Another issue, important in the computer age. but maybe or maybe not included.

Also I don't know quite what fits or not, but here is my first half-baked thoughts"

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The constitution provides for patents and copyrights, but the intent is to increase the arts, invention, and innovation. The patent office and system needs to be reformed so that only true innovations are granted patents. Copyright and Patent law should be brought into the 21st century to encourage creativity instead of being a source of corrupt favors to corporations and industries. In particular, medical devices and pharmaceuticals should be available without excessive costs related to licensing as they are in other countries. Software, methods, and other purely abstract ideas should not be patentable. Life forms, Genetics in nature and minor modifications should not be patentable. Copyright should be returned to 40 years after the death of the author, and a default license for "orphaned works" should be granted if the copyright office has no current ownership record

Added first-sale doctrine plank.

IMHO there are so many errors here I can't say where to start, but here we go:

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The constitution provides for patents and copyrights, but the intent is to increase the arts, invention, and innovation.

The intent of intellectual property in the US Constitution was/is to protect the investment of the inventor through a special temporary legal financial protection for their artwork or invention. Innovation is not protected in law. Only the embodiment of an innovation, which is a patent, mark, invention and copyright are protected. Intellectual property is considered by some as a control and in some cases a hindrance, not a promoter of innovation.

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The patent office and system needs to be reformed so that only true innovations are granted patents.

There is always widespread agreement in the need for reform of the USPTO. However, this has to be coordinated with the intellectual property organizations of other countries and the international conventions on intellectual property. If we fail to honor these, then the USPTO is essentially irrelevant. We need formal legal agreements between the US and other countries, allowing for reciprocity and a common framework for financial damages and protections.

The definition of what it "true innovation" is a real thorny issue which hasn't always been clear in patent law. What is the definition of "true innovation"?

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Copyright and Patent law should be brought into the 21st century to encourage creativity instead of being a source of corrupt favors to corporations and industries.

This is political hogwash. The reason patents are only done by corporations and industries is because of the costs of obtaining a patent and the high risk of failing due to a lack of uniqueness. This problem is due to the high costs of patent attorneys and the searches.

In addition, inventors are awarded patents and writers copyrights. They in turn sell the assignment rights to corporations and industries.

As a holder of 5 US Patents, 2 German patents and 5 Japanese patents plus 5 other published applications, I have never seen any corruption in the process. I don't like the lawyer fees, but the provisional patent route helps those without capital to get a patent easily if it is truly a new work.

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In particular, medical devices and pharmaceuticals should be available without excessive costs related to licensing as they are in other countries.

Wrong. This is a marketing and pricing issue, not an intellectual property problem. The inventor and assignee have the right to apply the derivative value of any intellectual property in a cost as they see fit in a free market.

The problem here is the FDA regulations which have been primed to favor pharmaceutical companies and how they abuse the American people. If they allowed individuals within the US borders to buy products outside US borders, then the difference between prices within the US and outside would disappear in an instant. Unfortunately when Internet pharmacies sprung up in Canada and it became known that people near the border could cross the border and buy the same medication (sometimes coming from the same lot) for a much cheaper price, the FDA shut it down. There is no free market in pharmaceuticals due to pharmaceutical industry lobbying.

One could potentially fix the problem by forcing unitary pricing of patents across all geographies, but that's then not a free market.

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Software, methods, and other purely abstract ideas should not be patentable.

Hogwash.

With the limited exception of certain types of embedded control programming (and there are few examples like clock mechanisms, etc.) which is needed for innovative hardware to operate, software is not patentable. Software is a language based written embodiment of a process executed in silicon. It is copyrighted and then licensed, like every other language based embodiment of thought.

If you can't copyright software then the written word cannot be copyrighted on any electronic or physical media.

Abstract ideas cannot be patented. On the other, organized thoughts, under the banner of a process, should and are patented. Killing the patenting of process would essentially kill the nanotechnology business in this country.

Open source software is copyrighted and licensed in such a manner as to be free to use, etc. but it is still copyrighted, owned and licensed.

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Life forms, Genetics in nature and minor modifications should not be patentable.

Genetics is the science of the embodiment of chemical patterns in living organisms.

The genetic pattern of an organism, represented in language format as the sequence of amino acids, must be a copyright, not a patent which is based on language that has lost its copyright, the Periodic Table of Elements and amino acid compounds. One could promote that the human genome sequence should not be copyrighted, but the contextual representation in written of a genetic sequence of a living being outside of humans should be copyrightable.

On the other hand, the equipment and methods by which one can identify a genetic sequence are clearly patentable and should remain so. Equipment and methods that could perform any modification of any genetic sequence for whatever purpose should be patentable as well. The resulting derivative genetic sequence or any new amino acids discovered in representation would be copyrightable material since they are language based descriptive embodiments of a chemical.

Minor is not a legally defensible term.

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Copyright should be returned to 40 years after the death of the author, and a default license for "orphaned works" should be granted if the copyright office has no current ownership record

Although I agree with this statement, it is legally indefensible unless you add that a copyright, unless the language or actual embodiment is changed, will expire no matter the media used. If you don't specify the absolution of media, then every time we change the media the copyright will be extended, which is a problem in today's music and entertainment video.

Intellectual property includes marks (Trademarks, Servicemarks, etc.). This is completely excluded on this plank, which is a major hole.

Uh, where's the hole? If you mean that the platform is silent in the present tense on copyrights, patents, trademarks and similar, that's correct.

Or did you mean something else?

Gen,

Official documents regarding the CFR 37 are always titled:

"Patents, Trademarks and Copyrights"

The IP declaration at the beginning of the thread says:

Quote:

The constitution provides for patents and copyrights

The plank, which is essentially a political proposal for change should have the same consistent topics and definition language as the law it proposes to consider changing. Thus, the plank opening statement should be:

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The constitution provides for patents,trademarks and copyrights

Now for the first activist idea:

Currently we have service marks and trademarks and the USPTO is pretty anal about forcing firms and individuals who apply for a mark that don't have a product into service marks.

I'd propose the eradication of a separate category of marks called service marks and placing them totally under trademarks and have them called trademarks. When you apply for a trademark, it should be for both services and for product trade.

Hmmm..... I don't know if that makes sense or not; intangibles ARE different than tangible goods, are they not?

Second activist idea:

One of the reasons many consider the American intellectual property system corrupt and elitist is because all legal actions against infringement, etc. are court action based, which enriches lawyers and makes for some very expensive decisions.

Since the Supreme Court now forces customers/consumers into mediation from a contract. Then we should force companies into remediation as well.

I'll propose that any company that uses mediation as a legal tool on the consumer side should also be forced to use remediation for resolution of intellectual property cases.

That'll make companies like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint think twice about forcing binding mediation on customers!

Yes, the goods are different but why should you have two marks to represent your brand? Worse yet, why should you have to apply for two marks just to cover both bases?