Quality of patents 'falling dramatically', warns OECD.... NWO group notes corporate effect on pat

The New Scientist notes.... www.newscientist.com...

A book dealer friend once told me of an affluent American who walked into his London shop and asked if he could buy "20 yards of books". It didn't matter what they were, he announced airily, as long as they were leather bound they'd look good on the mahogany shelving in his new abode. Well, it appears such attitudes now dominate the thoughts of what we once thought of as innovators, as they treat patents as a similar commodity to be bought in bulk.

As our global "leadership brain trust" has evolved. one might say that they have channeled the fate of nations by their ideals of governance and policy. Once upon a time, for instance, The United States was a nation with economies of industry, agriculture, and scientific innovation. But some subtle paradigm shift occurred and America subsequently became an "information" economy... herein you will find some (but by no means all) of the fall-out from that 'ideal.'

The Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2011 finds that patent quality has declined by an average of around 20 per cent between the 1990s and 2000s, a pattern seen in nearly all countries studied..

Now of course, we can't assess the meaning of this without a clear understanding of how this organization measures 'quality.'

The OECD measures patent quality by the number of times a patent is cited as "prior art" in another patent - showing its importance to the inventor community as a whole. On this basis, they found that US, German and Japanese patents "produced about 70 per cent of the top 1 per cent of highly cited patents between 1996 and 2000, but their share had fallen to 60% five years later."

OK then, a 20% drop in significant (i.e. 'cite-able') patents in a decade, and a 10% drop over the last 5 years Apparently this means that the patents which have been submitted, evaluated, and approved are - for the most part - relatively narrow in scope, perhaps trivial tweaks to existing patented products.

Now a word about the OECD:

OECD stands for "Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development" and is a body of 30 countries, whose ministers meet to "cooperatively discuss, develop and refine a broad range of economic and social policies including macroeconomics, education and science." Although in 2004 the self description went something like this "The primary purpose of the OECD is to gather information about the activities of various countries and regions, so that senior government persons can use this to make informed decisions."

Either way, the concept of this body scream NWO. I have had some difficulty in identifying exactly "who" are the members of the OECD, aside from the identified nations in the organization. It would behoove us to nail that down.

Back to patents..... Among the statistics gathered by the OECD are the tell-tale indicators that the paradigm shift to "information as commodity" has been implemented without consideration it the bureaucratic structures in at least the US; if not other nations.

A small example of what we are seeing is this:

[Google has this year bought 2000 software patents from IBM (a good few shelves' worth and twice as many as Thomas Edison, the virtual godfather of this blog, ever filed). It is also buying Motorola's cellphone division and its portfolio of 17,000 wireless-centric patents. It's part of the search engine's attempt to defend against patent lawsuits in the US, where high volumes of low quality patents have led to the magic of human inventiveness being replaced oftentimes by "non practising entities" - companies who file overly broad patents on obvious ideas in the hope that one day the technology will become feasible, allowing them to pounce and sue. And it's forcing firms to act defensively, salami-slicing their innovations and filing patents on almost imperceptibly tiny improvements.

As the value of patents shifted from the substance of the invention to the 'filing' of the claim,. a bum rush of large corporation are amassing every patent they can... ultimately this seems to be a clear sign that someone wants to establish a patent market; where packages of patents can be exchanged traded or used as some kind of currency, or collateral. There is grave danger in this, we are not talking about physical reality, we are changing the patent as a symbol of something that has value, into something that has value in and of itself..

Very recent history demonstrates that our own legislators and political appointees are very much accommodating the shift away from protecting the exclusivity of rights for inventors towards the right of property of filers. This can be further discussed here: www.abovetopsecret.com...

In short, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act recently passed by an almost unprecedented super-majority (thus obviating the need for a Presidential endorsement) rejects over 200 years of American Jurisprudence and strips the protection afforded to inventors, preferring instead to protect 'filers.' (All this while specifically excluding banks from the change - to further add insult to injury.)

Now the fact that the US remained one of the few nations who recognized the 'exclusive' right of inventors to their inventions without proviso or condition was one of those things I saw as potently pro-innovation, and very capitalistic.... now... certainly not so much.

Are we learning yet?

So basically you are saying there is a direct inverse relationship between the quality of patent filings and number of reality television shows over the last ten years?

'Jersey Shore' ratings go nuclear: Most-watched MTV series telecast ever!
insidetv.ew.com...

The series returned Thursday night to 8.4 million viewers.

That makes it MTV’s most-watched series telecast of all time. (For EW’s recap of last night’s shenanigans, click here.) In MTV’s 12-34 demo, Shore was up 63 percent from season 2′s opener. Even more impressive: Shore had a 4.2 adult demo rating — that’s higher any show on the big broadcast networks last night except chart-toppers The Big Bang Theory and Grey’s Anatomy (which Shore tied).

I wouldn't be surprised at all if the quality of patents is falling. However, while I think that this is contributing to the decline in cited patents, I think there is also another just as important reason. People try to avoid using other people's patents, because they don't want to pay royalties, for obvious reasons. This means that either they ignore the patent and use it illegally, or find a similar, but different enough, way to do something that legally gets around having to use the patent.