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20 years is too long

Revision as of 10:27, 23 July 2009 by Ciaran (talk | contribs) (Post-grant changes== In the USA, patent applicants can continue to enlarge the patent withing the first two years after it's granted.<ref>http://www.forbes.com/2000/10/13/1013amazon.html</ref> So)

Patent procedures are too slow, and patents last too long for software.

Duration of patents

Patents last for 20 years. This term has been set by TRIPS.

Patents exist to encourage researchers to publish their ideas. The researcher gets a temporary monopoly, and in return, society gets access to the idea when the patent expires.

For software, almost all 20-year old ideas are useless.

Time required for grant

In most countries, a granted patent is considered valid starting from the application date. This means Person A can apply for a patent, and Person B can develop a product. If Person B looks at all published patents, they will not see Person A's patent which is still being processed. If Person A's application is accepted, they can immediately accuse Person B of infringing the patent.

The unfair situation can happen in any field of development, but it's aggravated in the case of software because the development cycle of software is often very fast.

Post-grant changes

In the USA, patent applicants can continue to enlarge the patent withing the first two years after it's granted.[1] So if Amazon searched all existing patents in 1999, and if they found that their 1-click shopping idea wasn't patented, they could still find themselves sued in 2000 or 2001 by someone who later expanded a patent granted after Amazon did its search.

References