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Battling the Patent Trolls
opus writes "There's an interesting series of
articles at law.com on the current situation in patent law, which has become "a money-minting machine for a few patent holders". Includes an article on Peter Detkin, counsel at Intel, who spends much of his time battling patent infringement claims against Intel, and who coined the term "patent troll". Apparently it's not just the geeks who are unhappy with the current state of affairs in patent law."
AN/"intel corporation": 3598 patents.
I am sure you can see the difference in value between patents awarded to a corporation with a R&D department which actually researches the stuff they have patents for, and those of a leech with no research, just the "administration" of other people's patents.
But the threat of an injunction which stops production for a year or so whilst the lawyers fight it out in court is a gun to the head of these companies. So we have what amounts to a protection racket: pay up or be put out of business. At the moment the fees are tolerable, but this kind of thing has a way of growing exponentially as more people catch on to the idea of easy money. Once patent trolls start making a measurable dent in the bottom line you can bet that these companies are going to start complaining to their tame congresscritters.
(Not that I've got anything against large companies in themselves: some things just really do need a large organisation to make happen. But I've noticed that getting something done is just so much easier when you have the president of a large company backing you)
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Does this mean that when an Ian Banks -style post-scarcity society becomes possible, we can all leave capitalism and communism behind?
I only ask because it was possible a century ago, but the US Government in collusion with power and oil companies acted to suppress Nikola Tesla's reasearch....
Companies would even brag about holding a patent in their advertising.
But today, when I hear about someone getting a patent, I'm inclined to think "On what? Fire, the wheel, or did you go all out and invent an incandescent light bulb? By the way, where did you say you got your MBA again?"
Do patents have any prestige left?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
I venture that most of the "patent issues" that are discussed here are really execution problems.
Patents are granted without real study of the subject or patent infringement claims that are ludicrous. Patent law itself, except for the long and static "time to live" is not seriously flawed IMO.
All right, we've established that the patent system is not bad in and of itself (it encourages manufacturing investment in a situation where information is temporarily vulnerable) but simply that there are people who abuse it, like any other system.
I wonder what the judges would think if many of these cases went to court? Surely the fact that the companies suing have never involved themselves in the manufacture or design of any product would weigh against them. Certainly, their track record would show that these people aren't inventors trying to win back the right to produce the fruits of their labors, but pirates who board a company and wave swords around until someone brings up the doubloons from the hold. Their case rests not on the strength of their position, but on the money it will take to pay someone to swim the legal moat to push it over.
A clever bit of roguery, my congratulations. After all, everything worthwhile in the world was built through backstabbing and piracy.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
And here we have a little mistake which ruins the whole beautiful conception :-)
Means of production are scarse indeed but communism doesn't make abudance of any sort, artifical or natural. It just divides what we already have into, say, "shares" for all people to use instead of one person.
And still, yes, IP makes ideas more scarse.
So IP is bad no matter what! ;-)
The CMU scheme sounds like the work of someone who has spent too much time reading Aynn Rand and too litte time noticing that most markets are rigged.
You point about rigged markets, and the possibility of tremendous abuse and defrauding of the government are very valid (and yes, Ayn Rand's view of economics and the human condition was profoundly two dimensional and myopic, but I digress). Clearly if one is bidding on one's own patent in order to drive up the government's 120% then one is engaging in fraud. People have become Prime Bitch in Cellblock A for less than that.
Nevertheless I think the notion deserves some consideration. I would couple it with my own idea (a 100% tax credit for N years to the patent holder, but no, I repeat, no monopoly privelege whatsoever), and modify the notion as follows:
1) Patents confer a 100% tax free profits on the invention if sold alone as a whole, or a pro-rated portion if incorporated into some other product, for a period of time N years. No monopoly privelege, no exclusionary rights beyond the tax credit.
2) A free market will determine the patent's sale price, when the patent holder is ready to sell, he or she may sell at whatever price the market will bear. This may be early or late in the product's cycle, and the patent holder my calculate the pricepoint wisely, or not, as anyone might, selling anything, in a free market economy.
3) The government may purchase the patent at twice the market value (selling price) if it wishes, thereby saving the tax credit burden and enriching the patent holder even further. This may only be done on the First Sale of the patent, all further transactions are at market value and the government may outbid the market as any other company might. The only reason for this clause is to discourage the government from buying up all patents initially (thereby perhaps depressing or inflating the market and certainly influencing it one way or the other in an untoward way) and to reward the initial inventor even more greatly should the government buy up the patent. The only reason the government might buy a patent is to (obviously) avoid the loss in tax revinue it represents. Once again, I reiterate, the patent confers no other privelege beyond the tax savings.
Details can be argued, hammered out, and some reasonable solution reached. What is unacceptable, and must stop, is the issuing of government sponsored monopolies remeniscent of the Royal Monopolies granted inside friends of the King under the British Monarchy with the economic damage, scientific and technological stifling that ensues. Replacing it with a tax-free burdon, then letting free markets reign, appears to be very reasonable, especially if the free market is "rigged" slightly to favor and more generously reward the initial patent holder.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
So, since Sony patented the Trinitron tube technology, they have stiffled competition in the Televesion and Computer monitor market? Since Qualcomm patented a particular cell phone technology, they are the "great big monopoly" of cell phone companies?
Okay, then you keeping the answers to your math test "secret" will slow down my advancement as a student... dramatically. I guess in order to promote my advancement, you should just give me your answers. Damn, I should have thought of this when I was back in high school!
On the contrary, if two people can present within a reasonable period of time that they developed a similar way to do XYZ, then no patent is awarded.
So, let me get this straight... company A spends 5 years and $4.3 billion developing a new technology. They don't (or can't) patent it. Companies B,C and D all come along and "use" this technology to market their own products, creating a competition lowering prices. Great for the consumer! Now company A is only making 1/4th of the profits (probably less than that due to decrease in cost due to competition) then they would have been making and never recover the $4.3 billion they spent developing their technology. Investors then pull out, employees leave the company, and the company goes out of business. Investors will then not see spending money on investments as a lucrative means of making money for themselves and will stop investing in technological advancements and all funding will go out the window... no more R&D because companies won't be able to afford it without their investments. How is this "conducive to encouraging invention?"
But company X has spent several million (if not billion) dollars researching this? Do they not deserve to make up their lost money they spent on the research? Maybe treatments for breast cancer or AIDS isn't the best thing to keep "secret". As I said, there is a lot that needs to be changed within the patent system, as times change, etc... but the overall patent system isn't bad. It's a good way to protect people's investments into technology and the future.
Why the attack on Microsoft? This has nothing to do with Microsoft. Microsoft wasn't even brought up until this point. Are you just another /. user who likes to attack Microsoft every opprotunity he gets? That's pretty lame.
The legal concept of property does not require a physical object. In fact, a mere physical object is nothing to the law. It only achieves some legal significance when rights attach to it. Most notable is the right to exclude others from using it - the core of all property rights.
Proof that "ideas" can be stolen:
- MS Windows; and
- MacOS,
I find it difficult to believe that a software engineer cannot understand abstract concepts and has to look only at physical items.If you feel that the policy choice of the patent and copyright laws of giving creators the exclusive use of their creations for limited periods of time is incorrect then DO SOMETHING - speak out to legislators to change the law. Get involved with industry groups. As the title of my first post implies, we have only ourselves to blame if the laws that cover our technology practices are bad ones. Don't be an Anonymous Coward complaining from the sidelines.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
The problem is with the Patent Office. They are understaffed (due to constant budget cutting by Congress) and the people they do have are incompetent (like most government employees) and technologicly illiterate. As a result, people are able to obtain patents that never should have been issued.
If the Patent Office made patents non-transferrable, and returned all patents to the original inventors, *all* of this would cease to be a problem.