Bill Bartmann is the author of Bailout Riches, a book to provide investors with the right roadmap to spectacular profits. The book lays out a step by step plan on finding deals from the federal government, local financial institutions and loan brokers. The defaulted loan types include credit card debt, consumer loans, business loans, commercial loans and real estate loans and mortgages.

Billions of taxpayer dollars are being used to buy bad debts from banks to keep them solvent as borrowers default on their loans. These debts are being sold for pennies on the dollar to anyone willing to buy them; however, they are not necessarily worthless investments.

For example, you by a $5,000 bad loan for $250.00. Next, you approach the borrower in default and offer them a chance to settle the debt for $500. If they agree, you just made a one hundred percent profit on your investment. This is a win-win-win situation; the bad loan is off the bank’s books, the borrower is out of debt and you made a profit.

Bill Bartmann made his fortune buying bad debts. In his book, he shows how you can make yours too. You may wonder why Bartmann would share something like this with the world. The reason is simple; there’s plenty to go around. In the next year or two around $1 trillion of debt will be written down and sold cheap.

Bill Bartmann is the author of Bailout Riches! and the creator of America’s largest debt-buying and debt-collection company. Bill Bartmann has been listed among Forbes Magazine’s 400 wealthiest Americans and has twice been named National Entrepreneur of the Year by USA Today, NASDAQ, Inc Magazine, Ernst & Young and the Kauffman Foundation. Visit http://www.roadtomajorwealth.com

I think trade secret protection has its own set of challenges, namely that it’s really hard to keep anything secret very long with employees who leave for competitors, and it’s very hard to prove that something wasn’t just “knowhow.”

Nevertheless, I agree that software patents should go away.

“I don’t mind a parasite, I object to a cut-rate one.”

Bogey knows patent trolls.

Dave – there are two parts to the change John is proposing. 1. Publish the application earlier, 2. Have an engaged community effort to respond (rather than a closed PTO process.) I think #2 has the real impact.

I think it would be awesome if people would stop using patents and shift to trade secrets. I’ve always felt that trade secrets were the appropriate form of IP protection for software – going back to when I did real research on this in the 1980s (to the extent that anything I actually did could be categorized as “real.”) If this was the outcome of this change, it’d have been highly effective!

The real problem with this idea of publishing patents early is that it would really chill the use of patents for IP protection – people would instead rely more on trade secrets. The fundamental transaction in a patent is that the inventor discloses the “secret” of how he made it work in exchange for a temporary monopoly. If patents are made public before they get very far along in the process, inventors face the risk that their invention will now be publicly disclosed and then they DON’T end up with patent protection, for whatever reason. In theory this would only happen if the invention wasn’t novel or was obvious, but there is almost certainly a mismatch between what is patentable and what is otherwise proprietary, so this would be a real risk.

Maybe the patentee could then revise his/her application for re-review.