this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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So, if you have enough money, you can just fire off a shitload of ex-post-facto patents after a competitor releases a prior-art product, sue them, and win using patents that didn't exist when the competitor's product was created????
Might as well just close the whole patent system and leave, there's quite literally no point to obeying it if you can so blatantly steal anything and everything.
There's no point? There is a point: To protect the rich and powerful. The patent system is serving its purpose here as intended by the people who have been making these rules.
That is not the official goal of the patent system in any country, and any behavior like that should be stopped.
You think the string-pullers would be honest about their goals? It's all about control, making sure the haves keep.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
As great a philosophical mainstay as Hanlon's razor is, I find it pretty difficult to believe a system of laws that almost exclusively favour the wealthy, especially when it's people in positions of wealth that write said laws, is some happy accident.
I'm not saying otherwise, I just have some serious doubts that there are some men in black in some dark room pulling the strings.
They're definitely in an ivory tower at the least.
The stated purpose of the police is not "protect the rich from the poor".
The stated purpose of war is not "to extract resources from that country and fund the industrial war machine".
Many things are made for serving a purpose that's not said out loud.
It's about proving who was the original creator/user of the IP, instead of who is the first to file to have that IP protected.
The flipside of this would be having random holding companies just mass filing for ownership of everything posted online, said, written-down, or created, in the hopes that they get approved first so they can sue others, even the creators, for using it.
Look at the "very demure, very mindful" woman, Jools Lebron. Someone else (Jefferson Bates) file to trademark the saying because the original creator didn't think to until after it was viral. Because the laws are ultimately about proving who was the creator, and not who filed first in the USA, it's likely that Jools will get ownership, eventually.
They're called patent trolls and our busted system already has them
One of the gates to getting a patent approved is proving that you are attempting to patent it in a timely manner. You're supposed to file a patent within one year of first public disclosure to prove that you're actively protecting your IP and plan to develop it, and if you don't it's grounds for denial.
Palworld alone has been out over a year now, let alone how long most of the Pokemon stuff Nintendo has been patenting. Nintendo has zero grounds for applying these patents, and the fact that they are able to obtain them just because they have more lawyer money means the patent system is completely pointless and laws don't matter.
That's how it should work, yes, if Nintendo can demonstrate prior art. That's the first-to-invent system.
The US did change to first-to-file some years ago, but from the articles like this coming out, it sounds like they're still granting patents to the first inventor.
What's the point of trying to be legal if this is legal? It completely destroys any semblance of competition.
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