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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  29
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.
Which of the following statement is true according to the text?
选项 A、Most patents are controlled by large companies.
B、Patents are exchanged among large companies.
C、Inefficient patent management causes the failure of high-tech firms.
D、Many patents are granted to low-quality inventions.
答案D
解析 本题考查事实细节。第三段第四句指出，发明者已将一些很明显的(obvious ideas)想法申请了专利，即这些想法并没有太大创新性，第四段又引用专家的话指出，更加全面细致的审查将很可能发现，很多专利的授予本是不必要的。因此[D]选项符合文义。[A]选项根据第三段第一句设置干扰，但“大多数”一说无法推知，而且第三句提到，很多专利权可能最终落入知识产权控股公司之手，因此[A]选项错误。[B]选项根据第二句mutually设置反向干扰，但根据上下文可知，大公司是利用手中的专利相互抗衡，而非共享专利权。[C]选项强加因果，文中只提到了高科技公司的失败，但并没有提及原因。
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