<rant>
I dislike the patent system in its present form. I believe that
patents last much longer than they ought to. I think that genuinely
independent
re-invention should be a valid defence in cases of infringement. I
think that most patents granted are for things that are so obvious that
they should not be patentable, but a lot of examiners are not in a
position to make a good judgement about what would be obvious to
someone who is "ordinarily skilled in the art" of a specialist field of
engineering because a lot of examiners themselves have engineering
skills that would not be considered up to the standard of "ordinary" by
specialists in the fields of endeavour that many inventions involve.
One day in the coffee room at work, a colleague explanied to me the
problem he was working on, and over the next few minutes I suggested to
him several ways of solving this problem, but my colleague told me that
each of
those solutions was already patented. If the examiner were allowed to
send to a panel of five experienced engineers a document containing a
summary of the goals and motivation of the supposed invention but not
containing any disclosure of the details and claims of the supposed
invention, and if the engineers were mostly able to guess each claim of
the invention within a few minutes, then I think this might be a
practical way of proving that a supposed invention is either well known
or not sufficiently inventive. I am disgusted by the many patents that
have been granted recently for old textbook circuits or for circuits
that were
previously patented by someone else under a slightly different title.
Furthermore, I feel that patent examiners and the patent office have
not enough incentive to look properly for prior art, since they get
paid more (in the form of granting fees) if they fail to find prior art
that exists, yet they stand to lose very little in the case that they
grant a patent that they should not grant. I feel that companies that
subsequently infringe a patent bear too much of the risk or cost when
an invalid patent has been granted. I believe that if the patent office
or the examiner risked a fine for granting a bad patent that were
similar in size to the penalty that a company or engineer could receive
for infringing a patent, then the standard of examination would
improve. I believe that too many monetary and procedural obstacles are
put in
the way of anyone who knows of prior art and wishes to invalidate a
bogus
patent (it should be free to do this and there should even be a
monetary
reward when the patent is invalidated, as it is a service to all other
citizens who would then have the use of the newly unpatentable
invention at lower cost). I believe that the extra work of searching
for patents that
any new product might infringe is a huge cost to the economy, and is a
massive waste of the time and effort of some of the most skilled people
in the world. In my own employment as an electronics engineer, I have
had to try hard not to use any circuits that are even
slightly inventive unless I have to, because using an
inferior circuit from a 20 year old standard textbook avoids the risk
of infringing any valid patents, whereas if I come up with my own
circuit then I would have to perform a very time consuming search for
other people's patents on the same idea, and even if I perform this
search perfectly it still leads to uncertainty because there may have
been a patent application already submitted by someone else that has
not yet
been published.
</rant>
In spite of this disincentive to invent, from time to
time during my employment I have of necessity had to come up with a few
circuits that I could not find in old textbooks, and due to the
policies
of my employers I have had to apply for patents on these,
as either the inventor or a co-inventor. Here is a list of patents with
my name on them (though I don't own them):
US6891412 Loop filter for a PLL that
achieves good noise performance in spite of small capacitor values
US7323922 Digitally Controlled Gain Stage
having an Analogue Control Input
US7750749 "Switching Circuit, and a
Modulator, Demodulator or Mixer Including Such a Circuit"
US7548051 "Low Drop Out Voltage Regulator"
US7038552 "Voltage Controlled Oscillator
having Improved Phase Noise"