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Ex-Microsoft CTO Checks In On Patent Reform
theodp writes "Defending his controversial Intellectual Ventures in a less-than-hard-hitting CNET interview, ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold finds it peculiar that some people get really wound up over patents. 'People generally don't have any problem with the patent system,' quipped Myhrvold, the inventor of Microsoft's patented Television scheduling system for displaying a grid representing scheduled layout and selecting a programming parameter for display or recording, which allows you to more efficiently select shows like Elimidate for viewing."
Not all patents are a problem i don't think, certainly nobody seems to object, it's just when very vauge ideas are patented and stockpiled by big companies that everyone starts questioning if the system needs sorting. Gotta love the idea of having to have a working implementation of the idea, that would at least weed out a fair amount of dodgy patents.
The first time I read that as "Myhrvold has pursued patentology.."
What you mean is that YOU do not have a problem with the patent system. However you do not speak for all "people", and in fact you are markedly different from most people.
To wit: When you get slapped with a multimillion frivolous patent lawsuit from a tiny scumbag parasite company like Eolas which threatens your very livelihood and business that you have worked so hard to build, you can afford to have uncle bill toss gobs of money at litigating it, then gobs more money at settling or buying off the company if it starts to look like their chances of exploiting a legal loophole to win are nonzero. And in the end you don't feel a thing. Most people can't do this. As a result "people"-- i.e. not you, real people who live outside the ivory tower where half-decade lawsuits are a negligable cost-- do tend to have problems with the patent system.
What do they say when you call to tell them that you've patented their DNA?
If he doesn't understand why people don't like software patents, then maybe he should have paid more attention to his (ex-)boss.
... 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." b gates91)
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.
-- Bill Gates in a 1991 internal memo (Source: http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/quotes/index.en.html#
A perspective I see commonly expressed around here is that patents are by and large not a bad thing but that software patents are in fact a very bad thing. Or sometimes, that patents are a good thing or at least a necessary evil but that software, "process", and "business strategy" patents are a very, very bad thing.
In the case of "process" and "business plan" patents, this is somewhat similar to what you are saying, because such patents are, by their very nature, vague.
In the case of software patents though the reason this perspective (i.e. software patents are bad in a way patents in general are not) is that with most "real" patents, the patent is a specification and in order to be subject to the patent you must actually implement that specification, must actually craft something real. In the case of the computer program though, the thing crafted is a specification-- that is exactly what a computer program is. The patent is not sufficient to implement the specification (since it isn't a real specification like a program would be, just the idea of one), and there is nothing tangible about the implementation; worse, the implementation may be in some cases human-readable text, something some people may by its very nature consider to be speech. The idea you can violate a patent simply by writing something seems absurd.
Just when corporations try, and succeede in patenting things like clicking a mouse inside a window, patents are meant to protect creative intellectual property, not to divvy the basic workings of the world up to corporations.
It's not so much that patents are bad, but what people are being allowed to patent.
With software patents, people are patenting the most simple of ideas, and they're doing it in a frenzy.
Microsoft's 'IsNot' patent is just one of the pathetic reasons why so many people have become anti-patent.
Software patents seem to be used mainly as an anti-competitive action, rather than used for protection of clever and innovative ideas.
Anybody who can't understand what the fuss is about is either completely ignorant of this situation, a moron, or plans to use his own patents in an anti-competitive way.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold has made many reports to the police about a strange balding man running after him shouting "DEVELOPER DEVELOPER DEVELOPER DEVELOPER"
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
What do you think of the complaints of how patent litigation is hurting companies? Some days it sounds like the trumped-up malpractice crisis of the '80s.
Myhrvold: Well, this is even stranger. We actually did a study on this. The overall number of lawsuits for patents is growing, but so is the overall number of patents. So explain that to me.
- this guy doesn't need anything to be explained to him, he is a crook. He did a 'study'? Let him point to the study. Let him show us that study. I bet it was nothing like a study. I bet he sit down with a couple of guys over a beer and talked about how much money they could make from litigation and that was his study.
If you then look at it and ask, what fraction of those lawsuits are due to companies that have no products, the IP-only companies--it's about 2 percent. If you look at it and say what fraction of lawsuits are due to large technology companies, it's about 2 percent.
-Look at that, he's got some numbers! I bet he just pulled those numbers out of thin air. I don't know how many companies are out there suing each other over stupid patents but I am sure it is not 2 percent. It is either something very very small like 0.0001 percent or something very large, like over 60 percent but saying it's 2 percent doesn't make any sense. It's not a real number.
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This guy hopes to make money on litigation that much is clear. He calls himself an inventor. Inventor my ass! I 'invented' things. Plenty of things. One of them is in my russkey extension - selecting text in a browser and transforming it into a different type of text right on the page. There. An invention. I bet anyone can come up with that. And I bet it would stiffle innovation if I started suing other people for doing the same.
You can't handle the truth.
I find the patent system to have strange parallels with mass religion, or more specifically, evangelical Christian beliefs.
One loose theory of why religion is originally formed is that it is a mutation of the set of rules the tribal elders set down in order to protect ones tribe. The banning of pork products made sense in the dessert as pork very hard to keep in such harsh conditions. Rules on sexual interaction were originally intended to prevent the spread of STD's in ancient times. These very rules were later warped by the church (which had turned the "rules" into its own organization) in order to force a population increase in their followers. By promoting a warped version of this rule the church now contributes to the spread of STD's, one of the very things its founders most likely hoped to prevent.
How dose this relate to software patents you ask?
Well patents were not intended to strangle progress of smaller companies, they were intended to prevent big companies with huge R&D budgets from stealing smaller companies ideas, and either beat them to market with their own idea, or buy off the researchers from the smaller companies with huge bribes.
But in order to prevent the smaller companies from becoming the very entities that threatened innovation by hoarding their ideas, patents had a time limit on them that was reasonable.
5-10 years was the norm for most countries I think, but I'd have to look it up.
Then a funny thing happened. As the means of production became more efficient, i.e. companies needed LESS protection from the competition, patents started to get Longer and Longer. So companies started to buy up patents, or lobby for longer patent lengths.
The very system that was meant to help innovation is now the main reason that innovation is suffering.
People generally don't have any problem with the patent system.
That's not a very convincing argument when you consider that most people don't have a problem with the patent system because they don't know there's a problem in the first place. Once in a while some patent will go through that will garner some attention (patent on the swing, Smucker PB&J patent, etc) but in general the patent issue flies under the radar. No doubt that's the way they like it though.
He rants about people wanting to "abolish the patent system". Yeah, right. Damn straw man arguments. The controversy is over software patents.
The European Patent Convention says that software is not an invention and cannot be patented.
That the US Supreme Court has said in various rulings in software cases that:
Transformation and reduction of an article to a different state or thing is the clue to the patentability of a process claim
Whether the algorithm was in fact known or unknown at the time of the claimed invention, as one of the "basic tools of scientific and technological work," it is treated as though it were a familiar part of the prior art.
insignificant post-solution activity will not transform an unpatentable principle into a patentable process
If you invent something like a new and nonobvious physical rubber manufacturing process it is certainly a patentable physical process whether it mentions software or not. Software does not prevent a an otherwise patentable invention from being patentable.
Software is not a "process". Any possible software is to be treated as a "familiar part of prior art". You cannot turn unpatentable software into a patentable process without some signifigant post solution physical activity. All from the Supreme Court.
Lower US courts have violated those Supreme Court rulings, particularly in the State Street Bank case which esentially ushered in software patents. Software patents which were previously and properly rejected. These lower court rulings upholding software patents only remain standing because the US Supreme Court has entirely neglected patent law for far too long.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I'm a grad student studying computer security. Recently, I made some discoveries which have the potential to significant increase the security of Web transactions. (With luck, I'll be presenting at Black Hat 2005, so please forgive me not saying more than that until my submission gets a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.) After hearing from several Ph.Ds in the field that this idea was fairly novel, I decided it'd be good to talk to a patent lawyer. After all, I came up with it on my own time, without using any university resources, in private research unconnected to my university activities, and under my contract my discovery belongs to me.
.1 = $2,000). What I'm left with is how much it'd cost me to get a patent, or $18,000.
...
So I did my research and found one of the better IP lawyers in the state. I walked into his office with a preprint of my academic paper, copies of existing academic articles which may be considered prior art, everything I thought he'd need.
His first question was whether I was willing to go bankrupt for this idea. "Uh... what?" I asked. That wasn't what I was expecting to hear.
The average cost for a successful patent, he explained to me, runs around $7,000. That news floored me; isn't the patent system supposed to be accessible to private citizens?
Oh, no, he told me, that's not the price. That's the price for a successful application. Right now, only about 35% of all software patents are granted. So the amortized cost of a software patent is about $20,000.
Then it starts getting even worse.
About one patent in ten will ever make their original investment back from licensing fees. The overwhelming majority of patents issued fail to recoup their initial outlay. Most patents are not used to get licensing fees; most patents are used to deny other people entry into your market. If a patent can keep other people out from your business, then it might make financial sense; but as it currently stands, since I have no business in this area of the security field... I'd be looking at one chance in ten of recouping my patent cost.
So, in other words, take the amortized cost of a patent ($20,000) and subtract from it the speculative revenues I'd be receiving ($20,000 *
That's considerably more than I make in a year as a graduate student. I could possibly, if I sold all my worldly possessions, get that much money together, but I'd probably have to declare bankruptcy as soon as it came time to pay my student loans. Hence, his question: is this idea worth going bankrupt over? Especially given the unavoidable fact that, if I did manage to beat the odds and get good licensing, all the major players would simply threaten to sue me for infringing on patents of theirs I didn't even know I'd infringed, and would offer just a no-cost cross-licensing deal that would let them have access to my patent for free, and all I'd really get out of it would be the mercy of them not suing me?
I'm not opposed to the existence of software patents. I think they're wildly overused, and overused in unethical ways, but there are some algorithms which are so breathtakingly new and innovative that they deserve patent protection. (RSA comes to mind as an example.)
I am opposed to a patent system which is priced far outside the capabilities of private citizens.
I am opposed to a patent system which is structured in such a way that large companies can get unlimited access to the small guy's patent portfolio just by threatening a lawsuit.
I guess you could say I'm opposed to practically every dimension of how patents are currently practiced.