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Has the US Patent System Gone Too Far? When Samuel Hopki

游客2023-12-11  56
问题                     Has the US Patent System Gone Too Far?
    When Samuel Hopkins came up with a method for improving the production of potash, a critical resource used to make glass, soap, and soil fertilize, it was probably just the kind of invention that President George Washington had in mind when he created the US patent system. It’s unclear, however, how Washington would feel about America’s 6, 368, 227th patent. Issued to Steven Olson, it protects a "method of swinging on a swing.. . in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other."
    To critics of the current US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), this kind of patent demonstrates everything that’s wrong with the patent system today. "We have too many patents being granted," according to Daniel Ravicher, who is the Legal Director for the Software Freedom Law Center. "There still remains this belief that the more patents we have, the better society is. A more soph-isticated and reasonable belief is that there have to be some patents, but we need to assure that they are legitimately worthy."
    As long as large corporations held the patents, things remained fairly peaceful. There has always been a kind of uneasy "mutually assured destruction" standoff among giants. But as certain high-tech firms failed, many of their patents were acquired by intellectual-property holding companies, whose only business was to use these patents to make money. In other cases, independent inventors have patented what some consider obvious ideas. "We believe that companies that don’t make a significant contribution, in terms of innovation, have exploited the existing patent system to play hold-up games with those who are, in effect, innovating in the marketplace." says Rob Tiller, assistant counsel and vice president for intellectual property for software maker Red Hat.
    Part of the problem is that the current system is overloaded. "The flood of patent applications has overwhelmed the resources of the patent office," says Mr.Tiller. "I think that there have been many grants of patents that a fuller, more careful review would probably show should not have been granted."
    Last October brought one of the most significant and still evolving changes to the patent landscape. In a case known as In re Bilski, a court rejected a patent for a business method of hedging investment risks. In its decision, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit restricted patents to two specific areas: an improvement "tied to a particular machine" and a method that "transforms a particular article into a different state or thing." This standard creates a lot of uncertainty for companies innovating in less tangible industries.
    Meanwhile, companies will continue to run afoul of old patents, ones that would fail to meet the new criteria. And patent-rights advocate Herbert Wamsley, executive director of the Intellectual Property Owners Association, makes the point that there will need to be further refinement through future court decisions about exactly what does and doesn’t fall into the patentable category. [br] It can be inferred that to improve the patent system______.
选项 A、the PTO’s resources should be increased
B、the old patents should be abolished
C、the patent office’s workload should be reduced
D、the standards should be raised to approve patents
答案 D
解析 本题考查推理引申。第五段提到，“比尔斯基案”的判决中产生了限定专利保护范围的新标准。第六段引用知识产权所有者协会执行董事的话指出，未来还需要法庭作出进一步限定申请专利范围的决议，即，提高专利授予标准，保证专利的质量。故[D]选项正确。[A]选项是根据第四段中提勒观点设置的干扰项。该段提到申请专利的数目已远远超过了专利办公室现有的资源，是为了强调专利申请的泛滥而不是为了说明专利局的资源有待增加，故排除[A]选项。[B]太过绝对，无从推知。[C]选项因果颠倒，专利局工作量的减少是改善专利制度之后的结果。
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