Currently, large corporations hire interns and others to do nothing by scour through the patent office looking for new ways to create patents (ie: digital assets and legal claims) from existing patents. Many times, when they find something, they reverse engineer the item or “invention”, modify a few key design specs, and send the modified blueprint and sample right back to the patent office to get a fresh patent on it and have monopolistic control over it for many more decades. Corporations maintain entire departments specifically devoted to generating revenue from lawsuits regarding patent violations – it is simply another revenue stream to them, derived from the work of these “patent mules” who spend their days combing through the dusty shelves of the U.S. Patent office, looking for that slight modification in a design in order to invent an new product (which is simply repackaging and claiming patent rights on an older design).
As such, items really never get released to back to the public for free use because they are constantly being redesigned a few years before expiry of the patent and locked back down again. Corporations have the means to rebuild/slightly modify these items, yet individuals don’t. The cycle continues.
Same with biological materials like GMO patents on seed stock used by farmers. Corporations have the ability to modify molecules in labs, twist the molecular arrangements only slightly, hang a few extra unused atoms on a molecule chain, and suddenly they have a “new” biological “product” and a new patent. Individuals don’t have access to electron-scanning microscopes, and farmers don’t have the capacity to keep these new GMO hybrid materials out of their own fields. Suddenly the farmer is guilty of using some corporation’s “patented GMO product” without him even lifting a finger to cause it to happen. Should we even be creating patents on GMO materials? Can it be stopped to remove this insidious ‘lawfare’, and monopolistic predator-like practice by corporations?
This proposal aims to assemble a team of patent officers and other Constitutional law advisors to convene as an outside investigative council and comb through U.S. patent law and current practices by the U.S. patent office with the aim of drastically reducing its scale, scope, and adverse impacts in American innovation and productivity, finally removing the strangle-hold that corporations impose via patents, in order to achieve and maintain monopolistic control over large sectors of our economy.