What's up with the patent system

Everyone knows that the patent system in the US is broken. It's original purpose to protect inventors has been completely overtaken by the interests of large companies and the interest of patent holding companies. The Patent Office is supposed to scrutinize each patent and approve them only after it has been confirmed that the patent meets the criteria set in patent law. Instead, the patent office grants almost any patent. Their excuse is that the courts can later decide if a patent is valid or not.

Letting the courts decide would be a good idea if it were free and took a reasonable amount of time. Defending yourself in a patent infringment lawsuit costs millions of dollars and takes years.

I see three good options to solve this problem:

1 - Make the patent office do its job aided by netizens. Publish every patent in a blog format and collect comments for 3 months. Comments should be structured and categorized. For example, a comment may be in the category of "prior art" or "too obvious".

2 - Hire good professionals in every technological area. Each patent should include a "problem statement" indicating what is being solved. Then let two of the professionals in the specific area of the patent work for a month on trying to solve the problem. If the solution found is too close to the patent - nix the patent. Of course, the question is who pays for the professional's work. They are hired by the patent office as contractors. If the patent is assigned to a company then they are paid by the company the patent is assigned to. If the patent is submitted by an individual then some other equitable payment structure needs to be devised.

3 - Transform the patent office into a "patent registration office". Anything you want to patent you post it in the patent office web site. Once posted, it is as good as a granted patent. Let the courts decide if they hold or not.

It should be noted that option 3 has more or less the same results as the current process, but it is much cheaper as the majority of the patent office employees can be repurposed.

Whales and Japan

What should we do? we can not just stand there and let anyone continue killing whales. The "research" justification is no more than an absolute disgrace and a slap in the face to the real scientific community.

Here is what I think we should do. First, there is no reason to boycott all that comes from Japan. I am sure there are many japanese people and companies that do not agree with the killing of whales but I ask them to show it to us, show us that you do not condone the killing of whales by your government, sign a declaration against it, be the first japanese company that declares that it does not agree with the killing of whales. Then we will know where you stand and we will be able to make our own decisions as consumers. Toyota and Honda are the greatest car manufacturers, and they seem commited to producing cars that are friendly to the environment. They should demonstrate that they have principles and that they can have internal disagreements in Japan with regards to their own government's actions.

Save trees, save money, expedite lawsuit resolution

Most people do not know it, but a huge number of business lawsuits are filed with the purpose of disturbing the life of a competitor. It works because defending yourself in a lawsuit requires a lot of money, whether there is any merit to the suit or not. Courts are not keen to stop these lawsuits, as they have nothing to loose. Lawyers for the attacking party are happy with the dollars they receive.

One of the activities that take a lot of time and money to perform is the discovery. During discovery the parties ask each other for as much information as they can think of asking, whether it is related to the case or not. The reason for this is simple, asking for more documents can only increase the chances of discovering something interesting, even if it is not related to the case it could open the door for a new case and more money to the lawyers.

Today there is no obligation to present documents in electronic form. Therefore cases and cases of printed material change hands. The party producing the documents prefers to provide them in printed form, as that makes it more difficult for the other party to search and work with the evidence. The amount of wasted paper and effort in this area is staggering. In a small lawsuit it may amount to several hundreds of thousands of dollars. Millions in a medium size lawsuit.

What can be done? Easy answer: require that any documents found in electronic form are provided in the electronic form. That's it. Instead of printing 500,000 emails in one side, photocopying them and then scanning them on the other side, just compell every party to provide all electronic documents in their electronic form.

More questions than answers

Whever I think of what could I be writing that would be of use to a reader I see that I have more questions than answers. I thought I was going to write about analytics, but I realize there is little I really know about it. Here are a few of my questions:

Everyone in the analytics industry talks about the need to do targeted advertising. They show successfull use cases of how companies achieved such a good lift in their campaigns, etc. If that is true, why do I keep getting irrelevant advertising? Why do companies with which I have a long lasting relationship keep doing the wrong thing, even when they have all the data to tip them in the right direction? With all the millions poured into analytics implementations, why are companies still so inefficient?