The Patent System — USPTO in Particular — Comes Under More Fire

“Summary: USPTO needs to change in order to restore approval
from citizens whom it supposedly serves

“HOW MUCH does the USPTO want to be hated? More and more people
speak out against it these days, simply because it cannot make a
case in its defence when those who benefit are not scientists but
lawyers and franchisees. A little while ago, TechDirt — a
longtime patents critic — did some decent investigative work
to demonstrate a contemporary chaining of patent trolls, working at
someone’s behest a lot of the time (Nathan Myhrvold uses this trick
extensively). To quote later parts of the detailed analysis:

“Unfortunately, that’s about where the sleuthing runs out…
and it really doesn’t tell us that much. We already knew that
Vertigo was the parent company, and who owns/runs Vertigo is
secret. We did learn that another company owned by Vertigo is using
more patents from the same inventors to sue more companies, but
that’s about it. Either way, as a basic exercise, it certainly
teaches you a fair amount about the sneaky and hidden nature of how
patent trolls operate, with layer upon layer of shell companies,
changing patent assignments and licenses, all of which hide whoever
is actually pulling the strings.”

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