Form of patents
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A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by the government to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for a public disclosure of an invention.
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Summary
The problems with patents are not necessarily part of the system in the UK, although there is a risk that they may be adopted. For example, patents on a business method or software. The primary intention should be to ensure that the current patents system does not degrade further, rather than to attempt to an overhaul as with copyright: "progress by evolution, not revolution".
It has been suggested that the duration of patents should be reduced in line with changes to the duration of copyright. The main concern, however, regards drug patents.
Forum topics
- Thoughts on Patents (last post on October 12th, 2009)
Votes
Manifesto Ratification 2010
The manifesto ratification vote ran from March 6th to March 16th, in which 160 of approximately 650 members participated. There were four questions regarding the form in which patents should take.
The first question was:
- Where patents don't promote innovation, or actively prevent it, we'll scrap them
- 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, or on colours or smells.
The options and results for this question were:
| Option | Votes | Percent of vote |
|---|---|---|
| Yes | 185 | 97% |
| No | 5 | 3% |
The second question was:
- All patents will require 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.
The options and results for this question were:
| Option | Votes | Percent of vote |
|---|---|---|
| Yes | 162 | 85% |
| No | 28 | 15% |
The third question was:
- We will require patents to be compulsorily licensed
- 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.
The options and results for this question were:
| Option | Votes | Percent of vote |
|---|---|---|
| Yes | 159 | 84% |
| No | 31 | 16% |
The forth question was:
- Patents will be subject to invalidation if..
- Patents will be subject to invalidation if they are "obvious to practitioners in the art", or if they are intentionally written to obscure or obfuscate information. This is how patents are supposed to work, and we'll make them in fact work this way. We want to create a better system for challenging bad patents.
The options and results for this question were:
| Option | Votes | Percent of vote |
|---|---|---|
| Yes | 189 | 100% |
| No | 1 | 0% |
The winner in each question was the option with the largest proportion of votes.
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