Moral ambiguity

[mdlbear]

Every couple of months our lab has a Patent Review Committee meeting to determine which of the crazy brilliant ideas we researchers have come up with in the interim are worth throwing vast quantities of expensive lawyer time at in order to turn the clear, subtle prose of our technical reports into the opaque, obfuscatory ravings of patent applications. Or something like that. All the managers are on the committee, of course, along with the other higher-ups, an outside consultant, and a lawyer. Also one token guest researcher. It's a rotating position, and I was it. In part, I suppose, because I didn't have any disclosures being evaluated this time around.

This was my second time as guest committee member; the evaluation form was recently revised, and much improved. These things always put me in a difficult moral position -- I think the patent system is broken, especially in the matter of software patents (and let's not even mention business models, user interfaces, and file formats). Oh, wait. Right.

The astute reader will note that the fact that I disapprove of software patents hasn't prevented me from acquiring ten of the despicable things. (One of those isn't strictly a software patent. But it's mostly software, so I can still feel disgusted about it.) Or keep me from evaluating other peoples' patent proposals. Fairly, I hope. Some of today's batch could actually turn out to be valuable. As for the file format and user interface, well... I understand somebody recently was issued a patent for a transportation device that, when you finally fought your way through the patent verbiage, turned out to have been the wheel. I don't think he's bothered trying to enforce it -- some little problem about prior art -- but I'll bet that plaque looks great on his wall.

The plaque hanging on my office wall goes with this one.

Comments

[ravan.livejournal.com]

Oooooooh, you did mass spec! I must admit, it's an interesting bit of verbiage that seems to say "run it through the ms, and then compare it to stuff we have already scanned".

[mdlbear]

Actually that's my father's patent, and the disclosure describes an IR spectrophotometer. The patent itself mostly covers digitally smoothing the IR spectrum, and pattern matching the peaks against a table.