While I agree with your sentiment, what you propose is much more difficult than you think.

The present copyright term and "automatic rights" instead of "rights after registration" are not spontaneous American ideas, they are requirements of the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty.

You will have to get the whole of Europe/ Asia to sign on to whatever changes you propose.

Or America could withdraw from the treaty, but that would mean Americans would lose their rights in treaty countries.

The author fails to realize that most the the rights he cites as reasons for the fifth amendment being unnecessary, are based on the fifth amendment. You do not have a spontaneous right against police beatings to extract a confession, the confession elicited through beatings would be inadmissible because it violates the fifth amendment, therefore police would not beat people. Yes i know people still get beaten, but the fifth amendment is the root of the law which says you can't beat people, if you actually read the law that says you can't beat people, BECAUSE it violates the 5th amendment.

This is like saying we don't need a root directory because we have all these other directories that can hold stuff just as well. It is easy for a 1st year CS student to criticize a system he doesn't grasp, at all.

I guess i FAIL0 on this. Throw the constitution out the window! Bennett Haselton will tell us what our rights are! It must be so hard being the smartest guy in the room. A thousand tears for you.

If someone discovers a flaw in a system, you are not barred from ever fixing that flaw in the future. Whether or not the person that discovered the flaw is a minor is irrelevant.

If they offer a potential code fix you can chose not to use their code and avoid all liability.

You can try to fabricate a strawman argument to try to prove your point, but what you said is just plain wrong.

More likely this is a function of the internet, and the ability to search for prior art in a matter of minutes.

In the past a party looking to get a patent would go back and forth with the patent examiner at the USPTO a number of times, because the USPTO had a vast library of prior art that your average person doesn't have access to. Every time the examiner came up with prior art the patent would have to be rewritten to shrink it claims.

Now with the internet, anybody can search just about any database, this means the first draft patent will include more examples of prior art, a patent with less broad claims, and less for the patent examiner to object to.

A better measure of whether the USPTO is lowering its standards is the number of broad claims versus narrow claims in a patent. As well as the number of prior art examples cited in the patent, by definition if the prior art describes an aspect of the patent, that aspect is not patented, it is cited as a reference to what the patent DOES NOT cover.

That is completely wrong and the word inventor doesn't mean what you think it means.

Assuming you are right, if the inventor "needs to be part of the network" then 99% of patent holding companies would be NPEs, because as I said before - Big corporations do not "own" the patents. A shell company in a tax haven like Ireland owns the patents and license them back to the parent, and other licensees. If the Open Invention Network is considered an NPE then so are these shell companies.

No that sounds completely wrong.

1. The Open Invention Network actively licenses the patents it holds, so it would not be considered an NPE.
2. The SCO litigation was about copyright, not patent.
3. Your statement about unequal protection is false, a non sequitur, and illogical. Big corporations do not "own" the patents it. A shell company in a tax haven like Ireland owns the patents and license them back to the parent, and other licensees. If the Open Invention Network is considered an NPE then so are these shell companies.
4. Attorneys fees to a defendant are already allowed in many types of cases when it is determined that the plaintiff had no business filing suit, including patent litigation. Revising the patent law so that a bond has to be placed before the suit can go forward ensures the wrongfully accused defendant will actually get paid and the plaintiff can't just vanish after they lose, thus leaving the defendant with the attorneys fees.

Your visceral knee jerk reaction to a concept that you do not understand is absurd.

The ocean is freezing, the sub is well insulated, that traps heat. Even if you stop the rapid oxidation of the material in the compartment the heat does not dissipate instantly, so as soon as you open the compartment the fire will start again. Also the stored heat will continue to deform/ weaken the material that makes up the compartment.

Look at the coal fires that have been raging underground in PA for decades.

That is not to say that they did not seal off compartments, just that the whole situation is more complicated than just sealing the compartment until there are no visible flames.

Anything that makes court opinions more accessible is a good thing. Your concern about "privately owned services" is about 200 years too late and ignorant of the way court opinions are presently published.

The present system is WestLaw Lexis or another legal publishing company publishes decisions of note, i.e. only decision that change something in the law. Your average case is never published. You have to pay major money to get access to this material.

The courts do store decisions but in such a difficult way to access that it is not worth the effort. Are you going to go and wait in line for a civil service person to go and get the physical copy of the official court opinion, every time you want to see it? Imagine trying to get hundreds of documents from the DMV everyday. And then paying photocopying services because the official court document cannot leave the file storage room.

Isn't this the problem with all hobbies? As you mature and get older you move away from things with which you used to fill your leisure time. Hobbies drop off and are filled with spouse/kid/work related issues.

When the typical editor noted in the article ages through the honeymoon/kids period of their lives, I would suspect they will return to editing Wikipedia, even more so when they retire from work. The typical editor will return to editing just like the typical person that built models as a kid or played with toy trains, when they have leisure time to devote without distraction.

This is nothing new. They had a program in 2009 called Clear to speed you through screening and it was abruptly shutdown without explanation. http://daggle.com/clear-airport-security-program-closes-707

It was then started again, but more limited. http://daggle.com/clear-airport-security-with-all-downsides-2179

So... how long will this incarnation last?

That is pretty cynical, federal judges are appointed for life and get a pension after retirement. Could the MafiAA offer a bribe that is worth more than guaranteed income for life, plus a high likelihood of a professorship at a lawschool, or partnership at a big law firm, after retirement? Pretty unlikely.

You fail to prove your point. You equate corporations to patent trolls and then go on to talk about how corporations have money and small inventors do not.

The definition of a patent troll is an individual that files patents with no intention of exploiting the patent themselves. Patent trolls typically have few to no employees their only assets are patents they purchased from others. Patent troll income is derived primarily from bullying others into questionable patent licenses.

If company X has a factory that makes widgets and they have a patent on widgets, then they are not a patent troll, even if they sue to prevent other from making widgets. Maybe you think everybody should be allowed to make widgets, but that doesn't make company X a troll. That is the power patents grant, to prevent other from using your invention for 20 years (in the US). If you don't like that, your problem is with the patent system as a whole, not company X's trollish-ness.

Both corporations and individuals can be patent trolls. Your discussion of corporations v. "the little guy" is irrelevant to the issue of legitimate inventors v. trolls.

First to file encourages people to file for patents sooner rather than waiting for someone else to file and cutting them off with a first to invent claim.

First to file doesn't favor patent trolls, they can't patent the invention if someone else was using it publicly and didn't bother to patent it.

If anything it cuts off patent trolls because they can't keep inventions a secret waiting for someone else to file a patent, and then usurp that patent from the original filer.

Don't you need to dominate the market to be considered a monopoly? Last time I checked Apple only dominates the hipster/ trust-afarian/ techno-snob markets. Plenty of other markets for fledgling entrepreneurs.

Mr. Wu seems to be saying inflammatory things to increase book sales.

You cannot serve process by mail using a 1st class stamp. You have to use a special class of mail with signature service and return receipt requested, the postal employee does not leave it without an adult who says that they can accept mail for the addressee, signing for it. Also, when you mail it, the process server has to have to physically affix a copy of the suit to the address you are mailing it to, its called nail and mail. Nail it to the door, mail a copy also.

So your anecdote about your neighbors junk mail is irrelevant to this discussion.

thedirt.com got served in error, ignored the papers, and this is what happens when you ignore court papers. This is fixed easily enough by showing up to court now and correcting the error.

The court system works just fine, thedirt.com sitting on their ass and not correcting the error in the beginning is the problem. They would have been able to recover whatever it cost them to respond from the plaintiff that erroneously served them.