So the financial industry will get a "second chance" to subject business-practice patents to review and possibly get them invalidated. The author and most of the people he quotes are concerned about level of influence that Wall Street has demonstrated over Congress in this case (a concern that I share), but a re-review of business-practice patents seems like a good thing to me. My biggest complaint would be the narrow scope: why limit it to the financial industry? Why not allow a system-wide audit of all business-practice patents, and software patents too?
This bill doesn't require that the government audit the financial industry business patents, but rather lets the financial industry lawyers challenge the patents in court (currently patents have a presumption of validity that would prevent this in many cases). So it would be Google and Microsoft's lawyers that would be doing this.
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So the financial industry will get a "second chance" to subject business-practice patents to review and possibly get them invalidated. The author and most of the people he quotes are concerned about level of influence that Wall Street has demonstrated over Congress in this case (a concern that I share), but a re-review of business-practice patents seems like a good thing to me. My biggest complaint would be the narrow scope: why limit it to the financial industry? Why not allow a system-wide audit of all business-practice patents, and software patents too?
"a re-review of business-practice patents seems like a good thing to me."
Me too, but not when it's selectively granted. This pork smells bad and should be thrown out.
> Why not allow a system-wide audit of all business-practice patents, and software patents too
I don't think they have that kind of manpower.
This bill doesn't require that the government audit the financial industry business patents, but rather lets the financial industry lawyers challenge the patents in court (currently patents have a presumption of validity that would prevent this in many cases). So it would be Google and Microsoft's lawyers that would be doing this.
> I don't think they have that kind of manpower.
So we give it only to financial services companies :-)