart shows that while the number of applications has grown, the number of issued patents has not kept up. (US inventors only)
Below in no particular order are some of the foundational rules of patent law. No attempt is made to prove these rules, but most should be familiar to patent attorneys. If you disagree or are looking for an explanation feel free to comment below and I will respond. In many cases I have already written a post related to the foundational rules. For my analysis of the Foundation of 35 USC 103 see 5th Anniversary of KSR: Is Section 103 is Unconstitutional?
*Patents are a Constitutional Right
*Patents and Copyrights are the only right mention in the Constitution
*Patents are a Natural Right
*Patents are a Property Right – the basis of all property rights is creation/production and the same is true of patents.
*Trade Secrets
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Perhaps the UN didn’t get the message, however you would expect with all those brilliant climate scientists they would have – you can’t build a perpetual motion machine. According to Fox News the UN has put out a report on how it is going to create a “sustainable” economy by spending trillions of your dollars. A sustainable economy is one in which resources are infinitely reusable and there is no adverse byproducts. It appears that the brilliant or perhaps mad scientists at the UN didn’t take thermodynamics, or they missed the lecture on entropy. Entropy explains why you cannot build a perpetual motion machine. It explains that every process results at least in waste heat, which means any
The SmartGene v. Advanced Biological Laboratories case is the first fallout from the Supreme Court’s Prometheus decision. Advanced Biological Laboratories (ABL) owns two patents (6,081,786 6,188,988) directed to computerized methods of guiding the selection of therapeutic treatment regimens, particularly for HIV. The patents explain that the new treatment options coming on line, the complex nature of the disease and how patients react to the disease and the use of multiple different treatments that can cause complex drug interactions results in the need for computerized system to help doctors treat their patients. The background section points to academic papers and patents directed to expert systems on this problem. So clearly other people felt there was a need for such a system.
The claims are directed to three expert systems on a computer and inputting data about the
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Twitter posted their Innovators Patent Agreement (IPA) https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement/blob/master/innovators-patent-agreement.md with much ballyhoo yesterday. Despite the claim that Twitter will only assert patents defensively, part 2(b) of the IPA allows Twitter to assert patents against anyone who has asserted their patents. This will only exclude a very few companies, mainly startups. Twitter’s stated goal is to promote innovation, but the real result if Twitter is successful will be that companies will rely on Trade Secrets. Trade secrets decrease innovation, because the information is not shared. Inventors cannot build on the work of previous inventors and they are more likely to waste resources rediscovering other people’s work (reinventing the wheel). History clearly shows that when a country relies on trade secrets instead of patents, innovation
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Mark Cuban has been famous for criticizing intellectual property and particularly patents. According to IPBiz he stated on his blog that,
Pick any country that is currently doing well, China is a perfect example. In China the Intellectual Property Laws are so weak that someone thought it was a good idea to completely replicate Apple retail stores. Compare their economy to ours. As much as I hate to compare other economies to ours, it’s worth taking a look .
He has also criticized companies that enforce their patent rights. But now Cuban has bought into a company, Vringo, that acquired Lycos’ patent portfolio and is now
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Just because you can obtain a patent for your invention does not mean that you should file for a patent. So how do you determine whether it makes business sense to file a patent application on your invention? The goal of filing a patent application is to create a barrier to entry. There are many ways to create a barrier to entry in business. For instance, a company’s customer list can give you an advantage over potential competitors since they will not know who the key people are in the industry. Another barrier to entry might be your location if you are a retail store. A gas station on at a busy intersection with easy access has an advantage over competitors that cannot be at the same busy location. Trademarks may also provide a barrier to entry.
The USA now has the highest corporate tax rate in the World. The sad point is when you add in State corporate taxes, the US was already had the highest corporate tax rate in the World. This will hurt the US’s innovation, fewer people will invest in startups and fewer people will invest in new technologies.
The Marxists in the Administration will argue that this has no effect on whether companies invest in the US, or hire employees here, or whether people decide to start businesses in the US. Of course, they have absolutely no evidence to back up their assertion. In fact, all the evidence is against them. But they will argue that we have to “invest” in our future. This comes from an administration that believes
CONSUMPTION CREATES WEALTH.
No this is not a joke, but exactly (see Food
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In an article entitled “Could Morse Have Patented the Web? Under today’s loose standards, the telegraph inventor might own the Internet” , dated March 26, 2012, the Wall Street Journal demonstrates their incredible ignorance of patent law. The article states, “The standards for patents are so low that simply having an idea often justifies a patent.” Obtaining a patent takes at least several years to obtain and tens of thousands of dollars. It is the most expensive, time consuming, and most examined property right before you obtain title of all property rights. In addition, when Morse obtained his patent the requirement that a patent
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