Hey, Speech Heads. If you caught yesterday’s post, an omitted sidebar from my article, you likely saw a response from Walt Testchner. He felt that I had taken what he said out of context.

I wrote that he said that felt that technologists were the best gauges of knowing whether their art is infringing or something truly novel—after all, they are, at least ostensibly, masters of their craft. They should be in a position to know.

Walt, however, made a second point that we hadn’t included in the sidebar. He reproduced it his response, but I’m going to quote it more visibly up here in the interest of fairness.

He wrote:

I really believe that using lawyers to do the search for prior art is a huge part of the reason that we have so many patents issued that are bogus. If the inventors did the search themselves they would be less likely to submit a fraudulent patent application. As I recommended in the article that I sent you, the way to reduce the number of fraudulent patents that are issued is to make knowingly submitting a fraudulent patent application equivalent to lying under oath.

What Walt’s arguments seem to suggest (and I’m sure he’ll correct me if I’m reading this wrong) that the patent system should be driven by a community of inventors that make up their given art, and that to ensure it is, practitioners skilled in their art need to take more personal responsibility in pursuing their own patents.

When he talks about egregious examples of “fraudulent patents” or advocates for a more inventor-driven process, the sum total of his arguments suggest that bringing outside forces (read: lawyers) into the patent process has perverted it. The process has been taken away from a community of practitioners skilled in the art and turned into something else, perhaps a moneymill for lawyers.

In full interest of fairness to attorneys, I think many of them would argue that they are not outside forces; that a patent is a legal protection with legal jeopardy attached to it. They might say that a patent is the, at best, uncomfortable marriage of technology and law and they are inherently a part of the process, not an extraneous force. At least that’s what I read in Gregory A. Nelson’s comments. He suggests that if a patent is worth pursuing, it’s worth pursuing with professional guidance.

I certainly won’t weigh in on this personally. I am neither a technologist nor an attorney, but I think this a really interesting debate. It gets to the core of not only what a patent is, but what it ought to be and the real world constraints that impinge on the ideal.

When I wrote this sidebar, my hope was to engage readers in a debate about the fundamental core of patents. I think there is a very vital and interesting debate at the center of what Walt and Gregory are saying. In the original side bar posted yesterday, because of space constraints for print, much of what I wanted to get into was cut. The discussion suffered; I’m sure.

In retrospect, I should have overhauled it for the blog. This is the perfect venue for a longer more nuanced discussion. My apologies to both Walt and Gregory on that count. I am sincerely glad that Walt wrote back, though. I think this has become to perfect opportunity to open the floor for a wider discussion. I’d like to throw this back to Walt, Gregory, other technologists in speech, and the legal community. If you have anything you’d like to post, feel free to comment or write me directly. I’d like to make the blog a space to talk about this.