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  3. Has the US Patent System Gone Too Far? When Samuel Hopkins came up with a method for improving the production of potash, a c

Has the US Patent System Gone Too Far? When Samuel Hopkins came up with a method for improving the production of potash, a c

admin2013-07-11  22
问题                     Has the US Patent System Gone Too Far?
    When Samuel Hopkins came up with a method for improving the production of potash, a critical resource used to make glass, soap, and soil fertilize, it was probably just the kind of invention that President George Washington had in mind when he created the US patent system. It’s unclear, however, how Washington would feel about America’s 6, 368, 227th patent. Issued to Steven Olson, it protects a "method of swinging on a swing.. . in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other."
    To critics of the current US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), this kind of patent demonstrates everything that’s wrong with the patent system today. "We have too many patents being granted," according to Daniel Ravicher, who is the Legal Director for the Software Freedom Law Center. "There still remains this belief that the more patents we have, the better society is. A more soph-isticated and reasonable belief is that there have to be some patents, but we need to assure that they are legitimately worthy."
    As long as large corporations held the patents, things remained fairly peaceful. There has always been a kind of uneasy "mutually assured destruction" standoff among giants. But as certain high-tech firms failed, many of their patents were acquired by intellectual-property holding companies, whose only business was to use these patents to make money. In other cases, independent inventors have patented what some consider obvious ideas. "We believe that companies that don’t make a significant contribution, in terms of innovation, have exploited the existing patent system to play hold-up games with those who are, in effect, innovating in the marketplace." says Rob Tiller, assistant counsel and vice president for intellectual property for software maker Red Hat.
    Part of the problem is that the current system is overloaded. "The flood of patent applications has overwhelmed the resources of the patent office," says Mr.Tiller. "I think that there have been many grants of patents that a fuller, more careful review would probably show should not have been granted."
    Last October brought one of the most significant and still evolving changes to the patent landscape. In a case known as In re Bilski, a court rejected a patent for a business method of hedging investment risks. In its decision, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit restricted patents to two specific areas: an improvement "tied to a particular machine" and a method that "transforms a particular article into a different state or thing." This standard creates a lot of uncertainty for companies innovating in less tangible industries.
    Meanwhile, companies will continue to run afoul of old patents, ones that would fail to meet the new criteria. And patent-rights advocate Herbert Wamsley, executive director of the Intellectual Property Owners Association, makes the point that there will need to be further refinement through future court decisions about exactly what does and doesn’t fall into the patentable category.
In Daniel Ravicher’s opinion, the current US patent system______.
选项 A、results in the low-efficiency of the patent office
B、contributes greatly to social development
C、fails to reveal the practical function of patent law
D、emphasizes a complicated application procedure
答案C
解析 本题考查观点细节。根据题干关键词定位到第二段。该段主要论述了软件自由法律中心的法务总监丹尼尔·拉维切对美国现行专利体制的看法和态度：被授权的专利太多了；专利权是必要的，但要确保它们有立法价值。暗含之意为，目前一些被授权的专利没有立法价值，即专利制度无法体现专利法的实际功效。故[C]选项正确。[A]选项无中生有。拉维切只是指出了被授权的专利数量多，并未说明美国专利局的低效率。[B]选项张冠李戴。将其他人的看法(There still remains this belief that．．．)当成是拉维切的观点。[D]是根据sophisticated编造的干扰项，从文中无从推知。
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