Women in Technology

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Article:		What happened to BountyQuest?
Subject:		Internet Savvy Patent Attorneys
Date:		2003-11-10 08:44:24
From:		anonymous2
Response to: Internet Savvy Patent Attorneys
The alternative, of course, is to get patents written in sensible English, or at least in the jargon of technical professionals (who are supposedly the users of the patent system :-) rather than lawyers. The system as it is now is pretty much useless. The idea was to encourage inventors to publish their inventions, but in fact the method they use to publish them isn't useful to anybody who actually needs the invention to solve a problem.

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Internet Savvy Patent Attorneys
2003-11-10 12:18:05 Tim O'Reilly | [View]

Boy, do I agree with this comment. Patents used to require submission of a working model. I wish they required working source code as a condition of receiving a software patent! But it would help if they made it so that you had to be able to reconstruct the invention from the patent. As it is, patent filings are much more like the "obfuscated C contest" than they are like anything that improves the world's ability to learn from inventions in exchange for that limited monopoly granted by the patent office.