Patents, Novelty, and Trolls: Crash Course Intellectual Property #4 

Felt the same ✌️ crash course 😍

jchobbit Wait, if Stan's in front of them camera, who's directing?????

TheJaredtheJaredlong Mark

Lord Spoice Who the eff is Mark?

TheJaredtheJaredlong He is a camera worker

+jchobbit Yep. I'm a Stan Fan, too.

Literature does not provide any service or improve anyone's life. Technology especially medical does and should be made as short as possible.

SangoProductions21 with the speed technology advances now-a-days 25 years might as well be 100. i find such broad legislation to be pretty poor since it does not take into account the speed in witch new technologies in certain areas are developed, nor does it protect the people who NEED the said invention to live, like new types of drugs that could potentially save THOUSANDS of people who would already NOT be able to acquire said drugs anyway so should not be considered has the pharmacological industries loosing profit (what profit do they loose if the people being treated would NOT buy their medication anyway?)

***** yes. I know how long it was originally. It still doesn't make 20 years seem unreasonable.

SangoProductions21 I don't think the author's life should come into it at all. A fixed amount of time would be much easier to deal with. You see something say (c) 2010, you'd immediately be able to work out when you could do what you like with it without having to look up how old the author was when it was made and guess at how much longer they can be expected to live.

***** exactly

Michael Feigin I also want to mention ... utility patents used to be 17 years from the date of issue but people would 'game' the system and make what was called "submarine patents." They wouldn't be published and they would just file continuation after continuation and amend the claims ... then when the market was right (which could be 20+ years after filing) they'd get the patent issued and go after everyone ... or, they'd have one patent issue and file continuations with more patents forever. There are still patents stemming from pre-1995 when the law was changed. A guy who invented a semi-conductor in the 1970s tried to argue in 2014 (coincidentally when his prior patents expired) that the patent office never responding to one of his continuing patents and so it was still valid and should now be issued would would allow him yet another 17 year term to sue everyone making a semiconductor. In theory, that would have worked. For some reason, when the law was changed from '17 years from date of issue' to '20 years from date of filing' (with patent term extension for undue delays on the part of the patent office which would cause you to get less than the 17 year effective term), they did not change the law for design patents. My guess is it was just forgotten or not really an issue since design patents are so much narrower and examined faster, but you could theoretically still game the system to get longer term for a design patent. ... If you need a guest speaker, I've got some videos on my website as samples ... for a patent attorney, I'm charismatic. :)

Michael Feigin pretty sweet stuff! I'll check it out for sure

Michael Feigin ohhh talk patent to me:)

Heidi JB :)

SchiferlED We should copyright your idea! and also patent design it.

Or he needs a patent for a machine for putting the icing on a cake so he could earn more money than he did in the crash course economics video.

MaskinJunior how would you improve it? the alternatives is all innovations are kept secret if they want to make a profit

psrdirector In this day and age that may be better, because now I cant use a bright idea I came up with just because someone else has pattend it when he came up with it years ago. And there is no good way of researching pattented solutions to make them useful. There are simply put too many innovations it is hard to keep track of them all, so pattents are now an obstacle beccause you need to avoid them.

well then your bright idea not to bright or orginal. if its a good idea, license it from the person with the patent or wait for it to expire. or think of a new better solution

psrdirector I think it is brilliant. It costs a few dollars, and saves us a shift of machining, which in turn makes one of the machines in our machine-shop obsolete so we can replace it with one more modern. (We need to have it for this only operation, and it is the only machine that can do that because it is old and don't have all those safety features newer machines has. But as I said in the earlier post. It is expensive to pattern, impossible to notice if someone is infringing on the pattern so we just keep it secret and hope someone else don't pattern it and find a way to notice we are doing it.

from that vauge description doesnt even sound patentable

orayole Yeah. If you can make money off it, you should be able to do it within ten years. If you can't manage that, you're obviously not trying.

***** Exactly. Even 10 is a bit long. A 5 year monopoly is a pretty long time for many things. Especially medicine.

orayole Also true. Though, it might be a bit hard to sell anything shorter than ten years to those who like the idea of a patent.

orayole Split the difference, let's say 12 years plus 5% of profits from those that use your patent for the next 6 years after. Something like that might have a better chance of getting passed without big companies lobbying to strike it down.

Braden Smith Show the new combination And its Result being An New combination Of Two Innovations in to A new Invention, Provitional Patent it And Do "Constructive Reduction To Practice "plus Actual "Reduction to practice"

Elliot Jenner Agreed. It's this obtuse-ness that allows patent trolls to thrive.

Elliot Jenner That's mostly a failing of the Patent Office. Filed Patents, in order to be approved, are supposed to contain clear steps on how to reproduce the innovation, as Stan said, both for public benefit and to prevent them from being overly broad. If the patent clearly spells out what it is, then what it isn't is just as clearly obvious. The US Patent Office, however, has been pretty terrible in enforcing that requirement. They cite under-funding and under-staffing as the main reason vague or overly broad patents have been issued. Filers, on the other hand, always file for the vaguest patent they think they can get away with and still get approved, helping them not only defend their patent, but also pick up the bonus benefit that the vagueness may get them ownership of other people's ideas as well at a later date.

Erik Olsen For someone skilled in the art that the patent pertains to. What patents I've seen relating to skills I have have been understandable just fine.

Erik Olsen patents have gotten much more bloated with information in the specification (specs) due to chaotic rulings from the courts. The more the courts read the claims in view of the specs, the more incentive there is to stuff the specs full of different embodiments of the invention. It makes examination "easier" because the prior art is more comprehensive, but the USPTO rules for novelty rejections now take into consideration whether or not one must "pick and choose" to make the rejection.

Diana Peña Is the subject an living being that is being patented? Then there is a patent on life.

DoggySpew I think you are missing the point. Any of the plant patents aren't grown from natural seeds and are produced only by man asexually. It is organic but it isn't something that can just happen without human intervention. So, no, it isn't a patent on life.

I wonder if we'll have patented breeds of human clones in the future. That would be so cool, in a dystopian cyberpunk future kind of way.

***** well those dogs coulds certainly not last long in nature without human intervention and some have been "man made" so to say..... *runs to the patents office*

Shivam Rawat : Sudden death- poisoning

Justin Callahan get it Patent Pending Status!

Amun Atum :Yes Indeed We Need Free Stuff!

TheFireflyGrave I don't think so, ClashCourse doesn't go into that many details, that's something you gotta find out for yourself if you want to know it (not trying to be mean though).

bluewales73 That would fall under 'trade secret' laws. The protections only really kick in when the source of someone else's work can be traced back to the secret holder. Independent discovery is not prohibited.

bluewales73 I believe that's called a 'trade secret' and the legal protection associated with it is that you have to actively protect the secret. In other words, if you go around telling your friends about your secret, than it's no longer secret, and you have no protection. You can't apply for a patent, either, because a patent requires full disclosure of the information. If, however, you have tight security on the secret and only tell those who have a need to know and have those people sign NDAs, then you may have legal grounds to go after a spy who manages to get a hold of the secret. That's probably not a perfect explanation, but I think that's the idea. I don't think trade secrets, by their nature, have very extensive protection beyond the security a company places around them. For reference, an example of a trade secret would be Coca-Cola's recipe.

Kilgore Trout That isn't true. While some ground level research is often completed in the public sector, there are still large hurdles that require large companies to surpass. Take intel processors for example, they often work with some basic levels of physics, but that isn't the same as claiming that the public sector has developed a way to make consistently performing 14nm chips. In the case that it was something public like that, why on earth couldn't AMD also complete this task? For another example in the pharmaceutical industry, lets pretend there's a theoretical drug that treats blood pressure. Lets idealize it (already there are almost no drugs directly produced by the public sector) and say that it requires no further development and the manufacturing process is efficient and easily scale-able. Even then a pharmaceutical company would require up to 10 years of clinical trials, and then years of marketing, in hopes that it even turns a profit. This process alone costs tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Not only is this never the case (often it also requires hundreds of millions to develop from a base level research), the public sector lacks the ability to make these a reality anyway. This isn't to say that a lot of innovation, especially for pharmeceuticals, doesn't come from the public sector in the form of universities, but in terms of the way academia alone is set up, the public sector could not fully develop a drug.

lockdown58 Take the Intel example. Anything from the transistor to the integrated circuits, to the major components of a microprocessor design such as ALUs, caches and control units, to the physical processes used to make the chip such of photolitography, chemical vapor deposition, EVERYTHING came from the public sector. The 14nm process is just an engineering problem of how to make it cheap enough, nothing truly innovative there. Single molecule transistors have already been demonstrated in fundamental research labs,

Kilgore Trout That isn't true. There's literally no other production of 14nm chips on the planet, public or private. If there were, intel wouldn't be crushing every other company consistently in terms of performance. While individual groundwork can be completed by the public sector, it's simply false to imply that this means that the whole patent came from the public sector. The relationship for the most part between public and private, is that public sector kinda gets to dick around trying various cool different things and pushing the field forward. The private sector then takes these discoveries, develops them much further with more depth, and makes them into a usable product. There is no case in which a public division creates something, and it's simply patented by the private sector. Were that the case, the public sector would patent things as they once did as was the case with public seeds or different inventions. The fact of the matter is, that current academic setting does not provide the funding or incentive to develop ideas into consumer products in any capacity. TL;DR Even if different sections of public research developed some pieces of technology, it's a lack of understanding to imply that they completely created the product that is then patented.

lockdown58 Drugs that cost less than a dollar to manufacture per dose should never cost several hundred dollars per dose. Plain and simple. That's the problem with Big Pharma- the executives that run the business are more concerned about lining their pockets than about saving lives.

***** The manufacture process is never the whole story though. It also requires years of clinical trials employing very expensive professionals and running a very specialized, expensive, small scale manufacturing run of the drug in question. It's nice to say "medical advancements should be sold at cost," but it takes at least 10 years from start to finish. Even if the company is just 10 people at minimum wage working a standard 40 hour week, that's still 2 million dollars that has to be recuperated someway. That's a hyper idealistic scenario, it would never work with only 10 people at minimum wage, it would be professionals that make 6 figure salaries (which they likely deserve as they attend a post secondary education in an extremely competitive environment for upwards of 7 years). Even if after all that the drug cost pennies to manufacture (which is incredibly rare), if they sold it so their net profit was only a dollar, they then need to sell 2 million doses just to break even on their development. This doesn't count the cost of advertising, reagent costs, costs of clinical trials or legal fees associated with filing for approval. While that may be reasonable for the very few large drugs that are used broadly that you often see on TV. Those likely could work with this model because they have a wide enough base to take millions if not billions of doses a year. But at that point what about those who have ALS, a fringe cancer, or some other less common disease? What about those? Even at the same margin, even at 20x the margin, that never makes sense from a business standpoint. It also doesn't make sense from a societal standpoint, if we funnel extra money into helping this smaller population, you deprivate others indirectly by preventing the company from then developing more drugs to help others. While in theory yes, drugs shouldn't be sold for much over cost, it doesn't make economic, social, or logical sense if you consider everything involved. Now if we really wanted to fix this, we would develop a public pharmaceutical company that is funded with taxes and then can just develop medications which other companies can then manufacture for this theoretical small profit. The current system doesn't do this though, as grants often will not fund a public project enough to complete the long and expensive process.

In the broad sense, almost *every* trade is an "art". Mechanics, Chemistry, writing, landscaping, acting - all *arts* (Fun fact, if you record a third-grade play on your phone, you are violating copyright for the play, the set dressers, the composer of any music, the musicians playing it, the costumers, and the individual performances [by commission] of each and every actor including your own little Jimmy playing the tree in the back.) Think of *copyright* as "performances and records thereof" and *patents* as "lists of instructions for building and operating tools". You can thank Disney for super-long copyright times. When that mouse finally goes Public Domain, they are going to take a real hit in the merchandising. Personally, I think a period of "lifetime + 20 years" is plenty. It covers the author and any potential widows and orphans if the author dies young. Longer than that skews to corporate interests.

A patent focuses on the design aspects of the product, and how the inventor came to that conclusion. Copyright focuses on the manner in which ideas and opinions are expressed. The defining feature is if the product is a "manner of manufacture" or has some useful utility. In the eye of the law art, historically lacked this element.

AntiMessiah Most large companies, or those that work with overseas companies, file their patent in multiple countries at the same time, to prevent anyone else from patenting their idea in another country. To do this, they have a massive amount of due diligence to do, checking to see if it has been patented somewhere else. But, technically US patents only work in the US. direct quote from Legal Zoom (www.legalzoom.com/articles/does-your-us-patent-trademark-or-copyright-protect-you-overseas): "There is no "international patent" that will protect an invention all over the world. A separate patent must be filed in each country where the patent owner seeks protection. Fortunately, WIPO offers a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) application, which simplifies the application process and allows one application to be filed for patent protection in multiple countries. Patent fees and requirements differ significantly by country, so it is advisable to consult a registered patent attorney who is familiar with the intellectual property laws of the specific countries where a patent is sought."

Kathryn Davidson Just as there's the Berne Convention for copyright, there's the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property for patents, however.

Kathryn Davidson Thank You.

Horst Wrabetz and yellow

the device could be patented.

***** well if you take into account people have patented emoticons and numbers these days. One could say the patents system is pretty broken right now.

***** No, it's a bit of a media fuzz. There are solid arguments that Apples patents are too broad, but they don't own the concept of the rounded corner except for some extremely specific corner roundings in some extreme specific contexts. Again, still arguably disgusting that such a thing is even possible, but Apple can't sue brick-house makers.

Percetion Of Ownersship

if you watch his interview on Vice (The news site) my god... That dude (Martin Shkreli) is so friggen creepy. You can tell he has no soul.

No, he (or rather, his company) actually took over production of the drug, and was able to expand research due to the extra profits (it had gone over half a century without any research towards reducing the sometimes life-threatening side effects of the drug). This is a pretty common strategy in the pharmaceutical industry, from what I've heard. The increased price also encouraged a different firm to start the process of creating/approving a generic version of the drug.

He is not a patent troll at all. You had no idea what you were talking about, didn't you?

Vermillion 303 The definition given by the video matches up with what Shkreli did... do you know what your talking about? lol

UnconditionalKindness13 Dude, did you see him on the Breakfast Club? They troll him so hard it's hilarious.