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."

Comments

A company built on patents only?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've though about doing this, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who came up with the idea. Dammit, should've patented it when I had the chance.

Re:A company built on patents only?

[LeBlanc_Joey]

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.

Re:A company built on patents only?

[serutan]

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.

Re:A company built on patents only?

[Audacious]

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?

Re:A company built on patents only?

[Directrix1]

Thats terrorist talk there bud. On that note, fuck America (or more specifically its government). It has ceased to care about any person without a million dollar pocket book. The laws of America now exist to enslave its poor and empower its rich.

Although, the sad part is that the comman man is just as responsible as anybody else for this outcome. We have empowered them through our complacency and utter lack of regard for anything other than what is on our damn televisions every night. We have been enslaved to technology, and as a result those that produce that technology own us all. Especially, now that what we see on television (our defacto standard for the propogation of our culture) tells us that men have to be ignorant fools who are only interested in football, sex, gadgets, and being retarded with their friends to fit in. And women just have to buy everything including a perfect body to do the same. We are trained to be submissive idiots, questioning those who are otherwise.

Oh well, at least we still have our sweet... sweet capitalism. At least we have a choice of where we buy things. You know ma & pa shop down the street or Wal-Mart up the street for 70% less (which coincidentally enough is all you can afford now that you work there). Good thing McCarthy came along and kept us from falling into the hell hole of desperation that is communism.

And at least we still have our voice in our government. You know our solitary occasional whispering voices, compared to industries full time lobbyists. I am perfectly satisfied with all of my governmental representatives are you ;-). So when's the next civil war?

Re:A company built on patents only?

[Leibel]

Surely if it's behind closed doors then governments can safely ignore it. Only by getting these loopholes out in the open and widely exploited will anyone be bothered to change the system. That is, unless the government wants this sort of behaviour and that is what the law is designed for. In which case, it isn't a loophole.

Re:A company built on patents only?

[killjoe]

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.

Re:A company built on patents only?

[killjoe]

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.

Re:A company built on patents only?

[serutan]

Interesting, but I'm not sure how limiting corporate income would discourage anyone from staking out IP claims, waiting for others to do the actual inventing, then swooping in to seize the profits.

Re:A company built on patents only?

[Jennifer E. Elaan]

"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.

Re:A company built on patents only?

[JonnyCalcutta]

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.

Re:A company built on patents only?

[LaCosaNostradamus]

So when's the next civil war?

That depends upon your definition of "war". Tax evasion is now at epidemic levels, and that only makes sense, since the Neo-Libs and Neo-Cons both want to make government power more focused: much more narrow and intense. As long as you avoid the withering glare of the All-Seeing Eye of the modern Sauron (i.e. the Federal Government), you can pretty much get away with anything you like. You little Hobbitses -- Sssss! -- can scrabble around in Eriador, raising tomatoes and chickens ... just look out for Orcs^W National Guard on the march, and Nazgul^W Al Qaeda in the air.

In short, an environment it being created in which is will be difficult to obtain a welfare check of any sort, but it will be easy to evade all kinds of taxation. This is well within the Neo-Con vision of future government. Any fool can see it. And there's your civil war ... fought very civilly.

Re:A company built on patents only?

[mindriot]

That just reminds me of this song I heard recently:

Chorus:
In ten years we're gonna have one million lawyers
One million lawyers, one million lawyers
In ten years we're gonna have one million lawyers
How much can a poor nation stand

Humankind has survived some disasters for sure
Like locusts and flash floods and flu
There's never a moment when we've been secure
From the ills that the flesh is heir to
If it isn't a war it's some gruesome disease
If it isn't disease then it's war
But there's worse still to come, and I'm asking you, please
How the world's gonna take any more

The world shook with dread of Attila the Hun
As he conquered with fire and steel
And Genghis and Kubla and all of the Khans
Ground a groaning world under the heel
Disaster, disaster - so what else is new
We've suffered the worst, and then some
So I'm sorry to tell you, my suffering friends
Of the terrible scourge still to come

Oh, a suffering world cries for mercy
As far as the eye can see
Lawyers around every bend in the road
Lawyers in every tree
Lawyers in restaurants
Lawyers in clubs
Lawyers behind every door
Behind windows and potted plants
Shade trees and shrubs
Lawyers on pogo sticks
Lawyers in politics

In ten years we're gonna have one million lawyers
How much can a poor nation stand

In spring it's tornados and rampaging floods
In summer it's heat stroke and drought
There's Ivy League football to ruin the fall
It's a terrible scourge without doubt
There are blizzards to batter the shivering plain
There are dust storms that strike, but far worse
Is the threat of disaster to shrivel the brain
It's the threat of implacable curse

Re:A company built on patents only?

[dargaud]

Both the parent and g-parent posts ideas are interesting. I thought of another way to limit the power of companies: have a rule that states that the highest salary (all included) cannot be more than N times the lowest one. This way if a company is truly profitable, everyone down to the janitor will flourish. And when a downturn comes, no golden parachute for the guy who is, in most respects, the most likely culprit. I'll let the computation of a fair value of N to real economists.

Re:A company built on patents only?

[JonnyCalcutta]

The Department Of Homeland Security have asked that I dissavow my communist and terrorist based views as expressed in my previous posts. America is great, capitalism is the one true God and communists are sissies.

Linux

[vlad_grigorescu]

Let's see how all of this will play out for linux... Good or bad?

Re:Linux

[di0s]

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?

I'd like to thank the USPTO

[bonzoesc]

Thanks for all the help, Patent and Trademark Office! Without you, we'd all be able to have nice things and we can't have that!

Re:I'd like to thank the USPTO

[Homology]

Thanks for all the help, Patent and Trademark Office! Without you, we'd all be able to have nice things and we can't have that!

Yeah, and this USA is pushing/forcing other countries to adopt. But hey, this is capitalism, so it must be good :-/

Re:I'd like to thank the USPTO

[back_pages]

While you're thanking the USPTO, why not rub a few brain cells together and thank the people responsible for the problem?

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.

Re:I'd like to thank the USPTO

[java.bean]

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.

Re:I'd like to thank the USPTO

[Waffle Iron]

Patent law is subjective by its very nature. If the USPTO had a vested interest in not granting patents, it could probably reduce the number of granted patents by a factor of 10 just by interpreting the letter of the law as conservatively as possible, never giving the applicant the benefit of the doubt, doing exhaustive prior art searches, and generally making it a royal pain in the ass to get any patent.

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.

Re:I'd like to thank the USPTO

[TheHonestTruth]

Except what the whole point of this article actually has nothing to do with getting a patent to begin with. It is that companies with gobs of money are paying inventors/small companies to assign their rights to the big company.

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

Re:I'd like to thank the USPTO

[Waffle Iron]

I don't think that anybody has a problem with assigning patents, assuming that all of the patents issued were in fact novel, useful and nonobvious. However, that's not the case, especially in the area of software patents.

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.

Re:I'd like to thank the USPTO

[back_pages]

If the USPTO had a vested interest in not granting patents,

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

Re:I'd like to thank the USPTO

[novakyu]

Er, excuse me for butting in, but how can this be mercantilism?

From Wikipedia: Mercantilism is the economic theory that a nation's prosperity depended upon its supply of gold and silver, that the total volume of trade is unchangeable.

And naturally, from there comes the whole family of crazy ideas about tariffs and "protecting the domestic industry." But, in this case, I don't see anything related to international trade (the only thing vaguely "international" seems to be, er, something about USA forcing other countries to have similar patent laws...)

So, how is this mercantilism, or were you just using a buzz word without knowing what it meant?

Re:I'd like to thank the USPTO

[Waffle Iron]

The USPTO is primarily paid to examine patents, not issue them or except maintenance fees.

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

Re:I'd like to thank the USPTO

[lightknight]

I'll see your Wikipedia, and raise you a Merriam-Webster:

One entry found for mercantilism.

Main Entry: mercantilism
Pronunciation: -"tE-"li-z&m, -"tI-, -t&-
Function: noun
1 : the theory or practice of mercantile pursuits : COMMERCIALISM
2 : an economic system developing during the decay of feudalism to unify and increase the power and especially the monetary wealth of a nation by a strict governmental regulation of the entire national economy usually through policies designed to secure an accumulation of bullion, a favorable balance of trade, the development of agriculture and manufactures, and the establishment of foreign trading monopolies
- mercantilist /-list/ noun or adjective
- mercantilistic /"m&r-k&n-"tE-'lis-tik, -"tI-, -t&-/ adjective

The sleeper awakens

[Orgazmus]

I really want to recommend the book "Te sleeper awakens" by H.G.Wells
Read it, and then you will see that this is on topic ;)

Exports.

[Anonymous Coward]

Intellectual property is the biggest export of the US. People say we import everything and export nothing, but that's not true. It makes sense there would be an industry built around the largest export.

Re:Exports.

[gid13]

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

Re:Exports.

[mrchaotica]

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.

Re:Exports.

[rodgerd]

And yet less than 50 years ago the US was the biggest IP thief in the world.

Re:Exports.

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps Italy is using the good original Coke formula with real cane sugar. In the US, soda pop is usually made with much cheaper corn syrup. The net effect of the Coke -> New Coke -> Classic Coke transform was the replacement of sugar with corn syrup. Corn syrup is so cheap because of government programs that heavily subsidize corn production. (Socialism is popular in the US, as long as it's targeted at right wingers and nobody talks about it.)

Re:Exports.

[mrchaotica]

Alrighty then, so here's the ingredients list for the American Coke that I just finished drinking:

1. carbonated water
2. high fructose corn syrup and/or sucrose
3. caramel color
4. phosphoric acid
5. natural flavors
6. caffeine

and here's the ingredients list for the Italian Coke from the bottle I kept as a souvenir:

1. acqua
2. zucchero
3. anidride carbonica
4. colorante E 150d
5. acidificante acido fosforico
6. aromi naturali
7. caffeina

Well, I guess you're right! America gets corn syurp and/or sugar, while Italy only gets sugar. It's also interesting that they list "water" and "carbonation" seperately.

Re:Exports.

[bobsalt]

South America is the same way. In fact I believe the US is the only place where corn syrup is used as a sweetener in soft drinks.(anyone know that for a fact?) This is because the price of sugar is kept artificially high due to a few farmers that grow sugar in southern united states by using subsidies on all imported sugar.

We get enough laws written, we'll be just like roman empire was at the end of its days. Its inevitable.

Re:Exports.

[bryanp]

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.

A more retched hive of scum and villany...

[Froze]

How much more broken does our system have to get before it becomes completely disfunctional.

The way I see it, These guys will basically crank random noise into the patent system until virtually every idea that trys to come into production will have a lien of some kind on it. Thereby blocking any kind of developement by the small guy, only the mega corps will be able to produce new ideas and they will keep the pace as slow as possible to maximize there profit returns on current technology. In short THIS Bites.

Re:A more retched hive of scum and villany...

[null etc.]

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.

Re:A more retched hive of scum and villany...

[smd4985]

I definitely agree with what you are saying, but I do not think it will be all bad for small companies. Some small companies (e.g., Eolas) will patent an idea the Big Boys need, and then the war will begin. In the end, I think there is only two scenarios: 1) the patent system blows up and no one cares about who owns a patent, or 2) licensing fees drop precipitously so that innovation is as easy as a few micropayments. Lets hope for the latter!

Re:A more retched hive of scum and villany...

[mrchaotica]

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!

Re:A more retched hive of scum and villany...

[a whoabot]

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.

Re:A more retched hive of scum and villany...

[skrysakj]

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.

Re:A more retched hive of scum and villany...

[themoodykid]

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.

Re:A more retched hive of scum and villany...

[the gnat]

however, his cautions on unfettered capitalism still have considerable merit. however, vigilence and a little regulation here and there to hold the corporations from getting too much power are usually enough

It's worth pointing out that even Friedrich Hayek, whose famous "The Road to Serfdom" is (rather unfortunately) much beloved by conservatives, fully endorsed regulation as necessary to ensure a level playing field and protect consumers. Hell, I think Adam Smith said something similar. Point being, there's nothing necessarily contradictory about combining free markets with regulation, and Marx wasn't really saying anything original or particularly insightful. You can be strongly pro-capitalism and also favor strong regulation; this was pretty much Clinton's position.

The problem is that most modern capitalism advocates tend to be strongly anti-regulation, for reasons ranging from absurdly idealistic to transparently selfish, and hence most people equate support for free-market capitalism with naked greed and opportunism. (Plus, of course, the dominant party in the USA is really just another group of mercantilists, pro-business instead of pro-capitalism.)

Re:A more retched hive of scum and villany...

[Darth_Burrito]

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.

Re:A more retched hive of scum and villany...

[JudgeFurious]

Well, now that you've cleared all that up that's a load off my mind.

Thanks
George W. Bush

Re:A more retched hive of scum and villany...

[ratamacue]

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.

"Don't be evil"

[Carlbunn]

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 makes sense...

[datastalker]

...if we truly are in "The Information Age". These sentences in the article sum it up:

"Patent owners get money upfront for the dusty ideas sitting on their shelves, the investors get the rights to use the ideas without being sued and Myhrvold gets to rent those same ideas to other companies that need them to continue creating products. Intellectual-property experts say his plan is audacious and unprecedented, customized for a new, rapidly dawning business environment."

It certainly seems like a Win-Win... of course, until the first lawsuits start flying. But we'll just have to see how this shakes out. In the meantime, it makes sense to parlay information as a product in "The Information Age", and that's what's being done here.

Re:This makes sense...

[colmore]

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.

there goes Google's claim to the moral high ground

[Daniel Ellard]

I would expect this sort of thing from Microsoft, Sony, maybe Apple (or Sun, my kind employer). But isn't Google supposed to be above this sort of crap?

Patent for using air to breathe

[RedOregon]

Some of those patents are a little spooky... patent on using two wires to pass data on a serial bus? Scary to think of what they could start demanding with a few of those patents. Someone REALLY needs to start pounding on the patent office with a clue hammer!!

Re:Patent for using air to breathe

[Canordis]

We can't do it because someone already patented the Clue Hammer(TM), the Clue-by-Four(TM) and the Clue ICBM(TM)

Goodbye, competition. Hello, Lawyers.

[RancidPickle]

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.

Huh?

[zerguy]

If "only patent attorneys populate the quiet hallways" then who thinks up all these ideas? It isn't patent attorneys doing it.

Re:Huh?

[Electoad]

1. Hire patent attorneys
2. get them to append "with a computer" to a bunch of old patents.
3. Profit?

You could hire monkeys with name tags to do all of this...

the new bubble?!?!?!?!?!?

[ghettoboy22]

QUICK KIDS!!! Go change your CS major to a law degree!!!!! It's the wave of the future!!!!

I sure as hell hope litigation and royalty fees aren't going to be the "new" new economy.

As a side note, with how many "patents" Amazon has, I'm pretty surprised they aren't on board with this.

sigh...

Re:the new bubble?!?!?!?!?!?

[wattersa]

try not to blame _just_ the lawyers. There are even (gasp) lawyers who don't believe in the way the current system is. In any event, the law could be changed if enough people cared. Sadly, they don't :-/

Hey, good job fellas!

[bigberk]

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.

Re:Hey, good job fellas!

[Zocalo]

You know, I've been thinking about this kind of thing too. Just as we currently have Tax Havens, how much longer before we have the "Patent Haven"? It works like this: a small country rejects the Berne convention etc. so that all patents, copyrights and trademarks become null and void within its borders. For a smallish fee (gathered through taxes perhaps) a business can set up shop on the island, produce pretty much any product it wants and sell directly over the Internet to the global market.

There are a few problems of course. Certain companies in the US and EU will kick up a stink and political/economic pressure will no doubt be bought and applied. So it will need to be a fairly wealthy and largely self sufficient country, or have some other bargaining chip. Laws might get passed banning "gray imports", but that's not a problem for the seller if they have a disclaimer stating that it is up to the buyer to check import regulations before ordering and they do not accept liability for goods seized by customs. It's even easier if the product is a software program of course, there are already plenty of websites offering software for download upon recipit of credit card details, both legit and otherwise.

This whole "patent company" idea looks more like a great way for a country to hand over more control to lawyers and its industry overseas to me. And how will the overpaid lawyers get their nice shiny cars, watches and other luxury goods when their own laws prevent them from importing them?

Re:Hey, good job fellas!

[rodgerd]

Taiwain is already an IP haven to a certain extent - because China has been so sccessful at bribing/threatening other nations on Taiwan's status, they haven't signed up to some of the more insane aspects of international treaties such as WIPO. Because the US is a big supporter, they don't suffer much for it.

Re:Hey, good job fellas!

[tsotha]

The way this has worked in the past is the US government will suddenly decide that small country is violating its citizens' human rights, or maybe fixing elections to get in power. Then comes the trade sanctions, a coup or even the marines. Look into the history of the US Fruit company in Central and South America.

You don't really think other countries go along with our crazy patent system out of choice, do you? They know they're getting screwed, but they hope to make up the difference with lower labor costs. The US patent system is, here in the US and also abroad, a kind of protection racket. Not much different than big city organized crime.

Re:Hey, good job fellas!

[grcumb]

"You know, I've been thinking about this kind of thing too. Just as we currently have Tax Havens, how much longer before we have the "Patent Haven"?"

How much longer? About 3 years ago. 8^)

I'm currently living in a small Pacific Island Nation (think: Cryptonomicon) which is selling itself as being conveniently free of certain obstacles to international, Internet-based commerce. I've often found myself thinking that it would be a great place to set up a software and services shop. Palm trees, hyper-affordable living, beautiful people and long evenings by the lagoon. Add to that the promise that no lawyer will ever tell you what you can or cannot do, and you'd have to call this place paradise.

So: Anyone interested? 8^)

Calling all...

[eSavior]

Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, and eBay

Apple zealots and google bashers please enter stage left.

By By, small software developers!

[MrRTFM]

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.

I, for one...

[Gathers]

I, for one, welcome our new patent holding overlords!

Back to basics

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Slippery slopes

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Does anyone else get the feeling we're on a slippery slope here in terms of tech business ethics etc?

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.

Re:Slippery slopes

[Anita Coney]

It's all about the status quo. Back in the old days of personal computing companies competed on quality and price (and not necessarily at the same time). But now that we have huge companies such as Microsoft, they want to defend their positions by making it nearly impossible for any new company to gain any ground.

This isn't really new. When was the last time you saw a new automobile manufacturer in the US? It's not because it's hard to make cars. There are tons of places to outsource production. The thing which makes it nearly impossible is selling them. In the US it's illegal in almost most states to sell automobiles without going through dealerships. In other words, it's illegal to sell new cars and trucks directly to consumers.

Because any new automobile manufacturer would be locked out of the current dealerships, he'd either be out of luck or would have to build thousands of dealership across the country. A daunting task for sure.

Now the same type of behavior is taking place in computers. It shouldn't be surprising at all. The downsides of course will be no real innovation and rising prices. But you probably knew that already.

Re:Slippery slopes

[bigberk]

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.

What I find interesting is how far we have come from a real free market. Ask any student of economics... what we have now in America and Europe is not a free market, rather there is government intervention propping up the strong and upsetting the "natural" balance that we would find with free market forces.

Do you consider yourself a capitalist? Do you respect your politicians and trust them to uphold the economic system that made us great? Bad news. Your politicians are failing you, they are using government control to hurt innovation, progress, and competition. Your elected politicians do not believe in the free market, they don't believe in capitalism, and they certainly don't value innovation.

Take as another example the music/video industries . They are being kept alive by the government, not by the market. In a free market economy, we would let them collapse without shedding a tear.

Re:Slippery slopes

[bcs_metacon.ca]

WRONG. The corporations are the government. They are so big, so powerful, that they've PURCHASED your government officials. "Your elected politicians" believe whatever the megacorporations whant them to believe, and do whatever they want them to do.

Free-market capitalism isn't the cure -- it's the problem.

The real cure would be to take back your government.

Re:Slippery slopes

[EEBaum]

"Does anyone else get the feeling we're on a slippery slope here in terms of tech business ethics etc?"

There's still a slope? I thought it was a long-time mudslide that receded into the ocean years ago!

Re:Slippery slopes

[geg81]

What I find interesting is how far we have come from a real free market. Ask any student of economics... what we have now in America and Europe is not a free market, rather there is government intervention propping up the strong and upsetting the "natural" balance that we would find with free market forces.

Governments need to intervene in markets in order to keep them free: it's only government intervention that can ensure that contracts are enforceable, that companies don't collude, and that people get the information they need.

The problem is that with the power to intervene for the purpose of keeping markets free, governments are also tempted to intervene for the purpose of lining the pockets of their private supporters.

Re:Slippery slopes

[fuzza]

As quoted in Lessig's OSCON speech (kudos to whoever made that Flash presentation), Bill Gates has been thinking along these lines for a while:

The solution... is patenting as much as we can... A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high - established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.

Title should read...

[gamer4Life]

"Tech Giants Bankrolling IP Whoring Start-Up"

Re:there goes Google's claim to the moral high gro

[Pxtl]

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.

Re:This is terrible.

[PKPerson]

This could actuially end up benificial to the market. For example, if someone invented a new technology and the patent bought by one company they would hold it and use it to lead the market, but now many companys will have access to it and this would encourage competitveness. We have seen patent-buying strategies used before my microsoft that lead to a huge amount of undetermination to write effective software. It would be worse if microsoft alone bought the license and used it to destroy and overrun the competition. This will niether help nor hurt the open source community, because a patent is a patent, and theres nothing you can do about that without money.

Patents should be "use it or lose it"

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The sad thing is, this has always been the biggest danger with patents, but the people who could make a difference were too busy worrying about the big-guy-licensing-out-little-guy problem (or making their own money, depending) to notice.

Patents should work like trademarks: if you aren't actually using the invention and don't have any plans to do so within a reasonable timeframe, you automatically lose the patent rights and anyone can use the knowledge your patent documentation provides. (It would be better if you had to demonstrate a use or intended use before a patent application was approved, but that's obviously unrealistic right now.)

Re:there goes Google's claim to the moral high gro

[Kenja]

" But isn't Google supposed to be above this sort of crap?"

Dont know what gave you that idea. Its not like they have ever given away their own IP. However they will license it to you for a fee, its almost as if they think that their ideas and work are worth money. How insane is that?

You know what the coolest thing is?

[rsilvergun]

Once of the main reasons for the patent system in the first place was to discourage European style printer's guilds from hoarding all the knowledge. With patents, after a certain amount of time new ideas became publicly available after all. This isn't just perverting the system, this is turning it around 180 degrees. Pretty impressive I'd say.

Orwellian World

[Macka]

It's scary. Each passing year seems to move us inexorably closer to an Orwellian society. Soon it won't be possible to have an original idea any more without the system crying foul and demanding you hand over cash for a part of it.

There needs to be a change in the Law. Once you take out a patent, you have 2-3 years to bring a product to market that makes use of the idea, or you loose claim to the patent altogether. Further more, the patent should then be transformed into an Open Patent. Available for anyone, free of charge. This is the only way to prevent further abuse of the system.

Astral Plane Privatisation - the new Land Grab

[heretic108]

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.

A sound investment...

[j0nb0y]

In America's fastest growing industry: Litigation.

What about IBM?

[domenic v1.0]

IBM is the leads in new patents every year. Their IP release form they make you sign as an employee is pretty lengthy. But IBM rarely let's their patents go because of which IBM's success is partly due from those thousands of IP patent's they attain every year. IBM already has one of the largest patent portfolios worldwide and it continues to register more patents with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in one year...3,415 patents in 2003 more than any other company ever has. It was the eleventh consecutive year that IBM was awarded the most patents, and it brought IBM's total over those 11 years to more than 25,000 U.S. patents. I don't think they'll be treading on Big Blue's turf for a while.

Re:What about IBM?

[tsotha]

Yes, but IBM spends quite a bit of money on research. I don't fault a company for patenting honest-to-God inventions. That's why they wrote it into the constitution. The problem is those little companies that patent obvious things which don't require any research (or even thought, for that matter).

egh

[Anonymous Coward]

"Intellectual Ventures"... it's almost an unsettling idea to think a company like that is out there. It's an interesting idea, but I have to say I don't like it. It reminds me of the people buying up 50,000 domain names incase someone might want to use one in the future and then just sitting on them like a jerk. What a pain in the ass it would be to come up with some new idea in the future only to have to match it against a company who is sitting on 500,000 "patents" on as many broad topics as possible just to make sure the idea was never thought of before in any way shape or form. It kind of defeats the purpose of patenting if you ask me.

It's a pain enough as it is trying to find a nice domain name these days. At least when you find one you know it's yours & you can own it with certainty.

If all these "patent hoarding" companies are going to be out there claiming any broad idea that might ever be useful you won't even be able to tell if your idea's already patented or not. It won't be a simple/instant check on register.com, it will be a "Egh... well, let's start up the business, make a few million, and then hope we don't get our !@# pounded 5 years from now from 4 patent-hoarding companies claiming to have already thought of something kind of similar. What a mess.

Freedom? Ha! You must be joking...

[derEikopf]

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).

Re:Obvious statement

[null etc.]

Great post.

Limited monopoly should only encourage innovation in one situation - where companies must outlay significant resources, time, and money in order to reap the productive yield of their research.

A competitive company will only invest in research if it can gain a competitive advantage from that research. This advantage is diminished when every other company is allowed to copy the productive yield of that research. Patents protect large coporations, such as pharmaceuticals, from losing billions of dollars of research to competitors who instantly copy the results of that research (drugs, in this case).

That being said, a limited monopoly harms innovation when a company is granted the ability to cripple entire industries through the patenting of fundamental, and often obvious, discoveries. This is especially the case when the company does not have to outlay a dime for research - often, the intellectual property is the by-product of an employee who is performing their job, which is usually not to create ideas, but rather to create products which are salable in a given market.

Re:Seventeen years is a blink of an eye...

[Salsaman]

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.

Re:Seventeen years is a blink of an eye...

[lottameez]

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.

Re:This is terrible.

[NanoGator]

"It's a complete perversion of the original intent of the system."

Why?

a.) It encourages creative development.

b.) Those with patented ideas get rewarded.

Maybe there is some perversion going on here, but I wouldn't say complete.

Not that big a surprise....

[mblase]

Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, and eBay have contributed to a $350M bankroll which the firm is using

That doesn't surprise me, once I think about it. Haven't all of those companies been stung by patent lawsuits in recent years, of one kind or another?

It makes sense that they'd want to invest in a company devoted to buying up unused patents, rather than waiting for the owners of those unused patents to jump out of the shadows and claim Apple or Microsoft is infringing on an unused idea they had fifteen years ago.

Re:America: Fucking itself in the ear again

[themaidtricks]

So one day your African start-up is merrily going along infringing one or two of Megacorp's patents, and then suddenly Megacorp's "security force" shows up and kills all the workers, burns down the factory, and confiscates the "pirated" material.

Megacorp: 2000384348783 Enterpreneurs: 0

Re:Seventeen years is a blink of an eye...

[testadicazzo]

In terms of modern technological and software development it's a lifetime. I can't believe you got modded up for this compeletly ignorant comment.

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.

shows you what bullshit patents have become

[geg81]

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.

So...

[Moby Cock]

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.

Re:This is terrible.

[Billly Gates]

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.

Profit is never evil!

[Dink Paisy]

Perhaps you are right and Google is under the impression that whatever makes money is good. A lot of people think DRM is evil, but Google does it for their book searches, and a lot of people think censorship is evil, but Google does it to please the Chinese government.

What this really says to me is that Google is looking for places to invest the money from their IPO. Presumably that means they can't think of places to spend it themselves. That would make the chance of Google having some big, revolutionary plan much less likely, since such a plan would probably consume as many resources as they could throw at it to improve the chances of success. That makes me kind of sad. Google had a chance to change the world, but it seems all they really changed is the world of Internet searches.

I am getting too old to be in Software anymore...

[NotQuiteReal]

... perhaps I should get a Law Degree too.

I understand Lawyers get paid whether they win or not.

I am serious here. 44 is not too old to start over, right?

tulips

[poptones]

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...

Re: How about Switzerland

[davidbailey]

Welcome to Switzerland! - Neutral in "all" political matters, controlling most of the international banking trade, and now the only country in the world that allows YOU to set up your company and actually do business without worrying about getting sued because you staple your papers on the upper-left side of the page (International Patent #4535788563421) or because you might use "a computer communications language that puts real-time messages into electronic signals", "store computer data in binary-coded, magnetic signals on a rotating platter", "one-click" purchasing, or perhaps the widely-licensed "using flourescent lighting while speaking through a communications device from 9AM to 5PM"! (International Patents #347568902304, #968747834, #235754267 and #96506845982374)

It's back to the good old days of business where you could blow your nose without asking your legal staff if you might be using a technique that would cost millions in licensing fees!

Sell products with the features that make competitive sense, instead of the features you can afford the patents to! Write the software the way you want, using the formulas and functions the most efficient and understandable way! Take advantage of advertising and internal company documents where every other word doesn't have to have (TM), (R), and footnotes listing that you have no actual connection or relationship to the intellectual property and trademark broker (IPTB) "Customer Satisfaction", "Cost-Savings", or "Product Benefits" Corporations!

Selling prime locations in the scenic slums of Geneva for the unbelievable bargain of a mere $10 million per square foot! Imagine what you'll save on lawsuits and licensing fees!

DISCLAIMER: Independents, entrepreneurs, and startup venture capital business worth less than $100 billion need not apply. Military escort through Berne Convention signatory countries not included.

you don't understand

[geg81]

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.

Same old story, sorry.

[mr i want to go home]

It's worth remembering that Apple has been through this before with Microsoft. If I remember correctly, when Microsoft ripped off Apple's UI elements (that weren't specifically licensed to them) in Win95, Apple fought them with the idea that their interface was protected under copyright (trashcan -> recycle bin, etc etc).

Apple lost (this was the one lawsuit many of us were hoping would sink Microsoft once and for all) because their UI elements were not 'patented'. They learnt well from this lesson and have since been patenting every widget under the sun.

I fully expect Google know their history well, and also know that Microsoft is sniffing around their territory. They would be fools to think that Microsoft would treat them any differently to Apple, and are probably thinking how to protect themselves as best they can.

Re:how does this get modded up ?

[westlake]

so there you have it, the kids know so why don't you ? all this company are doing is screwing the USA, the other 191 countries will carry on without you

world trading partners tend to share certain interests and values, among them the principle of reciprocity. Patent Law of the People's Republic of China (Article 18)

The IP Armageddon Commences at Last

[Catbeller]

Damn.

It's like a dream. I remember posting this more or less same comment in a PC Magazine online forum back in '98 or '99.

This is the endgame, folks. This is what Gates has had planned for years -- the real endgame. Not some iffy market monopoly over PC operatings systems and office software.

This is the whole enchilada. They want to own EVERYTHING worth owning. This is why the "Intellectual Property" meme has been pumped so hard these past few years. the real reason why the RIAA, MPAA, the SPA, and all the overseas equivalents are suing anything that moves. It's the natural outcome of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

The biggest boys are pooling their resources to start the ultimate monopoly. They want to put a meter on every conceivable human idea they can beg, buy, borrow or steal. I'm not overstating how enormous their ambition is. Don't look at the distracting smiling face; keep your eyes on the magicians' hands.

I DO understand that they are talking about patents. But it's really irrelevant. They are going to force revenue to precipitate out of the ether into their hands that dwarfs anything Gates ever dreamed of. And that kind of wealth, driven by monoploy players, will be used to buy up more than merely patents.

It's why MS has been pumping the RIAA and MPAA to adopt MS proprietary codecs. It's why the X-Box REALLY exists. It's about owning the culture, or more precisely, the circulatory system of the culture. They want to own processes, patents, and eventually, every piece of ownable video, audio, and images of art. They will own the newspapers, or at least the means of disseminating the newspapers. All cable networks. They want the internet(s) under their control, if only to control the information flow so it can't affect their power.

The biggest boys are lining up for a piece of something even they can't visualize. The ultimate shape of this monster will be worldwide. It's power will be greater than any government or combination of governments.

They won't permit any real change in patent or copyright laws. They might let us have token victories on things that don't matter much, but the final shape will be dictated by them.

Here's the final outcome:

A loose confederation of very wealthy men will run a structure composed of corporations that will really, truly own every copyrighted work of man. They will own our history. They will meter it out to their advantage. Witness (NBC?) refusing to permit use of a copyrighted video of Bush making an idiot of himself on TV before the election, just because they could, no reason necessary.

And these corporations will hold copyrights and perhaps even patents, in some form, for ever-extended periods of time. Effectively for eternity. Corporations can't die. They can't go to jail. You can't arrest them. They are fictions designed to hide real men from real responsibilty for their actions.

We're going to have immortal fictions own our world. Americans say, "So what? I'll buy stock."

That's why privately owned corporations are all the rage right now. Why some of the biggest are invite-only for those they deem worthy. ICANN was bought by one of these monstrosities. Some corporations are buying back their own stock with an eye to, well, not share the wealth.

I'm only pointing out the obvious.

I'm not anti-business. I'm anti-corporation. There is a difference. I want expiration dates on IP. I want the corporate shield for individual malfeasance to be gone. I want this incestuous network of greedy buggers to hew to some kind of law that they didn't write themselves. We fought long and hard to break up the 19th century trusts that were smothering the life out of representative government; I DON'T want them back, only immortal, anational, and unkillable.

Re:The IP Armageddon Commences at Last

[alexo]

> I want expiration dates on IP

I thought we already have those.

OK, seriously now

> I'm not anti-business. I'm anti-corporation. There is a difference. I want
> expiration dates on IP. I want the corporate shield for individual
> malfeasance to be gone. I want this incestuous network of greedy buggers to
> hew to some kind of law that they didn't write themselves. We fought long and
> hard to break up the 19th century trusts that were smothering the life out of
> representative government; I DON'T want them back, only immortal, anational,
> and unkillable.

Never going to happen.

Since the beginning of history people were divided into two groups - the haves and the have-nots. The haves happily exploited the have-nots while securing their position and increasing the differences.

Once in a while, the have-nots managed to have a revolution of some kind. People died and some of the have-nots, got. These became the new haves and, in time, grew to like it. And so, the cycle endlessly repeats itself.

Re:there goes Google's claim to the moral high gro

[westlake]

I would expect this sort of thing from Microsoft, Sony, maybe Apple (or Sun, my kind employer). But isn't Google supposed to be above this sort of crap?

Google is a business, not a charity. It exists to make money and for no other reason.

the european perspective

[n3k5]

When went to Italy a few years ago, I noticed that Coke costs at least 1.5 times as much as it does here -- if you're lucky. I can't imagine that it costs that much more to manufacture it

But it's true, and you can imagine it, you just need to try. Well, okay, part of the reason why Coke is more expensive in Europe is probably because people can and will pay the higher price. But it also is more expensive to manufacture, because, for example, the people who fill it into bottles need to be paid more over here. They have to earn more because their cost of living is higher, because Coke costs more :-)

Now I'm getting even more off topic than I was to begin with, but here's another thought I just had: I think Europeans don't drink as much sweet soda as Americans do. I mostly drink water and juice to kill the thirst, and while I can get foo brand soda at pretty much the same price, 'the real thing(tm)' is more expensive. It's nothing I guzzle all the time, it's almost a bit of a luxury (like chocolate). So the higher price is justified -- firstly to hold up the image (the best cola in the world at a discount price -- unthinkable!), secondly to make up for the lower quantity in which it's consumed over here.

I'm sure only a tiny fraction of the price difference goes back to the USA, but I wouldn't be surprised if the total sum -- over all bottles and cans sold outside the states -- amounted to, well, you know, some pretty huge amount.

Re:the european perspective

[mrchaotica]

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...

Re:the european perspective

[BHearsum]

Funny. Over here in North America, juice and water are more expensive than soft drinks. I envy you.

Agreed: all hell is about to break loose

[argoff]

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.

As a developer... I think my response is...

[crazyphilman]

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...

Only in America could something this evil exist...

[borgheron]

This is without a doubt the most screwed up thing I've ever heard of.

GJC

Future income for programmers...

[crazyphilman]

Options that come to mind:

1. Write books. You can't be sued for writing about how to do something. Freedom of speech protects you, and as a "copyright holder" the Machine will think you're one of its cogs. Must... Protect... COG!!!

2. Get a joe job doing IT for a public agency or college or whatever. Can't be sued for working with existing tools. Only people who produce and sell tools will be sued.

3. If you create software for your own internal use, no one can sue you for THAT, either. So, make software that does something interesting, and rent out your services DOING that something interesting without making it clear exactly how you're doing it ("Elves do it for us. Sign here"). You're not selling a thing anymore, just a service (in a better world, you'd be able to sell the something interesting and let everyone do it for themselves, but the dicks are in charge, so tough luck, world).

4. Be a consultant setting up bland, boring, same-old systems for boring, staid, large companies. You're just a technician! No patent infringement here.

Simple Fix

[AstroDrabb]

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).

Given the state of politics in the US nowadays

[Lonath]

these people need to step back for a moment and ask themselves: "What Would Jesus Do?"

Software patents battle ground against...

[3seas]

....Physics of Abstraction (abstraction physics)

Abstraction enters the picture of computing with the representation of physical transistor switch positions of ON '1' and OFF '0' or what we call "Binary" notation. However, computers have far more transistor switches in them than we can keep up with in such a low level or first order abstract manner, so we create higher level abstractions in order to increase our productivity in programming computers. From Machine language to application interfaces that allow users to define some sequence of action into a word or button press (ie. record and playback macro) so to automate a task, we are working with abstractions that ultimately accesses the hardware transistor switches which in turn output to, or control some physical world hardware.

Programming is the act of automating some level of complexity, usually made up of simpler complexities, but done so in order to allow the user to use and reuse the complexity through a simplified interface. And this is a recursive act, building upon abstractions others have created that even our own created abstractions/automations might be used by another to further create more complex automations. In general, if we didn't build upon what those before us have done, we then would not advance at all, but rather be like any other mammal incapable of anything more than, at best, first level abstraction. But we are more, and as such have the natural human right and duty to advance in such a manner.

There is an identifiable and definable "physics of abstraction" (abstraction physics), an identification of what is required in order to make and use abstractions. Abstraction Physics is not exclusive to computing but constantly in use by ... well... us humans. Elements or facets of abstraction physics include the actions of abstraction creation and use, such as defining a word to mean a more complex definition (word = definition, function-name = actions to take, etc.), Starting and Stopping (interfacing with) of an abstraction definition sequence, keeping track of where you are in the progress of abstraction sequence usage (moving from one abstraction to another), defining and changing "input from" direction, defining and changing "output to" direction, getting input to process (using variables or place holders to carry values), sequencially stepping thru abstraction/automation details (inherently includes optionally sending output), looking up the meaning of a word or symbol (abstraction) so to act upon or with it, identifing an abstraction or real item value so to act upon it, and putting constraints upon your abstraction lookups and identifications (when you look up a word in a dictionary you don't start at the beginning of the dictionary, but begin with the section that starts with the first letter then followed by the second, etc., and when you open a box with many items to stock, you identify each so as to know where to put it in stock.)

Abstraction Physics has yet to be established/recognized in a broad "common acceptance" manner, similiar to the difficulty in the acceptance of the hindu-arabic decimal system (which included the concept that nothing can have value - re: the Zero place holder). It took three hundred years (from inception) for the innovation of the now common decimal system to overcome the far more limited Roman Numeral system. (NOTE: mathmatics and the symbol sets used are also abstractions and therefor a subset of abstraction possibilities and certainly an application of abstraction physics.) Though the act of programming is still younger than many who apply it, we are technologically moving at a much faster rate of incorporating innovations and better understandings of reality. There is a physics to abstraction creation and use which can be used to model and create a non-patentable user friendly general use, and dynamic, automation (abstraction creation and usage) tool, that also allows for organized placement and access of abstractions in a logical or mapable and navigateable

Prisoners' Dilemma

[Tony]

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.

Re:Prisoners' Dilemma

[killjoe]

You don't have to redefine evil. Jesus did it for you already.

Love of money is the root of all evil.

There, nice and easy to understand and 100% correct.

It is harder for a rich man to get into heaven then for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Rich people become rich because they love money. If they have richness thrust upon them (inheritance, IPO etc) they stay rich because they fall in love with money and want to keep it for themselves.

Sounds like another Enron to me...

[also aswell]

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?

What I really don't understand is how lawsuits

[Polarism]

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..

I am not a "true believer"

[einhverfr]

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....

Re:I am not a "true believer"

[Jennifer E. Elaan]

I don't think there is any way they can fail with this. They'll just buy so many patents that they can sue anyone except another patent house (who they will NEVER sue directly) into oblivion using a shotgun method. Citing several infringements in a single case also ensures that even if one patent is invalidated, they still recover the investment in litigation. Besides, when the company is composed almost entirely of lawyers, legal costs aren't nearly as high as they would be if the lawyers had to be hired seperately.

Do it first

[physick]

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?

Shenanigans! Cops do interpret the law.

[gtkuhn]

Cops have a great deal of discretion with regard to misdemeanors. Often the only deciding factor is how much whiskey they've had. Only felonies actually require cops not to ignore it. The same is true to some degree with any position of enforcement right up to the president. (President doesn't make law, he enforces it, right?) It is not supposed to be this way, but that's just how it works from crossing guards all the way up to USPTO.

I'd use this. A market for buying Patent stuff

[tezza]

I am using Delphion to research Prior Art for an idea I'm thinking of patenting. No, not software.

I'm sorting through 2100 patents and applications that match my keywords. So far nothing that I would infringe. But there are two outcomes:

1. Yes, I'm the first one to this idea.

or a realistic probability that

2: I could infringe on someone's generically worded patent.

Okay, so if that is the playing field, what would you anti-this-idea zealots suggest??

If I infringe, then I have to look at who has the patent and attempt to contact them. I'd have to look up where their office is, and even if they're alive.
Then I have to attempt to make contact. Phonecalls and emails out of the blue for them, cold calling for me. Then the lawyers step in and negotiate.

So a lot of ball-ache, and the kicker is that once I call they know that I'm interested, and they can start to probe me to see how much it's worth to me.

With this idea, I can see advantages for having one [or several] known company who unifies the process:

1) Known address
2) Contact details for sales
3) Secretaries to take my inquiries
4) Some corporate information so that I don't have to spend £££ getting my lawyers to translate their lawyers' documents. These are all in slightly different and convoluted Legalese. 5) A range of products so I can see how much they charge for other things
6) A better chance of them not ripping me off when they know I'm interested.

As an organistation who deals with this all the time, they'd know which are the ideas that are worth a lot to someone, rather than a idea that is close to expiry and has a lot of other patents. Single patent holders like to think their ideas are going to earn them £££ x 10^£££ and try to extort you for even the simplest idea.

For those people who bitch and moan in this topic, I have to ask: How many patents have you actually applied for? Did you think through all the avenues, including actually having to license someone elses idea instead of just complaining about You versus The Man??

Can someone tell me please....

[Leadhyena]

...why is it legal to transfer patents? Shouldn't the only person allowed to have a patent be the person who invented the item worthy of the patent? If patents are really supposed to benefit the inventors they shouldn't be allowed to be sold or hoarded. Make transfer of patents and copyright illegal, and this situation would not exist.

Patents should cover copying only

[nmos]

One thing that would solve a lot of these problems would be if patents only covered copying of the idea/method in the patent and explicitly didn't block people from coming up with the same idea independantly. It could even be taken a step farther and if someone could prove that say 2 or more others had come up with the same idea independantly then the patent would be revoked on the grounds that it failed the obviousness test.