Bonum Certa Men Certa

Patents Are Neither Ownership Nor Inventorship But a Temporarily-Granted Monopoly

Older: Patents Are Not Property, They Are a Monopoly, and They Are Not Owned But Temporarily Granted

The word art
Even art is nowadays being patented



Summary: The misuse of English words to make loaded statements about patents, as seen over the past week in a couple of blogs of patent maximalists

THE EPO overuses words like "inventor"; the USPTO (mis)uses words like "innovation" quite a lot, in essence just parroting the patent microcosm rather than applicants who think of themselves as developers, designers, engineers, programmers, builders, medics, chemists and so on (not "inventors").



"This 'words salad' from the patent microcosm is something we have become accustomed to"Spotted a couple of days ago was this new post by Peter Keros (patent microcosm). He spoke about "inventorship and ownership" in the following context:

Can vagueness in a development agreement allow standing to question inventorship of subsequently filed patents? The Federal Circuit held in Gregory C. James v. j2 Cloud Services, LLC, No. 2017-1506 (Fed. Cir. 2018) that an agreement vague on IP assignment could confer standing for a party to challenge inventorship of a patent.

[...]

Defendants lost because the SDA did not clearly establish that Plaintiff assigned the patent rights, so such agreements should explicitly assign rights to the correct parties. Furthermore, questions of inventorship and ownership should be clarified before starting infringement litigation to prevent subsequent challenges.


This 'words salad' from the patent microcosm is something we have become accustomed to. They use terms like "intellectual property", which is a propaganda term that vaguely alludes to a bunch of pertinent and entirely separate laws (such as copyright, patent, trademark and trade secrets) as though these are inseparable. They are also trying to confuse politicians and judges, calling acts of mere copying -- often not intentional at all -- "stealing", "theft" and even "piracy" (armed and often fatal robbery). As if these judges or politicians save actual lives by siding with the maximalists...

"They are also trying to confuse politicians and judges, calling acts of mere copying -- often not intentional at all -- "stealing", "theft" and even "piracy" (armed and often fatal robbery)."They often leverage words like "assets", "private", and "property" rather than "monopoly" or "franchise" (we saw lots of that in the buildup to Oil States). Days later Patently-O (a big culprit in this distortion of terms, including in the Oil States briefs) spoke of co-inventors/colleagues in relation to VerHoef (a CAFC case). It was about Section 101 and why a patent was altogether 'voided':

Once issued, Section 101 would still be available, but is questionable in my view (recognizing Congressional elimination of 102(f) should be given effect). An alternative would be to hold such patents unenforceable due to inequitable conduct (if intent is proven) or perhaps to simply refuse to give third-parties the opportunity to collaterally challenge patents based upon improper listing of inventors.


How can one persist with words like "inventors" when some patents are on mere designs? Those clearly aren't inventions, maybe just works of art (not even particularly sophisticated at that).

Watch out for control of discussions/narratives by mis-framing the underlying issues lexically/semantically. This happens far too often.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Is BlueMail a Client of ZDNet Now?
Let's examine what BlueMail does to promote itself
OpenBSD Says That Even on Linux, Wayland Still Has a Number of Rough Edges (But IBM Wants to Make X Extinct)
IBM tries to impose unready software on users
 
Links 29/11/2023: VMware Layoffs and Too Many Microsofters Going Inside Google
Links for the day
Just What LINUX.COM Needed After Over a Month of Inactivity: SPAM SPAM SPAM (Linux Brand as a Spamfarm)
It's not even about Linux
Microsoft “Discriminated Based on Sexuality”
Relevant, as they love lecturing us on "diversity" and "inclusion"...
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 28, 2023
IRC logs for Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Media Cannot Tell the Difference Between Microsoft and Iran
a platform with back doors
Links 28/11/2023: New Zealand's Big Tobacco Pivot and Google Mass-Deleting Accounts
Links for the day
Justice is Still the Main Goal
The skulduggery seems to implicate not only Microsoft
[Teaser] Next Week's Part in the Series About Anti-Free Software Militants
an effort to 'cancel' us and spy on us
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news
Permacomputing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Professor Eben Moglen on How Social Control Media Metabolises Humans and Constraints Freedom of Thought
Nothing of value would be lost if all these data-harvesting giants (profiling people) vanished overnight
IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 27, 2023
IRC logs for Monday, November 27, 2023
When Microsoft Blocks Your Access to Free Software
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." [Chicago Sun-Times]
Techrights Statement on 'Cancel Culture' Going Out of Control
relates to a discussion we had in IRC last night
Stuff People Write About Linux
revisionist pieces
Links 28/11/2023: Rosy Crow 1.4.3 and Google Drive Data Loss
Links for the day
Links 27/11/2023: Australian Wants Tech Companies Under Grip
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news
Links 27/11/2023: Underwater Data Centres and Gemini, BSD Style!
Links for the day
[Meme] Leaning Towards the Big Corporate CoC
Or leaning to "the green" (money)
Software Freedom Conservancy Inc in 2022: Almost Half a Million Bucks for Three People Who Attack Richard Stallman and Defame Linus Torvalds
Follow the money
[Meme] Identity Theft and Forgery
Coming soon...
Microsoft Has Less Than 1,000 Mail (MX) Servers Left, It's Virtually Dead in That Area (0.19% of the Market)
Exim at 254,000 servers, Postfix at 150,774, Microsoft down to 824
The Web is Dying, Sites Must Evolve or Die Too
Nowadays when things become "Web-based" it sometimes means more hostile and less open than before
Still Growing, Still Getting Faster
Articles got considerably longer too (on average)
In India, the One Percent is Microsoft and Mozilla
India is where a lot of software innovations and development happen, so this kind of matters a lot
Feeding False Information Using Sockpuppet Accounts and Imposters
online militants try every trick in the book, even illegal stuff
What News Industry???
Marketing, spam, and chatbots
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 26, 2023
IRC logs for Sunday, November 26, 2023
The Software Freedom Law Center's Eben Moglen Explains That We Already Had Free Software Almost Everywhere Before (Half a Century Ago)
how code was shared in the 1970s and 80s