US Senate to Revive Software Patents with PERA Bill Vote on Thursday
The US Senate will vote on the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act on November 14, 2024, which may enable broad software patents, raising concerns about patent trolls and negative impacts on small businesses.
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The US Senate is preparing to vote on the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA) on November 14, 2024, which aims to revive software patents. This legislation could potentially dismantle existing protections against overly broad software patents, allowing courts to approve patents for commonplace activities such as mobile food ordering and online financial transactions. Critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), warn that this could lead to an increase in vague and broad software patents, which may be exploited by patent trolls to target small businesses and individuals for extortion. The EFF is encouraging the public to reach out to their Senators regarding this issue.
- The US Senate will vote on the PERA bill on November 14, 2024.
- PERA could allow courts to approve software patents on broad concepts.
- Critics argue that the bill may empower patent trolls.
- The EFF is mobilizing public support against the bill.
- The legislation could impact small businesses and innovation negatively.
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15 comments- we should convene actual groups of "persons having ordinary skill in the art", who are not shown the patent application, who are presented with problems, and asked to describe a range of viable solutions.
- we should also use groups of such persons to judge whether two solutions to a problem (at least one of which comes from a patent application) are not meaningfully different.
Given these inputs, I think it would become much more expensive to determine that something is genuinely inventive (and applicants should bear that cost), but it should be possible to weed out a lot of obvious or overly-broad applications. If someone in the field who thinks about this for k weeks and arrives at "the same" answer, it wasn't that novel. I think it should also be possible for a group of "persons having ordinary skill in the art" to judge that an application is seeking something overly broad and that a PHOSITA should know that something is obvious, and incur some extra cost to the applicant.
However, if we could convince ourselves that stuff being protected was genuinely inventive, though we might be in a very different world, it doesn't seem crazy to me that e.g. a bunch of the work in ML research in the past decade should have been patentable because it wasn't obvious. It was repeatedly surprising! Of course, the current frenzy of activity might not be possible if it weren't for the spirit of openness that the field is adapted to. If the transformer was patent protected, who knows where we'd be. But it's really difficult to argue that concepts like the transformer architecture, or diffusion models or even something older like CNNs were "obvious" when experts, people in active research were surprised when they first arrived on the scene with the performance they had. And the don't seem obviously less worthy of protection than any of a range of physical inventions.
Ostensibly the patent system exists to incentivize open publishing of new technologies, but it isn't worth squat if full of vague language written by lawyers.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/214...
Looks pretty dead. Only 1 cosponsor and no action taken in a year.
These are committee votes, not the whole Senate.
It takes ~$1B to elect a president and millions for many of senators and congress(wo)men.
US congress's median age is 58.8 and median wealth is about a million dollars. Many are career politicians who are far removed from the lives of median Americans.
Remains to be seen what the Trump administration passes that helps the middle and lower class.
I'm submitting a patent for showing colors on the internet
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