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Start-up Granted Injunction Against Microsoft
AustinSlacker writes " A San Jose, CA start-up, Alacritech Inc, was granted a preliminary injunction against Microsoft in a patent infringement lawsuit involving several patents related to Microsoft's implementation of "Chimney" TCP offload architecture."
The step you are missing in the system you propose is move from academic research to industrial scale production. This is not a trivial step. In fact, it is without a doubt the hardest step. The current system produces a very streamlined system for moving things out of academia to industry. First you have academia which, for the most part, publishes their brains out. They generally hold a few patents for royalty purposes, but they tend to make their information very widely available. For instance, some time use SciFinder at a university library to search the word 'nanotube'. Watch as the program nearly explodes with the wealth of information it brings back.
The next step in the process is to pull things out of academia, which on the whole is VERY impracticable when it comes to scale up considerations. Academia might very well have made a nanotube transistor, but academia made it using a method where it would literally take a billion years to put together a decent sized circuit board. Large industry is leery of throwing money at the problem because it requires burning money outside of their core competency with a very high chance failure.
The compromise is to have a small start up with an idea take on the project. The start up gathers up some investors, throws some smart people at the problem, and more often then not fails miserably. The bright side is that the only people that lose are the investors that made the poor investment. Some times though, the start up has a stellar idea, gathers up the money it needs, and brings the product right up to the point of production. They work out that cool new technology that takes a process from taking a billion years to complete, to making it take 5 minutes by combining an interdisciplinary group that a university would find extremely hard to field. They also do it under financial pressure to keep their ideas applicable to industry in a manner that academia finds distasteful. If the startup plays their cards right, they can take their technology to a larger company, and with the protection of IP laws, share it with them and sell it off. The large company works out the final kinks and you get a new nanotube computer on your desktop.
This system lets each step in the process focus on what they are good at. Academia is awesome at pure research. The problem is that academia is very resentful and unskilled at doing research with an eye for scale up. In fact, one of the complaints academia has been having is that they are being pushed by industry to do less pure science and do more things with industrial potential. The IP laws let academia do what it does best. It lets large corporations get ready-to-go technology without taking on risk. It lets small start ups take big risk and receive big payoffs when they do good. It lets investors keep startups with an eye on reality by insisting that they work on industrial applications.
The system is solid, and it is the reason why the US, Europe, and Japan are by far the world leaders in getting technology from an idea to the market. It isn't coincidence that the leaders are all people with the best IP protection. That is not to say that the rest of the world doesn't contribute as well. The rest of the world is certainly catching up, though it should be pointed out that they are catching up at the same rate that they are improving their IP laws.
IP laws have a lot that could use fixing. The concept is sound though. If you put in the blood and sweat to build an idea from the ground up, you get to profit from it first, before people start to copy you. That protection is what makes people willing to pour so much blood and money into their work. Utopian systems aside, this system works, and it works damn good even for all of its problems. Pull the rug out from under this system, and you basically hand over all technical innovation responsibilities to large corporations that can take an idea from start to stop inside the same company, and to universities. No offense to anyone in either of those places, but I couldn't think of two entities I would least want to see in charge of innovation. One is paranoid of risk, and the other oblivious to reality. The startup is what keeps the system sane.