Government's 'secret' program stymies patents.
Newly released documents uncover a covert system to seize inventions:
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/
Comments from from Dr. Greer:
SiriusDisclosure.com has
Government witnesses who have stated that the US Government (and
others) illegally seized under National Security Orders (NSOs) patents
and inventions that threatened the corporate masters who really run our
country- and the world. This fascistic program has now been exposed.
In 2010, the Federation of American Scientists issued a report stating
that over 5100 patents has been seized in this manner. This was exposed
in the movie Sirius and the report is on our website www.SiriusDisclosure.
For
this reason, I have recommended that all such inventions that deal with
earth-saving new energy technologies such as Zero Point field
generators be open-source and that they not go the patent route, where
they will be delayed and ultimately seized.
 |
| Patent Office - Washington DC |
From the Yahoo article:For the full article with documents click here.
Entrepreneurs
and established companies alike depend on the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office to legally protect their inventions. But the Patent Office has been using a secret system to withhold the approval of some applications.
Newly
released documents reveal that the office, tasked with evaluating and
protecting the rights to intellectual property, has a covert system for
delaying controversial or inconvenient patents. It's a system that
attorneys say, if abused, could function as a way to limit or stomp out
emerging companies.
Before
today, the program - named the Sensitive Application Warning System
(SAWS) - has been mentioned only anecdotally by examiners who work in or
with the office, and in a government memo that was leaked in March 2006.
However, a new 50-page document obtained by a law firm's Freedom of
Information Act request shows the sweeping scope and conflicting
interests of this particular set of rules. The law firm behind the
request, Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP, frequently represents major tech companies, including Apple, Google, Twitter, and Oracle.
Delays by design
When
an application is submitted for a patent from a major law firm, it
usually requires the approval of one or two examiners who work within
the Patent Office. For Thomas Franklin, a partner at Kilpatrick
Townsend, applications that he prosecutes typically issue as patents 22
months after filing. (Though the USPTO's website estimates the
average patent pendency time to be 29.1 months, that figure considers
independent applicants who are not represented by powerhouse law firms.)
Any
application that is categorized in SAWS, however, is placed in a
special type of patent purgatory. SAWS-marked patents must be approved
by anywhere from three to nine people and can be delayed for years.
There is no official channel to notify an applicant once her patent is
placed in the system, and the Patent Office has denied requests to
divulge what applications are on the SAWS list.
For
instance, three years ago, Franklin submitted an application for a
startup that needed to secure crucial patents before it filed for public
offering. It was being sued by a large company in the same space, and
so it paid the Patent Office an extra fee to fast-track the application.
Franklin and his client met with the examiner who was in charge of the
case, and he seemed fairly confident that it would be approved in a
timely manner.
But then, out of the blue, the examiner alluded to a special approvals process that would delay the project.
"He
at first made me aware of that and said well, 'That's secret, I'm not
supposed to say it,' " Franklin told Yahoo Tech. "That's what piqued my
interest as a constitutional issue. There's a secret program that
they're not supposed to talk about."
To
this day, the patent - which Franklin says is for fairly mundane
technology - remains in limbo, with little communication as to why or
when it will be resolved from the USPTO. Franklin worries that the
system could slow innovation in America.
"If
it's a startup trying to get traction against an established player,
they may not get funding because they don't get the patent in place," he
told Yahoo Tech. "It favors the entrenched incumbent in that space over
the person with perhaps breakthrough technology."
Patent applications can be
placed in the SAWS program for an extensive number of reasons, which
Franklin and his associates call "astonishingly vague." This includes
applications of "broad" or "pioneering scope," "seemingly frivolous or
silly subject matter," or those "dealing with inventions, which, if
issued, would potentially generate unwanted media coverage (i.e., news,
blogs, forums)."
Whom does SAWS serve?
The final item on this list could include literally any technology but may be particularly aimed at inventions from high-profile companies like Apple, whose patents are often picked apart by dedicated blogs like9to5Mac or MacRumors.
The obtained documents
also list areas of technology that might trigger a patent application
to be placed in the SAWS program, including "smartphones,"
"Internet-enabled systems," and "processes and apparatuses involving
Education."
It's these vast categories that Adam Charnes, a partner at the firm, says could raise constitutional issues.
"Presumably, not every
smartphone patent application is sent into this program," he told Yahoo
Tech. "There's no way they could be. There's too many of them. If the
criteria don't give any guidance to the agency in deciding what's in or
what's out, it leads to the very arbitrariness that we're concerned
about."
Charnes and his colleague Kate Gaudry plan to publish an article forLaw360, an online journal, in hopes of informing the public about this program, which they say most companies are wholly unaware of.
"The Patent Office is kind
of a funny place," Franklin said. "We have this manual of patenting
examining procedure, and it's 1,500 pages long. They tell us everything:
all their criterion in excruciating detail. But there is no mention in
this huge book of this SAWS program. It's completely off the books."
The USPTO's communication desk did not offer a public comment by time of publication.
Below, the papers obtained from Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP's Freedom of Information Act request.
For copies of documents that are part of this article go to:
