Drafts:Manifesto 2010/Patents
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Current documents are draft copies yet to be ratified by the party though a vote and finalised by party members.
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Patents
Reforms of patents will include:
Software patents
We will not allow patents on software, or on methods and concepts which can be expressed without any physical implementation, such as methods of doing business.
A working model
All patents will require a working model, which will be inspectable by the patent office and anyone wishing to implement the patent. The patent will contain the full industrial drawings of the working example, and all other information that would be useful to anyone wishing to replicate it.
(To give an example, Frank Whittle patented the jet engine in 1930, but didn't succeed in building one until 1937. It's clear that his 1930 patent couldn't instruct someone else in how to build a jet engine, becausde Whittle himself didn't know at the time; or rather, he knew the outlines, but didn't know the detailed engineering necessary to turn his idea into reality. And when something is merely an idea, it is not in itself particularly useful, and certainly not useful enough that the public good of the idea outweighs the public bad of a monopoly.)
Small inventors
If the purpose of patents is to promote invention, then patent policy should favour small inventors, rather than giant corporations. Perhaps patents should be personal, i.e. owned by the person making the invention rather than the corporation they happen to work for.
Compulsory licensing of patents
We will require patents to be compulsorily licensed at some fixed proportion of the selling price of a product containing them, if the two companies cannot come to an agreement between themselves. In this way, a company wouldn't be able to prevent a competitor from selling a (perhaps better) product, but would receive revenue from them. Note that this policy would automatically make patents harmless to OSS where it is distributed without cost, becausde the fixed license fee would be zero.
Proper requirements for non-obviousness
Many patents are obvious to practitioners in the art. For example Amazon has a patent on clicking on a button on a web page to buy something (the "one-click patent"). A major problem with Amazon's one-click patent is that all it was obvious in the usual everyday sense of the word, it wasn't obvious in the sense that patent offices use.
Patent offices -- and law courts ruling on patents -- use a criterion based on a fictitious person who is averagely skilled in the art but has no originality of their own, and ask would it be obvious to this person. Instead they should go to actual practitioners of an art (in the case of Amazon's 1-click patent, this would be web developers), show them the patent and ask them if it's obvious to them.
Require that a patent teaches something
If a patent is written in language that make it hard or impossible for a practitioner of the art in question to work out what it means, it cannot fulfil its side of the bargain. Patents are often written in patentese not English; if they are not written in language that a person skilled in the relevant art can readily understand, they should be invalid.
This is especially true if the patent deliberately obfuscates information, e.g. A pharmaceutical patent that lists lots of compounds that don't work as well as the one that does.
Obscure and obfuscatory patents will be abolished. They should never have been granted in the first place.
Non-infringing activities
We will exempt activities such as non-commerical use, personal study, and academic research, from restriction by patents, so these can never be infringing. "Non-commercial use" would include non-commercial distribution of blueprints for hardware devices, including ones that can directly create the device (such as 3D printers).
Similarly, we will exempt activities undertaken to make one product to interface and work satisfactorily with another product from being considered as infringement.