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Tech Giants Bankrolling IP Hoarding Start-Up
theodp writes "Microsoft alum Nathan Myhrvold so strongly believes intellectual property is the next software that he's studying for the patent bar exam. His company, Intellectual Ventures, doesn't actually make anything - only patent attorneys roam the hallways. Myhrvold isn't the only true believer. Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, and eBay have contributed to a $350M bankroll which the firm is using to buy up existing patents that can be rented to companies who want to produce real products."
What about the "don't be evil" google motto? more like Don't be evil, unless it gives you a s***load of money
This is an unfortunate turn of events, and I believe one of the biggest threats to the open source movement. Some of the patents are so oddball or general that anyone can use them to hammer away at some underfunded Sourceforge group to keep them from developing anything that can be used as a competitive product.
The small software houses can't afford to hire patent specialists, and the big behemoths will steal the ideas out from under the little guys. I wonder how well the patents will hold up in other software-rich countries, like India, Russia, Croatia and Serbia.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
Except all small developers and inventors (IMHO, the backbone of technological innovation) might move to Asia, where they don't have to put up with American/European software patent crap. The patent worshippers can then stew in their stagnant, protectionist filth.
Lessee; they create nothing. Instead, they take the product of creators, auction it to others who want to create something and, voila, profit!
These people are nothing but evolved parasites!
This big group will be able to use 'innovative' patents like icons, one click shopping, etc; whereas small software developers (shareware authors will have to pay royalties to do the same thing.
What an absolute crock of shit. As another poster pointed out it is a complete perversion of the original intent of the patent system.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
The purpose of intellectual property law is promote innovation and investment in our societies. This 'rent-seeking' approach by major companies shows we need some serious reform in this area of law. We need to get back to basics -
Copyright is to reward authors NOT publishers and distributors.
Trademarks are to help consumers identify choice b/w products NOT assist virtual monopolies stifle competition.
Patents are to promote innovation and reward inventors NOT allow lazy rich companies to 'rent-seek' from others.
People need to remember that IP law ultimately exists to help the public. If it is not doing that it is seriously flawed.
Marx posited that capitalism would eventually collapse in upon itself. Interestingly enough, he thought that private property would be the mechanism that inhibited, rather than secured, freedom. I think he's right, except that intellectual property will be that mechanism.
We seem to have "progressed" from companies that competed on product (ie free market choice), to those that competed on lock-in (eg. MS anti-trust stuff) to those that compete by making IP roadblocks.
Perhaps soon the minimum start-up "capital" for a tech organisation will be measured in patents and not dollars. The patents would be like nuclear weapons: sufficient threat to prevent other people suing you and shutting you down. The small organisation with no IP capital would be shut out.
Nobody is going to benefit if this happens.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This might just as well be protection money. Sony, I expect this from, ditto MS (who has an aweful lot of legal IP, despite not being a litigation-happy company)... but Apple and Google might just be investing because they work at the forefront of technology and could easily run into bad IP issues, and it would be good for them to have a firm like this on their side. We'll know more when we see who else invests.
A society which requires the permission of lawyers to innovate makes sense? Let me guess which country you're posting from.
It certainly seems win-win if you're a corporation large enough to afford his fees as a middleman.
Suppose you're a big-name software company and you find out something you're doing infringes a 15-year dormant patent that he's bought rights to. You can afford to pay his $500,000 (or whatever - but it won't be small) license fee. If you're a small time engineer trying to get an idea going out of your garage, you can't.
This is a more streamlined engine still going down the wrong track.
Hey I like that metaphor.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Yeah, and this USA is pushing/forcing other countries to adopt. But hey, this is capitalism, so it must be good :-/
3) the small companies go broke trying to pay their lawyers, the big companies buy them up, and then our entire technology industry will be held hostage by a few companies
I say, let's hope for scenario #1!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Software is machinery built in logic which can perform useful tasks, manage information, save lives, entertain, facilitate communication...
In contrast, unrestricted patents have no intrinsic usefulness, rather than the imposition of an artificial scarcity.
Unlimited-scope patents (eg patents on software concepts) could be useful if they actually facilitated innovation.
I can actually see how a non-technical lawmaker could imagine a developer tackling some design/coding issues, entering a few search words into a patent company website, and getting pages of concepts which this developer then uses to write a better program, or finish the task in less time.
However, I could see the Republican Party converting en masse to Islam before this happens.
This sweeping regime of unrestricted, increasingly fine-grained patents amounts to an historically unprecedented privatisation of the Astral Plane (which I define here as the space of all possible realities, imaginings, concepts, ideas).
Up till now, the Astral Plane has been traditionally honoured as a Public Common, except where expressed into the physical plane in concrete tangible form (eg specific text, music, machinery etc).
If my own (small) country makes any moves to legislate this Astral Plane land-grab, I'll do everything I can - even agitating for national strikes etc - to stop it.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Hmm... "Intellectual property is the biggest export of the US."... "we import everything and export nothing"... They sound pretty much the same to me. :P
In America's fastest growing industry: Litigation.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Companies like this will destroy the free enterprise we Americans enjoy. If these companies are not stopped, every startup company will be paying royalties to these patent pirates, which will keep the big companies in control (maybe that's the motive).
The only trouble is that unlike with physical goods the rest of the world could decide to stop paying us for our IP at any time, and we wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Not at all. You can sue someone for patent infringement even if they developed the infringing code independantly. To label a patent infringer "scum" or a "sponger" when they could be perfectly innocent is going way too far.
Seventeen years is an incredibly long time in the world of IT. That means that patents from as far back as 1988 (when people were just getting excited about the new 386) are still valid now in the US.
You're so right. Marx didn't have any influence on the world. His works are totally forgotten by any serious scholar of philosophy and economics and theory in general. His ideas weren't used by people through the 20th century to overthrow old governments and create the basis for some of the most powerful countries the world has ever seen. The USSR never existed, and they definitely weren't the first ones into space. Mao didn't exist, and neither does modern day China. You're so right. Modern syndicalists and unionists owe nothing to Marx. Barthes owes nothing to Marx. Althusser didn't exist. Situationists didn't exist. Le Corbusier designed nothing. The International Movement didn't happen. What was Bauhaus? You're so right.
On that thought. Aristotle was wrong too! The four elements? Preposterous. Let's forget Aristotle ever existed. Same with Descartes. The world is deterministic? Ha! Newton? Corpuscles? Not likely! Let's forget all these historical figures and their entire work because in the end they were incorrect. They must have nothing to teach us.
1) patents last for 20 years, not 17. 2) in the technology business, 20 years is a lifetime and then some. consider the damage done to customers by the ridiculous LZW Unisys patent. Millions of dollars were wasted getting applications off of GIF onto non-proprietary image formats. 3) most patents, when challenged, are overturned completely or in part. 4) if I come up with an idea, on my own, and I can make a business of it, then I should own it. If you come up with the same idea, sooner or afterwards, then we should compete in the marketplace, not the courtroom. Let the consumer decide.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
Uh, guy, who do you think grants that a particular piece of real estate is, in fact, real, and is the estate of a particular person?
...the GUV'MINT!
Give up?
And if you think that only physical property is in the provenance of capitalism, I guess you believe the stock market is fictitious.
What a dope you are.
The entire problem here is the patenting of absurdly obvious ideas and algorithms. It's already a problem, and wasteful, harmful, progress and development slowing lawsuits are already flying right and left. Just do a search for software patents on slashdot to find plenty of examples. One guy's kid patented swinging sideways on a swingset for christ's sake (also shown on slashdot).
The parasites are the companies sitting on these patents, not the software developers who independantly come up with similar, often transparent ideas.
Patents used to require hard work, experimentation, and demonstrating that something actually works. These days, Nathan invites some buddies for a "gabfest" and writes up the results as dozens of patents. Nobody cares whether it actually works, it just needs to contain a high enough proportion of patents that can be used to pressure companies to pay in order to pay for itself and make a handsome profit. And for a few thousand dollars a pop paid to his buddies for ideas that people can generate in a few minutes, Nathan's company gets to control millions of dollars of investments.
Unfortunately, many of the usual suspects are a member of this little club. Fortunately, if this company can do it, lots of other companies can do it, too. And if one of their client is being sued by another patents-only company, it doesn't matter how big their portfolio is: cross-licensing won't get them out of their legal troubles.
Sort of....
Private property != intellectual property.
One is private, and is meant to stay that way. It does
not affect public.
The other is coveted, and meant to be used. It affects the
rest of the society.
When you patent an idea, you are not doing the same thing
as planting a flag in the ground and building a house for yourself. You are taking a piece of "society" and claiming it for yourself.
Here's a quick question for you. If the local police are enforcing a bad law, whom do you blame? If you blame the police officers, then you are entirely ignorant of how criminal law is written and amended. That observation is not irrelevant to your comment about the USPTO. Rub a few together and you'll see my point.
Is it just me or does this seem like a real shabby way to earn a living. I mean really, a company whose business plan is solely litigation?!? How do these guys look in a mirror.
How can it be beneficial if only the big corps have access and enough dough to buy licensing agreements from this company?
In all likelyhood the small guys will get sued and instead of competing, the big software players will just litigate anything that dare competes or is innovative.
Linux itself violates over 50 patents according to some experts. Everything from accessing a cpu via assembly to multitasking is owned by someone or some company.
If MS ever wanted to kill Linux they could sue Linus and the distro makers of patent infringement.
I believe the only reason they have not done it so far is because IBM is a big player and could easily countersue MS on patent violations. Infact they are smacking SCO right now in return.
What this shows is that patents are really weapons for the big corps who use it to force legal contracts and clout among different industry players. Someone who owns alot of patents is not someone you want to fuck with.
Meanwhile if this does become the new thing expect the big players to use it to solely crush opensource and competition from all but the other big players who also own patents, which will create a race on who can patent the most ideas, etc.
No wonder India is becoming popular. If I owned a small to medium sized programing shop not only would I be tempted to outsource, I would move my whole company there. I do not need these IP laws hanging around my neck in order to compete.
http://saveie6.com/
Actually, I think nonsense like this hearkens back to a story about tulip bulbs and unsustainable markets.
The end is coming for the corporate kings, and it's nonsense like this that will expedite their demise.
Go, Bill, Go...
Having somebody floating around whose only real motivation is ferreting out such scum and getting them to pay for the hard work that they're trying to sponge off of is a good thing.
Have you ever written any substantial piece of code? Chances are that you are infringing dozens of patents. Are you "scum" or a "sponger" because of it? I don't think so, since I doubt you even know of the existence of the patents you are infringing.
Many ideas that are being patented are so obvious that many people have them independently. The one who happens to be first to the patent office wins.
The real scum are the people who patent things that they know full well (or should know) are part of the public domain: ideas that others have talked about, ideas that have been discussed, ideas that are in textbooks. They steal from the public ideas and property to the tune of billions of dollars.
Don't worry, you still can, that is how gangs work.
This company is no more than a gang, you pay the fee, they protect you from the other IP whores. And not only is this legal, the taxpayers actually pay for it, when this bullshit floods the courts. I think some vigilante justice is in order.
Everything in moderation, even moderation.
No, especially moderation.
I'm sick of people claiming this is capitalism, it's mercantilism, there is a difference. Don't assume that anything done by our current government necessarily makes it capitalist.
The patent system has created a magical bridge between the world of actual achievement and the made-up world of Intellectual "Property." It's sort of like letting people go into Ultima Online and become rich and powerful, and then somehow transfer their titles and authority into the real world. The patent system clearly wasn't meant to be a platform for clever attorneys to systematically lay claim to future innovation. These people are simply taking advantage of defects in the system, making it work for them in ways it was never meant to, at the expense of everybody else. That used to be a pretty good definition of the term "con artist."
The mere fact that companies can openly perpetrate this sort of flim-flam says something about how far into la-la-land our legal system and our culture have gone. There was a time when such behavior happened behind closed doors and involved discreet payoffs to officials. Now IP pirates proudly wave their sabers and flash their gold teeth. There was a time when the media and the public would have been outraged by such brazen manipulation of the system. Now the primary response is more along the lines of, "I wish I'd thought of that."
I don't really think this sort of thing will stifle innovation -- people with great ideas will still want to see them become reality. What it will do is ensure that more of the beans end up in fewer people's piles, which is the way the economy has been going anyway for some time. In the future, if you have a clever idea you will have to look around for the right Baron to pay your tithe to, so you don't get caught poaching in the royal forest.
However, the USPTO has a vested interest in encouraging as many patents as possible, since more patent applications == more income, and a bigger patent office is a bigger kingdom for the people in charge. Plus, it's just plain easier to rubber-stamp the stuff coming in without checking it thoroughly. That's why we see the exact opposite of the approach I described above.
Basically, if a law is really bad, the local police often don't bother enforcing it. They've got better things to do. The USPTO doesn't have anything better to do, and it enforces the bad laws that it oversees with great enthusiasm.
You know, during the 1800's there were those who believed that the entire purpose of the industrial revolution was to leverage inventions like the cottin gin to expand their plantations for unlimited groth and profit. However, what the industrial revolution really demanded was a mobile and educated workforce - the anti thesis of the plantation system. At first they made laws so harsh you couldn't even teach a black person to read and extended slavery to forever, then they tried to regulate all the industries in the north and force them to respect slave ownership rules in the south, and when that failed they tried to break themselves off from the union and fence themselves off from the rest of the world causing all hell to break loose.
Well today, there are those who believe that the entire purpose and meaning of the information age is leverage their IP holdings to the four courners of the earth for unlimited growth and profit. But what the information age really demands is the uninhibited and unrestricted flow of information. At first they passed harsher laws until a person who coppies a CD can get worse penalities than a violent murderer, then they extended the terms of copyrights to effectively forever, then they tried to fence themselves off from the rest of the world using Digital Rights Managment technology. Well all hell is about to break loose.
All that's really needed is a law which ensures that the moment a company makes more than a billion dollars a year - it must break up into two companies. The newly formed company must be given everything the original company has and the newly formed company must relocate to a separate state. Should the company already have been broken apart (as in those companys who make hundreds of billions of dollars a year) then the newly created company can not reside in the same state as any of the other broken up bits of the company. Nor may these companies unite in any way, shape, or form but must work in isolation from each other.
Were this done, we would not have the problems we are having now.
Think it won't work? Look at history. So long as companies are kept in check the people flurish. When one or more companies become overly powerful - the people suffer. Just like when governments become overly powerful. Both tend to intrude into the private person's life and both tend to try to dominate, like a dog, everything a person tries to do.
On the funny side: I wonder how many times you can patent a flashlight as a cat toy? And how many times will a company buy that patent?
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
Since large companies own most of the software market, and they're going to leverage their patents to prevent anyone new from trying to come in and make a buck...
Since releasing software in closed-source proprietary form isn't very neighborly, and lacking GPL protection a nasty, patent-owning company can take it right out from under you in a court case, even preventing you from using your own stuff...
Well...
Looks like it's pretty pointless to try and sell software. So much for THAT idea. Even if I release it open-source I could still get sued over the patent thing.
It occurs to me that I might go on the hacker model, in which I write whatever software I want, and only release it to my friends, who I trust. They, in turn, give me their cool stuff. And we, as a group, get stuff the rest of the world doesn't even know exists. It's like The Force, baby. Some have it. Most don't.
Alternately, I can write something and sign over the copyrights to the FSF, who have much better legal resources than I do. This is as good as keeping it under the rug, only it lets many people use it.
Then again, I could mix the two approaches. I could keep a version of my software with "special sauce" for myself and my friends, and let the FSF have a more vanilla version...
Looks like we're all heading underground, me hearties! W00T...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
This is without a doubt the most screwed up thing I've ever heard of.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
I don't recall seeing much "foo brand" (Italian) soda -- if I had, I would have tried that instead.
But yeah, it's funny how the differences in culture work. Here wine is a luxury, but we drink all the Coke and chocolate we can handle until we get fat and have a heart attack. But now I'm getting really off-topic too...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
There is a _very_ simple fix to this issue. To aquire a patent, you must have working prototype. While I don't agree with software patents, this can still be applied. It would prevent people from just thinking of crap and getting a patent. There is not cost or R&D in thinking of something. The real purpose of a patent it to protect the investment of all the R&D by people. To just look at the market and try to guess things that may come up in the next 5-10 years is not innovative or deserving of a patent. If a patent would just require the submission of a complete working prototype, most of the problems of the patent system could go away (not all, but the biggest ones).
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Agreed. What is perverse is that ideas are not born in a vaccuum. To come up with an idea, you build upon the knowledge gained from past innovators.
Doesn't it seem that it's about time for this American civilization to come to an end?
The "Moral Majority" turns out to be just a bunch of j@ck-off hypocrites.
The so-called poltical 'Conservatives' are prepared to undermine and destroy the very foundations of democracy, just so they can claim that they "won" an election.
All the "high-tech" corporations are firing their own countrymen, (the ones who DID ALL THE FRICKIN' WORK), and hire a bunch of foreigners to replace them.
The biggest whiners about paying taxes are those who are driving around Mercedes, and who have millions in their inherited trust funds.
Millions of morons think that watching silly-asses with $500 hairdos singing insipidly stupid songs on a television program is the equivalent to having a 'spiritual life'.
Inventor gets paid for selling his patent for X to Microsoft. Now whether X is a patent for an artificial brain or a triple-click on a mouse has nothing to do with the fact that MS now has one more patent in their arsenal. What is another choice? Ban people from assigning their patents? How then will the people that file them make money and what is their incentive to file the patent, thus disclosing it to the world? There isn't one and they'd be better off using it as a trade secret. Or, as the argument goes, if companies did not have clauses in their employment contracts stating that everything done on company time was property of the company (i.e., an agreement to assign all IP rights), then the inventors would walk out the door with millions of dollars in R&D to go to the competitor. Please propose a better solution given the real focus of the article.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Bad in countries that recognize software patents and have no loopholes to protect open source.
But most of the money is in support, not product sales. So who do you sue? And how much blood can you squeeze from a turnip?
I believe that if anyone is sued, it's most likely to be computer manufacturers that distribute free as in beer Linux distributions with their systems, the companies behind the major commercial Linux distributions, and major contributors in the fortune 1000 range. Anyone else can either pass the blame or is not worth pursuing.
At worst, Linux development remains mostly in the hands of unpayed users and those in safe countries, and we don't see it offered with new systems from the major manufacturers. But so far I don't believe there's ever been a patent lawsuit against open source.
The problem is that we have a bunch of bad patents in the wild. Unfortunately, any issued patent is presumed valid by the courts unless overwhelming evidence is gathered against it at great expense.
The problem here is that the worse an issued patent is (overbroad, obvious, not novel, submarined), the more valuable it is to a pure patent aggregator. This is because bad patents are more likely to cover things that have become common practice, so they empower the holder with vast powers over entire industries. IP-only companies are going to be natural magnets for bad patents, because they care only about getting the maximum bang for the buck. There are no other considerations like actually trying to produce useful products.
The USPTO is primarily paid to examine patents, not issue them or except maintenance fees. The USPTO receives roughly 350,000 applications per year (7000 per week) and issues about 1000-1500 per week.
it could probably reduce the number of granted patents by a factor of 10 just by interpreting the letter of the law
Interpreting law is what judges do. Most people seem to like it that way. I suppose police you suggest that police officers interpret the law as well? It's never been their job before, but I bet they could realize lots of "results".
never giving the applicant the benefit of the doubt
And this is how patents have been examined for over one hundred years. Good idea, unfortunately it's not new.
doing exhaustive prior art searches
Can you define prior art? I am talking about the legal definition. Have you ever debated prior art with an attorney? Have you ever signed your name and submitted papers to a federal court where your entire argument depends on a date you found on a website? Do think that's a fun or easy thing to do?
and generally making it a royal pain in the ass to get any patent.
The USPTO receives more than 7000 applications per week and issues about 1250 per week. It has also expanded to address the growing backlog and break even (the backlog is no longer increasing in almost every department.) I'm curious where you establish "royal pain in the ass", since more than 80% of patent applications are abandoned in the current system.
However, the USPTO has a vested interest in encouraging as many patents as possible, since more patent applications == more income, and a bigger patent office is a bigger kingdom for the people in charge. Plus, it's just plain easier to rubber-stamp the stuff coming in without checking it thoroughly. That's why we see the exact opposite of the approach I described above.
I guess you're just being funny now. If there were the slightest shred of truth to your hyperbole, then why does the USPTO issue about 1250 patents per week but we read about maybe 1 or 5 per month at most? Why do people always fall back on the "swinging sideways on a swing" or the "one click purchase" patents? If reality and facts were on your side, then wouldn't we be reading about hundreds or thousands of "rubber stamped" patents per month? Per year?
Of course, it's not really your fault. You probably aren't aware that when a patent ends up on the front page, the examiner's entire career is in jeopardy. You probably aren't aware that the examining process takes 12-48 months and involves 10-200 pages of correspondence between the attorneys and the examiners. You probably aren't aware that having a high issue percentage is taboo among examiners and definitely not something to talk about. Finally, you probably aren't aware that 35 U.S.C. 102 states "a person shall be entitled to a patent unless..." which means that ultimately, the attorney can push the application to a board of appeals, in which case the decision to issue is largely out of the examiner's hands yet the examiner's name is still on the issued patent.
Basically, if a law is really bad, the local police often don't bother enforcing it. They've got better things to do.
What, like prohibition? I guess you never heard of the war on drugs? I guess you haven't seen police officers enforcing segregation? You have a seriously deficient understanding of the difference between interpreting law and executing law. If you combine those powers, you have bad results. They are kept separate for very important reasons.
The USPTO doesn't have anything better to do, and it enforces the bad laws that it oversees with great enthusiasm.
Once again, the USPTO doesn't "oversee" anything. Interpretation of the law is done by judges. The USPTO issues a patent if it fails to enforce the application - "a per
Is it any coincidence that all those companies (except maybe Apple and Google) detest FOSS and can't find any better way to compete with it?
What about the "don't be evil" google motto?
As a short definition of "evil," I submit that "evil" is the "willingness to fuck over other people for your own profit." That provides a quick-and-dirty litmus test for evilness.
The current marketplace encourages evil. Google is a prime example-- they make a big deal about how they don't want to do evil, but then they invest in a company which is designed from the git-go to perform evil.
The reason is simple: if they don't, they will be in a world of pain when everyone else starts using trivial patents as weapons of restraint. (99.999% of all patents are trivial, IMNSHO).
So, either they do evil now and protect themselves, adding to the decay of honest business; or, they take the moral high road, and risk death by a thousand lawsuits.
In an area where thugs rule the streets, only thugs may walk the streets free of worry. Our current system is ruled by thugs. Google is just arming themselves like the rest of the miscreants; but by doing so, they are joining them.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Think about it for a minute...
When Enron collapsed, the US didn't really loose any energy capacity, because Enron didn't actually own any power plants. The entire scam was just a scimming operation where they bought and sold energy, making a bit of profit (actually in some cases like in Louisiana and California quite a bit...) on each sale. Unfortunately they got too greedy for their own good and lost everything, including a lot of pension plans $$$.
This new corparate entity will be doing the same thing, but on a different level. Just think what it would be like to own the patent for words like the, John, Buffy or Katzenjammer? Wait! I digress... Those are copyrights?
Not patents! Where's my lawyer?
"Where did this apple come from?"
--Alan Turing
Thereby blocking any kind of developement by the small guy
On slashdot, the little guy is often considered to be the open source developers. Maybe, in this case, the answer to this kind of problem is for the Free Software Foundation to actively pursue aquisition of a high profile patent portfolio. The FSF probably already has one of the largest intellectual property portfolios on earth. Why not extend it to patents?
The patents could be licensed "for free" on a I'll show you mine if you show me yours basis. In other words, you get immunity from our patents if we get immunity from yours. Such a license would probably be fairly complex and carefully worded. Another problem is that it costs a lot of money to file for patents.
It's even worse. It punishes the doers. The people who get the patent often don't produce anything. They wait for other people to get off their ass and do the hard work of creating and marketing products and then sue them.
We have set up a system that punishes the risk takers and achievers and rewards the lawyers, the greedy, the immoral, and the bastards.
Nice.
evil is as evil does
can destroy anything regardless of whether or not the target of the lawsuit is guilty.
This applies to anything within the bounds of our legal system really.. murder, theft, etc.
We have a system where you can "lose" without even losing the court battle, simply because of the cost required to defend yourself. It all seems to be a matter of who has the most money in the courtroom, whoever can file more lawsuits and pay for them, whoever can hire the most expensive lawyer for either prosecution or defense.
Why is this? Why must someone go bankrupt defending themselves? The expenses should be a burden of government (or more accurately, the people in general), I would take a pretty safe guess that if this were to happen, most of the frivolous battles that take place in our courts would cease to exist because of how massive a dent it would make on our economy.
One should not have to have X amount of dollars to defend themselves at X level from litigation, it should not be possible to "win" through harassment rather than by due process of law.
Maybe i'm just too idealist though..
All your base are belong to Google.
What voice? In the last election there were only 10 representitives which faced close elections. Only five states that were in play in the presidential election. For an overwhelming majority of the population their vote does not even count.
evil is as evil does
The issue here is that without revenue from a real product, the company is put in a position of enforcing its patents. This initially doesn't sound like a bad thing for the company-- many people hace theorized about an "IP Vampire" which could be invulnerable to cross-licensing schemes and could cause great damage to Free Software....
But..... patents are *very* costly to enforce in court, and they are also *risky* to defend in court. Indeed, one adverse judgement, and your valuable patent becomes a worthless piece of paper *and* you are out hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
So a company like this will be tempted to buy as many patents as they can and sue as many people as they can, but this is a road which can only lead to bankrupcy. The only way to make this profitable is to *carefully* screen all patents, and be very cautious about filing suits. But then it isn't so scary is it? And will people really license the patents if they aren't scared of you?
So either way, I think that they will fail....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Yes, and there wouldn't be so many patents to examine if people didn't think that they had a good chance of getting them issued. The more that get issued, the more that get examined. Are you sure that you're not including applications that get re-examined? In my experience (I have well over a dozen patents, courtesy of my former employers), most applications ultimately get approved.
Have you ever debated prior art with an attorney?
Yes. I've been pulled into patent lawsuits.
Have you ever signed your name and submitted papers to a federal court where your entire argument depends on a date you found on a website? Do think that's a fun or easy thing to do?
Who the hell cares if it's fun or easy? If the patent examiner sees evidence that there's prior art on of a website, then its his civic duty to investigate further before yanking a chunk of knowledge out of the public domain for 20 years.
. If there were the slightest shred of truth to your hyperbole, then why does the USPTO issue about 1250 patents per week but we read about maybe 1 or 5 per month at most? Why do people always fall back on the "swinging sideways on a swing" or the "one click purchase" patents? If reality and facts were on your side, then wouldn't we be reading about hundreds or thousands of "rubber stamped" patents per month? Per year?
Because a vast numbers of bogus patents are issued but haven't yet been "discovered" by the appropriate leeches. That's one of the things that this VC new venture is going to be involved in. It doesn't matter if 95% of the patents are reasonable. One bad patent can cause orders of magnitude more economic damage to an industry than the economic worth of a typical good patent.
Of course, it's not really your fault. You probably aren't aware that when a patent ends up on the front page, the examiner's entire career is in jeopardy.
Sure, there's always going to be a couple of low-level scapegoats per year to cover the collective asses of the whole system.
You probably aren't aware that the examining process takes 12-48 months and involves 10-200 pages of correspondence between the attorneys and the examiners.
Sure I am. I've been through the process many times. All it takes is ca$h, a good attorney and some technical jargon. My employers have patented some of my brilliant ideas, and some of my less-than mediocre ideas, depending mainly on how many patents they wanted to get that year. I've never noticed any correlation between the quality of the idea and the difficulty of obtaining a patent. (BTW, have you ever noticed that one of the main jobs of an attorney is to simply reformat technical documentation into double-spaced courier font for $200/hr, changing every 's' ending on a plural noun to the phrase "a plurality of". How can you read that monospaced crap all day?)
the attorney can push the application to a board of appeals, in which case the decision to issue is largely out of the examiner's hands yet the examiner's name is still on the issued patent.
The board of appeals is an integral part of the overall flawed system.
What, like prohibition? I guess you never heard of the war on drugs?
That would be mainly pushed by the feds headquartered in the same city as the USPTO.
I guess you haven't seen police officers enforcing segregation?
I'm not aware of any current laws requiring segregation. Back when police did enforce it, they were part of the problem, when instead they should have been protesting and resisting the laws instead of saying "I'm just doing my job here".
The USPTO does not have authority to "reject" an application (in the sense that the USPTO says "no" and the case is final) - it can only attempt to convince the attorneys that an appeal would be a waste of time, then the applicant abandons.
Any
I read (almost) all of the comments and no one seemed to point out that if you publish an idea first, it cannot subsequently be patented. In science you publish a paper in a journal; in computing an open source project (with verifiable date stamps) would prevent the ideas being patented.
Granted, an awful lot of stuff is already patented, but if we are entering a new age of IP, we should get as much of it out into the public domain as soon as possible. Gabfests? Organise them online: online discussions are archived (with dates?) we could stop companies like this from grabbing patents if enough people contribute.
Gives me an idea for anew blog: everyone just submits their own ideas, they get recorded, and filed and eventually we have a huge repository of unpatentable ideas.
Is there a flaw?
"We have been enslaved to technology, and as a result those that produce that technology own us all." That's doublethink. You're confusing those that produce the technology with those who own the people who produce the technology. Or else the engineers of the world would be rich. While we often make quite decent livings, we're certainly not wealthy.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
I think a better and much simpler way of limiting companies is to simply not allow companies to own other companies or to exist outside their original remit. A company should have a specific and narrowly defined purpose (which was the original intention of the Articles of Incorporation until lawyers came up with the idea of being very generic in those articles). Going outside those defined goals or making them too generic should be illegal, resulting in the automatic (with an appeal obviously) un-incorporation of the company. If a company wants to change direction is should be wound up, money returned and investors can choose to start another company for their new purpose if they so wish. And as I said at the start, companies should have no rights to own shares in other companies - share ownership should be limited to actual human beings. This will result in a world of small businesses, which is the required model for a free market as envisioned by Adam Smith and the other thinkers that those big business economist hold so dear whilst running their monopolies and cartels.
Yes, there is. If we want to be obnoxious enough about it. If a country ignores our IP laws we simply refuse to deal with them. "Yes, we have this nice new medication that cures (pick ailment) but you can't have any. And no, we won't tell you how to make it either." Knowledge is power.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
What we've got in the US isn't capitalism. Not even close. The average US citizen pays nearly 50% of his yearly earnings to government through federal, state, and local taxes and fees combined. Capitalism is founded on free will -- the right to choose for yourself how to spend your own earnings. Pure capitalism would require that each participant in the market retain 100% discretion over where, when, and how to spend their wealth. So, at best, the US is roughly 50% capitalist. In other words, not even close.
Moreover, pure capitalism wouldn't allow for intellectual property, only contract law. Why? Because IP isn't a product of human nature, like a law dealing with force (theft, fraud, rape, murder, etc). IP is a product of government. IP is not force used in defense of force; IP is an initiation of force. In the abscence of government, there would be no IP, but there certainly would still be "laws" against real initiations of force.
In short, the boogy-man you were looking for is big government, not capitalism.