I’ve been going back and forth with patent attorneys Gene Quinn and Dale Halling in recent days–see Responding to Critics: My View on Patents & Innovation; Reality Check: Anti-Patent Patent Musings Simply Bizarre. He’s now accusing me of being a “liar” and has apparently banned my IP–otherwise I’d post the following there:
Gene,
I just saw your followup comments. It appears I misread your comment “I have offered a point by point debate where everyone answers the same question in 300 to 500 words” as saying you had responded to all our points already in writing on this exchange (which you have not). My apologies for the overly quick reading and for misconstruing your comment. I did not mean to imply you had not offered to debate. Sure, you’ve offered to debate. No need to post old emails or hysterically accuse me of being a liar.
I don’t think you’re a bad person or a bad patent lawyer, just that you are defending an unjustifiable position and not very good at arguing for it. Your entire case for patents as far as I can see seems to be an amateurish mishmash of ad hoceries. It’s not coherent or systematic. You seem to think asserting that patents are necessary for innovation, or asking a few rhetorical questions, constitutes an argument. It does not. Given that you do not seem to have an argument at all or be interested in serious discussion of this matter (witness your continued ignoring of the studies we’ve pointed you do), it is a mystery why you say you want to debate.
I am concerned that a debate with you would be a big waste of my and the audience’s time and simply make you look ridiculous; I have no desire for you to be embarrassed. But I’m still willing to do it, if someone can arrange it, and subject to suitable rules that keep you from evading questions, as you have repeatedly done in recent days in our written exchanges.
Update: Quinn continues to demonstrate his mendaciousness and vapidity in his post Beware the Anti-Patent Misdirection and Lies. He says my comment that he had not offered to debate is not accurate–yes, Quinn, I admitted as much above–I made a mistake. And it’s an irrelevant one anyway: who cares whether Quinn did, or did not, “offer to debate”? The question is whether Quinn is correct that patent law is justified. But no matter: what he is wrong about is in accusing me of lying–and he knows it (unless he is as mentally challenged and unhinged as he is beginning to appear).
This is pathetic to have to explain, but ranting monomaniacal poseurs sometimes make it necessary. What happened is quite obvious. First, on October 1, I quoted his offer to debate and explained I’d be willing to do so, though this would probably just be boring to the audience, a waste of my time, and embarrassing for Quinn. Then, three days later, I replied to one of his comments where he had written “I have offered a point by point debate where everyone answers the same question in 300 to 500 words”: I read it too quickly and thought he was saying something like “I have offered a point by ponit rebuttal to your arguments” or something like this–I just innocently misread him. So I replied, “No, Gene, you have not.”
Quinn then went crazy, accusing me of lying–since he already had offered to debate. When I saw his accusations I realized I had simply misread his comment, so I tried to clarify but he’d already banned me from his site; so I clarified above. And he’s still calling me a liar, despite my clarification. Only an idiot would think I would stand to gain from a pointless lie that he had not offered to debate, three days after I had publicly taken him up on his challenge to debate. I think Quinn knows this, so it appears his persistence is simply mendacious, dishonest, and ill-willed.
By the way, in his latest post he claims: Patent Reform: Obama Favors Major Changes to Patent Law. Typical patent lawyer exaggeration to try to ward off real change, as I explain in my article Radical Patent Reform Is Not on the Way.
Update: Gene Quinn, Joke.
Gene Quinn confuses rhetoric with logic. He’s not civil, he is contentious without cause, and, for this reason has not been able to keep a job with the same employer for any serious ideas because of it. He’s not a serious voice in the discussion of patent law because his mind is closed like a steel trap. He accused me of intellectual dishonesty but if you read the comments it is clear that Gene Quinn is not an intellectual and he confuses emoting with thinking, and attempts to replace it with logic. I feel sorry for him.
I was beginning to think I was crazy try to make sense of his arguments- I politely commented on his patent search tutorial in which he advised inventors to search only US patents and applications as a pre-filing cost-effective practice before a provisional was filed to get priority. I told him I was disheartened that any practitioner under FITF would ignore the law set out by AIA provisions to establish priority by seeking patent or non patent, public use or sale anywhere in the world (barring the one year exception) and offline copied paragraph2 of the USPTO process stating “Search to see if your invention has already been publically disclosed. …Therefore a search of all public disclosures, including foreign patents and non-patent literature is required.” In his online reply, much except makes no sense, except they are based on my unfamiliarity and ignorance (I’ve practice patent law for over 30 years), the client has sole and absolute authority for decisions made during the procurement, something about Armageddon, and his justification for having an inventor perform his own US pre-filing search to save money so that Quin can charge him $1000-3000 for a patentability review and opinion, followed by writing a provisional for $3000-$6000 to get an early filing date. Since provisionals are examined, they can wait a year and just got straight to a nonprovisional. Does he really think he can keep his date if the provisional does not enable the non-provisional or is this a bad dream? He is now coming after me through colleagues and bashing an article on updated front end search paradigms that will be published in WIPR in SEPT. He is outraged that I would dare challenge someone of his “status”; many people reached out in support, but seeing your comments in writing really helped.