I'm no patent expert, so why did we go from a "first to use" system to a "first to file" system?
It seems that if we were still the former, this wouldn't be an issue, correct?
There were obviously people before YogaGlo using this camera angle, otherwise they wouldn't have gotten the cease and desist. Now businesses (focusing on legal instead of product, which is one of many big misses with our current patent system) can and often must file patents to ensure someone doesn't come in after them and patent something they've been using for years.
Anything public can be used to invalidate a patent.
The first to file only refers to two inventors patenting the same non public (or public in the span of a year) invention. Anything public for more than a year cannot be patented because there's prior art (obviously).
So if you want to ensure someone don't sue you for a patent, you just have to publish everything you've been using.
Of course this is a lie, because there's always a patent that you can be sued, because even if you can invalidate said patent (even with another patent), you will still have to pay a lot of money.
"First to file" refers to a different technical timing issue.
It has always been the case that public use or description of an idea was supposed to make it impossible to get a patent.
That's a dead letter today. The patent office will eventually approve just about anything if you're persistent enough and use a thesaurus to make your claims seem a little different.
For instance, an East Texas jury just awarded a $2 million dollar verdict against NewEgg for using public key encryption in SSL. The patent was applied for in 1989. Whit Diffie, of course, invented and published public key encryption in 1976 and testified at the trial. The judge told the jury that the Patent Office was entitled to the presumption of validity over Mr. Diffie.
Some of the ideas involved were being used by NSA and GCHQ secretly before Diffie published.
Experts including Diffie who have discussed it with the mathematicians in question conclude that nobody else had a full working system for it before Diffie published.
I guess it was chosen to "streamline" the process of assigning a patent to someone (first come, first served). Unfortunately that doesn't necessarily mean it's a better process, because now, as expected, the trolls (or corporations with a lot of money for filing dumb patents) will be the ones to take advantage the most from it.
We went to "first to file" in order to make our system more similar to the rest of the world. As I understand it, there were already very few cases where priority was decided based on inventorship.
