Slashdot Mirror
Patents Chilling Effect on Science
cheesedog writes "The American Association for the Advancement of Science recently conducted a survey on the effect of patenting on the sciences. The results are frightening: 1/5th or more of all research projects in the United States are being chilled by patent holders. The sheer amount of research being canceled because of licensing issues is astounding, but at the same time many of these researchers hold their own patents and therefore contribute to the problem."
So what's the reason we have them again?
Don't most government-endowed monopolies have chilling unintended consequences on the markets they're supposed to protect?
Copyright gives incredible power to the top publishers (with a lock on book stores), the recording industry, and the movie distributors.
Government's monopoly on violence prevents the average person from defending their property, and use of the monopoly outside of our borders causes anger towards our citizens.
Government's monopoly on prescription drugs causes the costs to skyrocket (death sentence for the poor) and useful drugs to be delayed for years.
Government's monopoly on patent licensing is no different. The playing field is far from level. Drug companies would initially have to charge more to sell their meds, or sell through doctors groups (where generics might be contractually offlimits for those doctors). Patents don't protect bootlegs anyway, which get more pervasive as the web gets larger.
For our society to grow, we need to accept that monopolies are always bad, and only government can create them. There are no natural monopolies. The 4 or 5 times there might have been in the past I'd argue weren't meant to last, but they're gone anyway.
This being one of the reasons why up and coming countries like Chine and India will probably surpass their western counterparts in both science and engineering.
If Newton or Leibniz had invented calculus today they would have incorporated it into a computer program and filed a patent under a method for finding rates of change.
Perhaps slashdot geeks are a little different from the rest of the population because we're more motivated by advancing tech first, making money second. Unfortunately the rest of the world doesn't think like that. Science and research is only a means to a wealthy end for some people no doubt.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Obligatory spelling Nazi post:
From the summary: "The shear amount of research..."
According to Webster,
shear
Function: noun
1 a cutting implement similar or identical to a pair of scissors but typically larger -- usually used in plural.
2 chiefly British : the action or process or an instance of shearing.
3 internal force tangential to the section on which it acts -- called also shearing force
What I think they meant to say was:
sheer
Function: adjective
3 a: UNQUALIFIED, UTTER b : being free from an adulterant : PURE, UNMIXED c : viewed or acting in dissociation from all else
I mean, we don't need to know how stuff works. It just does, because that's how God made it.
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
wow...way to be efficient...NOT
this is interesting though. thats probably why research costs so much and takes so much time...:)
I wish to patent my technique for adding an apostrophe to a noun to make it posessive. For example:
Patents' Chilling Effect on Science
Baaa. I think it was supposed to be sheer.
In any case as someone stated, countries ignoring patents will thrive. Others will begin to suffer. Perhaps a trade war will result - and what will happen when large multinationals lobby powerful governments to crack down on those ignoring their IP rights?
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
Slashdotters, I warn you that I have a patent covering the discussion of the chilling effects of patents on science. This discussion must end immediately or you will be hearing from my lawyers!
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
As I step through possible scenarios in my head, patents come up. I believe I would be offering a genuinely new product, and that makes me think I can patent it and gain the entire market. Suddenly, patents don't seem so bad.
On the other hand, I understand that a patent would mean there's no competition in any given space, that innovation to reduce the price of said product/service (a net win for consumers everywhere) would never happen.
But wouldn't a company earning large profits from the patents expand, grow, create jobs, pay more taxes, and get the wheels of the economy going? Now that I'm in a position to possibly use a patent, they become easy to rationalize.
When they were only a theoretical exercise for me, patents seemed like they would have adverse affects on innovation.
I suppose the real danger is my unknowing infringement of another's patent and the hilarity that would ensue.
Mabey all of these copyrights will cause scientific research to be the first thing to reach absolute zero...
Lawyers are destroying this country, heck they practically own it. 90% of congress are lawyers, 9/10 medical suits are frivolous and the 'industry' of medical law is about playing the averages. In my home state of Georgia(USA) medical practioners have their own insurance union, they lose 1 Billion dollars a year defending against frivolous lawsuits. Only 1 in 10 of those suits actually stick...it's practically extortion.
Likewise, recent changes to IP are one of the worst things to happen to science and industry. Used correctly IP has its place in prompting innovation, but lawyers are turning IP into something strictly to leverage lawsuits with. That doesn't benefit customers, scientific organizations or industry leaders...but it does syphon mountains of cash to the IP lawyers.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
None of this will change unless and until we either get corporations to recognize that the US is losing it's ground due to stifling IP/Patent laws... or we vote in people who care.
Republican or Democratic, make sure your representative at least knows (and preferrably cares) about the current state of the patent system.
Oh, and donate to the EFF. I have.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
One must be careful about quoting the figures posted in the above article due to the fact that the survey reported only the proportion of researchers affected by patent and licensing issues that were forced to delay change or abandon their research projects.
However there were no figures given on the proportion of research projects that were adversely affected by licensing issues.
The survey is biased by the fact that those most adversely affected are the most likely to reply to the survey.
When you are talking percentage of a percentage of a percentage of the total population is can be a small fraction of the total population.
I am in a robotics research team here at UC Berkeley and we too found that often companies patent random stuff that they haven't even fully developed yet. Because patents can be overly broad (like the one on the hardware 'double-click') this can cause problems especially in cases where there is perhaps only one solution (or one cost-effective and viable one anyways) to a given problem. The solution may be blatantly obvious to the scientifically-inclined, but if someone holds a patent on it, what can you do...
I wouldn't complain as much if the patent system hired people halfway-knowledgeable or if they allowed patents only on something very specific (aka ethical to 'patent') and genuinely ingenious. But these concepts of ethics etc. are so hand-wavy that we might as well not even try to 'reform' the system, and instead just get rid of it because otherwise it will be hard to meet the standards we expect.
Perhaps another way to go at it is to have a board of scientifically-inclined folks to preside over the patent system and work at it with newer laws on what can and cannot be patented. Over time as new technologies and ways of thinking come about, such a board can continue to refine the laws. My bid for the people to serve on these boards: college professors from a mix of technical majors from various universities.
In any case, the other question is why would researchers who face this barrier file patents themselves? To do it before someone else does - it's not like prior art holds weight in today's patent system, so it is a quick solution to making sure you don't face problems in the future.
I'll leave you with that.
I'm a graduate student working on a high profile computer engineering project. My advisor (let's call him Prof X) runs the group, and also has a small side company based on his research.
I recently experienced just this effect. I needed some realistic multi-threading code to use to test a visualizer I have been working on (actually, it's not a visualizer per se, but the intermediate analysis steps you need to go through before you use the visualizer). I found out that the code I wanted to use is actually owned (patented) by Prof X's company, and that I would not be allowed to see or use it unless I signed an NDA.
(Posted anonymously for reasons that should hopefully be obvious)
It shouldn't take 'research' to arrive at this conclusion, just logic. Foster and promote a society of capitalist excess, greed, selfishness and litigation and of course real science and progress will falter.
I'm amazed anyone would call this 'news'.
I predict that in the future, everybody in the USA will earn a living by suing everybody else.
Leave that science stuff to other nations, we have better things to do.
The chilling effect could be quite useful in the areas of superconductor research.
Yes, I agree they do. However, I think your major premise goes a bit too far:
For our society to grow, we need to accept that monopolies are always bad, and only government can create them.
Consider for a moment copyright law, which you noted (negatively) "gives incredible power" to the holder. Indeed this is true, but how exactly would you propose to ever enforce any type of open source licenses (such as GPL) without copyright law granting a limited monopoly to the original author? Are you suggesting that copyrights in this context are bad? Perhaps so, but if copyrights magically never existed, the world of open source would almost immediately crumble. Your favorite software giants would totally absorb any "free" software into their own.
I think we can't just go from one extreme to the other, and expect all the earlier problems to vanish.
Part of the problem is that patents have been expanded far beyond their original intention. They were originally set up to expire in 17 years with the option for one renewal. That means that knowledge would be locked down for a maximum of 34 years. At that point it was supposed to pass in to the public domain.
It was changed because large companies had the habit of offering a pittance for licensing someone's patent. If it wasn't accepted, they would simply wait until the patent expired and then use the technology for free. Many people don't realize that the relatively modern addition of variable speed windshield wipers were invented in the early part of the previous century. I forget the exact year.
Now, however, that the patent has expired this is a standard feature on most automobiles.
This is simply the pendulum swinging back the other direction. Invention and innovation will be stifled to the point that the companies will start going out of business, strangled on their own patents. They'll be unable to bring new products to market because everything will infringe on someone else's patent. Companies are already buying other companies in order to obtain "the intellectual propery". If its to the point that you buy the whole company just to get their patents, things are desperate indeed.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
In my lab, we use liquid nitrogen to chill our science. Should I keep this method? Or should I wander down to the law department, steal some law grad students and pack them around my experiments?
... a patent was recently issued for "an anti-gravity device"
http://news.com.com/2061-11204_3-5942862.html
apparently you can get a patent on something you haven't developed
For those of you naysayers and those who speak poorly or Richard Stallman. Once again, he has proven to be correct.
is supposed to be that you would like, have an incentive to do research so that someone else couldn't screw you out of your work. If you don't develop it you should lose it.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
I agree that the patent system can be improved, but this appears to be just an examination of the costs of the patent system without any discussion of the benefit.
In one survey last year, 99% of Americans reported that the ongoing costs of operating their cars impacted their bank account in a negative manner...
True enough, but that's clearly a problem with the tax law (or perhaps tax law enforcement) rather than intellectual property law. GP is correct that, in theory, the limited monopoly of a patent is intended to enhance economic growth, not hinder it.
It is the administration of the patent system that is bad.
The U.S. Patent Office is underfunded, understaffed, and underqualified. Much of this is intentional on the part of big business and "patent companies" who profit off of a dysfunctional U.S. Patent Office not being able to do its job. The reasons things are so bad are purely intentional. Also, if a patent examiner rejects a patent, then a few phone calls are made and the patent examiner (who is more than likely some kid straight out of college) is in hot shit by his superior. So, since the patent examiners just want to get paid like everyone else, they rarely blow the whistle on companies which have a lot of lobbying influence in Washington.
Without the patent system, you would basically have a wild west business climate where the only way to protect your inventions is to hire your own thugs to deal with people who infringe on your monopoly. Of course, someone else could hire their own thugs and just steal your invention (provided they had the expertise to manage it) as well. Neither situation is good for business or a climate friendly to inventors, so that is why we have patents.
I could go on and on about why patents are necessary as well as talk about my real world experience with the system, but I think any sane person would agree patents are a necessary evil to scientific progress in business and industry. Nevertheless, the current patent system is so poorly run and so politicized that it might as well be more of a roadblock to inventors than a safeguard right now.
If you want a functioning patent system for the future, maybe you might want to write to your congressmen about how you think it would be wise to reduce social entitlement payouts to retiring old farts in the forms of medicare and social security, and put the money to better use in the U.S. Patent Office where right it is perfectly OK for a patent examiner to work a couple years for the government and then work for a "patent company" or law firm specializing in patents right after that.
Until then you get what you pay for.
I'm an indian and have lived in India for 28 years. See, the thing is, countries like India and China learn from others' mistakes. The US has had to lead in terms of not just technology, but legislation controlling technology (patents, copyright, trademarks) and everything else associated with it (education, research, the internet). When you lead, there are no guidelines and the outcome is based on your best effort.
Throw in a free economy and lobbying into the mix and you end up where the US is today. Other developing countries can see this and analyse it and if they're wise, try to learn from it. This is what India is doing (and I assume what China is too).
The question remains however, is what will happen once these countries catch up to the US and overtake it (yes, that WILL happen, just not soon and no, I'm not trying to start a flame war). Then they will be left to their own devices and where they go from there will be based on the strengths of their governmental systems, the level of corruption at that stage, etc etc.
In a nutshell, it's hard to lead, but easy to follow.
So don't give your country too hard a time for where it is right now. You guys have done a pretty good job (with technology). Ofcourse, its not the fall that matters, but how you get up.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
It seems to me that this has happened before. Around the turn of the last century, Lee DeForrest patented a whole bunch of undeveloped ideas and nonsense concerning electron tubes on the theory that something might stick. He really didn't know what he had when he developed the very first triode. But that didn't stop him from trying to patent every conceivable circuit he could imagine.
Unfortunately, Armstrong did know what the tube was good for and actually developed some very innovative circuits that lead to the Regenerative receiver. However, DeForrest's lawyers sued him because they thought they had a patent on the circuit before Armstrong did. The court couldn't sort out the details because they didn't understand the technology all that well either. They awarded damages to DeForrest, whose lawyers were well fed...
Today, you can look at DeForrest's patents and decide for yourself whether he really had a clue as to what a regenerative receiver was. Most technically literate people agree that his patent was merely a fishing expedition.
So here we are today: The AAAS has just realized that there might be a problem with patents. Golly! They're about 100 years too late IMNSHO. This festering heap of a stupid idea called patents began to be a problem when it became apparent that no one person could know all there was to know about science as people could claim in Ben Franklin's day. Today, it's harder and harder to find people who know all there is worth knowing about even a small branch of physics.
This concept of patent reform is so overdue that the best thing we can do about it is to junk the whole edifice and start over. It's that bad. We've known it since the last century. Why is it still here?
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Hello, everyone! I'm Pettie the Don't Sue People Panda!
Intellectual property laws are long-overdue for a revision. A while ago I stumbled upon a site collecting information about the most ridiculous patents ever issued. It's hard to believe the kind of nonsense the US Patent Office is creating. Clearly, the problem is not just with the laws, but also with their implementation. Looking at some of the patents one can't help but wonder about the technical skills of people issuing these patents, or, indeed, about their sanity. It's all very funny until you realize that overly restrictive intellectual property laws are hampering scientific and technological progress. These kinds of restrictions give the edge to other countries that exploit our technological achievements while paying little attention to our patent game. It's time we think about this problem in terms of its impact on our economy and national security.
This is absolutely true. Every time something gets posted here about patents, somebody inevitably brings up failings of the system, and blames either the lawyers or the examiners. These folks are just doing their jobs according to the laws in place. If you don't like it, talk to the legislators, not the implementors. Blame the broken system; cure the disease at its source.
(...and you're probably right about the karma thing, too!)
Choke your pride and sign the NDA. I fail to see what the problem is.
(I use code from work in pursuit of my thesis, they were more than happy to extend a NDA to me, I scratch their back they scratch mine...)
-everphilski-
The whole idea behind patents is to make sure that the innovator gets 'credit' for the Idea/Innovation but In my view there are 2 very crucial elements in this process of protection/ownership of innovation, first is the definition of innovation itself & second is the duration of protection. The definition of innovation should come as a measure of new-ness of the idea/innovation i mean what the hell is one click shopping patent for!!.
... of course individuals will be screwed as always :-(
Second is duration of protection, this has become very important in current times because duration of protection is basically a measure of 'how much time can one reasonably expect somebody else to come up with same/similiar idea given the present pace of development in this field'. Any lesser protection & you are screwing the inventor, any more & you are screwing the rest of society. In present times the pace of development has caught up & also the ability to innovate is also increased due to much better availability of information & resources (like computer/os/compiler) so the patent office should adjust the ability acquire patent protection accordingly. It really is as simple as that. Also, in not doing this patent office really is hurting itself because if everything one dreams of is patentable then effectivly the meaning of protection will be lost & it will just become another legal process that a company/institution has to go through
We are always correct.. even when we realize we were wrong.
How much more research is done in industry because patents exist? You think government officials are better at picking who to fund than the open market? Talk about a narrow-minded view of things.
Congress shall have power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
So the question is, if patents are now starting to impede the progress of science and technology (and I'm willing to bet plenty of people on slashdot could think of instances in which this is the case), there is a good case to be made that as it stands now, the law governing patents is no longer constitutional.
Just a thought. Feel free to flame.
You can see the actual report here .
Perhaps this is why there is a shift away from science in the US? People say we need to "reignite" science here, but with such strong patent laws I could see why scientists would be more persuaded to research elsewhere.
The patent bar is the only bar in the U.S. that allows practicioners to be non-lawyers. Sure, you're an agent, rather than an attorney, but you still practice before the USPTO. (And the practice is quite lucrative, if anybody is thinking of finding a new job.) The USPTO has tons of discretion to choose who practices before it, according to the Supreme Court in Sperry v. Florida.
Just another example of how the USPTO has too much power for it to use effectively, and how Congress has failed to properly regulate the patent industry.
And why we're at it, let's just abolish all private property rights. That way we could all enjoy the benefits that are now reserved for those money grubbing capitalists whose only contribution is to pay to employ us while we're inventing all this cool stuff. I don't care who owns it. I just want to be paid to try and fail and try and fail over and over until I finally have something that can be tried in the market place over and over and have a billion in one chance of returning any money at all back to the evil capitalist. Rather than the capitalist making money off it, I would rather GIVE my inventions freely to the world so that all mankind may benefit from my benevolence but of course still recognize me as the great genius that I am!
Research is being removed with clippers and/or scissors because of patents? Hopefully they do away with patents so we can go back to removing research by hand.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
At present, I have three patents in the works, and another two in the pipe. The are a number of patents that are out there with a stereocenter change or an addition of a methyl group, which do not change anything in the active site (biological). There are no changes to the compound itself "actively" (take a look at the advertised pharmacuticals). This is very alarming to me, due to the proliferation of paper. In general, some patents should encompass one central theme and cover the other additions in general terms, therefore making a single patent out of many. Right now, (IIRC) there is a ~28 month waiting period for the USPTO to look at your patent. Another reason for the time lag is the amount of money that you can use to place your patent in front of the line. I am waiting for this to snap someone in the butt, because of the time lag and filed patents.
Exchange of knowledge is the way that science works. However, businesses view the exchange of knowledge as "losing your advantage in the marketplace." I am really getting tire of patents, due to the time lag and legal problems that you have to go through. On the other hand, patents are the best way to own and profit.
Yep, money is the reason.
for it's current purpose: stablizing the market. If you're an invester, the last thing you want is innovation making it tough to invest. All those people who lost boat loads in .com boom are pissed right now, and they're looking for a way to consolidate the market into a few big players that yeild consistent returns. No more Microsoft's stealing IBM's thnder, and no more Google's stealing Microsoft's thunder. Just smooth, steady earnings.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
my idea turned up zero patents found! what do i win?
Fuck yea!!!!!
It is long overdue.
1. Have new idea.
:(
2. Patent it.
3. Profit!!
Great point; the whole software industry could feasibly collapse in this scenario. Currently our laws treat software like a recipe; nothing more than an expression of a set of instructions. But here, it's as if we'd have the ability to perfectly recreate any arbitrarily tasty dish (say, the perfect egg salad). New software would become literally worthless, because you'd have instant arbitrage down to zero cost. Oh, by the way, the same would hold for other digital content (think movies, music, etc.).
Still, I can't see such a hypothetical universe would be necessarily better in all respects. However it's highly intriguing to consider the vast ramifications.
As someone who works in physics research, and is concerned more with publishing papers than getting patents (although my advisor has quite a few), I'd be curious to see if something like a peer review system could work for patents. As with scientific journals, the editors (in this case, patent office personnel) can't be expected to thoroughly know every subject matter that comes their way, but it's not that difficult to find experts in the field who can point out flaws or know right away if work is fraudulent or unoriginal.
Are there any downsides to this that I'm not seeing, besides the obvious one that it will require researchers and inventors to volunteer time? I know that Physical Review Letters has a policy that the editors will automatically reject a significant percentage of submitted papers deemed obviously inappropriate for publication before sending them on for review, something similar to which would probably have to be implemented here, maybe just in the form of the current system.
people use to be able to ammend their application forever to effectively extend their patent, but now the expire 20 years after filing PERIOD. While drug companies change their formula slightlty and re-patent, the original formula is available for generics.
So because child porn wasn't outlawed in the US until only half a century ago or so, exploiting children was peachy keen because the photographers and participants were obeying "the laws in place"?
Just because something is legal doesn't make it right.
Well no, of course not. It seems like a non-sequitur troll, but let's examine it, just in case you're serious. The idea here is that, if you disagreed at the time, you'd have two choices. I suggest that society would be better off in the long term working to enact laws to make such exploitation illegal. The alternative is simply to point blame directly to the exploiters. Pointing blame doesn't carry much weight, and doesn't really address the fundamental problem now, does it?
So, what exactly would you propose? Take the law in your own hands and shoot all the exploiters? Well, that might work once or twice, but soon you'll find yourself on the wrong side of the law ("right" or otherwise for stopping the exploitation). Murder has been illegal for quite some time.
As a relatively civilized society, we tend to create criminal laws for just this purpose; to allow reasonable enforcement of reasonable standards. Of course it's not a perfect world where right==legal, and I still don't see how you jumped to that conclusion from my posting in the first place.
- They could notice that you have a patent, and decide not to.... (right!).
- They could license the rights from you. This is sometimes known as 'a deal with the devil'. Many a company has been burned by some wierd technicality that Microsoft places in such licensing agreements, and if they violate the agreement, you end up at option #5.
- They could find a way around your patent (they have enough lawyers and programmers that this is a real possibility).
- They could sue your for breaking any of their Thousands of (sometimes trivial) patents and simply litigate you into oblivion.
- They could violate your patent (possibly also a non-disclosure agreement signed under the guise of #2) and let you decide if you want to sue them, risking a counter-suit (see #3) and scaring off investors.
Current patent law really only serves the really big companies. Unfortunately, it's the smaller companies that tend to be the source of most innovation. -- Most of Microsoft's big 'innovations' came from small companies [[ the biggest exception would be windows, which was lifted from Apple ]]Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
risking a counter-suit (see #3)
Urk. That should be "see #4".
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
MOD PARENT -1 TROLL.
The shear amount of research being canceled because of licensing issues is astounding
We don't want people cutting research just because of patents.
Research should continue to separate fact from fiction despite patents.
We should slash the number of patents that people are able to hold.
I'm all out, anyone got any more?
meh
Fuck them...
Fuck them right in the ear!!!
All too true. MS is so large, they could easily rip off your idea with very little you could do to get back at them. I'm curious how many people have been ripped off (patent wise) by MS...and how many people have tried and failed getting damages from them. I do not know too many people who have enough constitution or money to stand up against the kind of legal power MS can procure.
I ask because I am in the tenuous position of trying to decide whether MS is infringing on one of my patent applications. If they aren't, no problems. But if they are, I'd like to talk to, or rather study, the successful legal prosecution of another's patent. Windows Vista would be the target...:)
I am John Hurt.
Patents exist to make more research possible. Therefore, in order to determine whether they do that, one must compare the number of research projects inhibited by patents to the number of research projects made possible by them. Just saying "1/5" are prevented by them is not enough information, especially if the other 4/5 wouldn't have been possible with-ought patents. Then there's the issue of which research is important. . .
Asimov had a point when he said that a decline in scientific advancement was a symptom of the decline of a society.
Has anyone looked at the ammount of private/corporate funding entering into the research world? As one who IS in the know (grad student from very tech heavy school in Cali, I'm sure you could figure it out if u wanted to) there is an unprecidented ammount of funding and opportunities entering research driven school. And yes this drives science. There are positive and negative effects from patenting, but it can easily be said that the effort ( in joint appointees, cold cash, and technology partnerships) that patents inspire in the corporate world has a significant positive impact on the new output of research areas. I dont have hard numbers, but I can say that the money coming into the emerging field of "NanoMicroBio-" etcetera is staggering, in the high hundreds of millions US.
While the report 28% of 40% (or about 11%) of scientists had to stop their research due to patents, 55% of scientists state that they use patents to protect their IP. So it appears that patents help about 5 times as many research projects than it stops.
I think the best solution would be some kind of fixed patent royalty percentage on all products. The burden of getting a piece of that percentage falls on the patent holders instead of manufactures. The most important part is that it reduces surprises where out of the blue you are faced with a mad patent claim.
Table-ized A.I.
Personally, I beleive that patents on inventions was a bad idea right from the start. On the surface it might seem I nice idea that if I spend years developing an idea and implementing it in practice that I would have exclusive rights to market the product. But, when you think about it, it was the product that too years to produce, not the idea. Copyright, registered designes, trade secrets, NDAs and first to market advantage and striving to stay ahead of cometition should be enough comerical advantage to make it easily worth while for companies and individuals to strive for inovation.
Speaking from my personal situation as a small comersial software devoper striving to be inovative. I would be more then happy to see the patent system totall abolished. From my point of view, a patent system, no matter how it is implement in practice, is going to be an impedance.
How is it fair if there are 100s of people working in the same feild all striving to inovate, all coming up with similar ideas, often the same ideas with in similar time frames, all investing large amounts of time and money into making these idears work in practice, only to find somebody else can prove they had the idea first? They all came up with the idea independantly, they all invested heaps of money.
How is it fair if in my day to day work I am constantly thinking up solutions to problems, where each day any one of thoughs solutions could be infringing on a patent?
How can I garantee to my customers that they wont be infringing a patent by using my code? There is no way I can tell that I am not infringing a patent.
How is it fair that if I patent something, I can't afford to defend it because legal costs are way to prohibative?
How fair is it that if somebody sues me for patent infringment, I likly can't afford to defend it?
It seems to me that if the patent system was removed, tech companies would be force to compete on the tecnical front, rather then the legal front. We could get on with the job of trying to make better product then the compention.
I think most small developers are force to take the "don't worry to much about patents and hope for the best" approach.
Scientists are also human, and susceptible to the same influences as other people. People will do or say or swear to a simply amazing amount of bogus crap if the price is right or the blackmail material is juicy enough or the power and glory associated with this or that is of high enough caliber to be attractive. Did you ever see the official "scientific" explanation of TWA flight 800? It was simply beyond ludicrous. That's a good example (one of a huge number) of money plus coercion masked by the label "science". We have slang terms for it on the net when you see it,we call it FUD and astroturfing, they just call it "business" and "government policy" when there's something slimy going on. Slap a white lab coat on it so it must be true? Not all the time...
Perhaps we should be asking why so many unoriginal and untalented researchers want to duplicate the patented work of others.
That's not true. Shear Research is alive and well.
That having been said, a legitimate plan and ability to survive long enough to win a full-out court battle (normally measured in years) would probably be a necessity in order to get MS to pay out. One company reduced itself to little more than a litigation shell that did nothing more than run the lawsuit for years in order to win against MS.
Unless you're big enough that you can manage a major lawsuit and get on with your 'real' business, I'd say that spinning off a company just for the purposes of the lawsuit(and even negotiations) is at least worth considering.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I would like to patent the storyline of an unknown entity (which we'll call god) creating a universe in seven days, two humans and some animals. As a continuation of this storyline there will be a lot of begatting, some war and the final half of the storyline will be dedicated to the human incarnation of the son of this god and his death to save all mankind. I am still working on the epilouge but I believe it will involve trumpets and tounges of fire......
No offense intended but I believe this is a good representation of why the current patent system doesn't work.
/. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
for 'not directly usable' read 'not usable'. ie: locked down
and the publication requirements don't mean squat anymore (if they ever did). part of the purpose of hiring a patent lawyer to write your patent is so nobody can tell how your invention (if you have one) works by reading the patent and so it covers as many possible competing inventions as possible.
Businesses are already wild-westish anyways. Patents aren't some kind of magic duct tape that keeps our economy sane, nobody patented concept of an mp3 player, yet Appl makes one that becomes synonomous with portable music and nobodies ever heard of... the Rio. You can produce anything you want, but if it's hot, it's just hot - there are no guarantees that you will get to be the only one moving said product.
define:shear,
define:sheer.
Although when talking about about researched being cancelled, shear does make for pretty vivid imagery. baaah!
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
when somebody posted a story about how pharmaceutical patents were chilling research.
/. morons - including an actual patent attorney who argued FOR this shit - duh! - came out of the woodwork - er, bit bucket - and I suppose they'll be out in force this time, too, saying "Gee! How can anybody invest without being guaranteed a monopoly?"
The usual
Morons.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
At least Kansas will be happy to hear about this.
There really needs to be a massive overhaul of the patents issue. Realistically many science institutions in third world countries dont pay the licensing fees anyway for the use of the information. The real effect is that it stifles many science projects in the first world and the countries like india and china are catching up or overtaking the first world and its all because the greed in the first world is horrific.
Well posted! This is one part of it, but I think there are more dreams out there which people believe in, wether they are true or not, and do everything in their power to make it true. I'll just add one major dream that the currents trends in society is being ruled by:
The Economist Dream
The Economics Dream is very simple: It is the capitalist belief that if you just make every exchange in society a transaction, we will automatically make the right decisions due to market forces somehow making those perfect decisions for us. Whatever will be the cheapest solution, when everything is marketized, will be the Best Solution.
Remember the stories about the supposed Information Age, when Information would be sold and bartered with, just like the stock market? This is one such idea based on The Economist Dream. Make everything a transaction, and whatever you need can be bought and whatever you have can be sold.
It didn't quite turn out that way however. What information is being bought and sold between corporations is information about us, our private information. Remember those privacy statements where corporations claim they will only share your information with their affiliates? I guess that means information about you will be sold to Checkpoint, or some other company, that then resells this information further to the highest bidder, or lose the information to some hacker..
The Economist Dream is all about making everything a transaction, as if money-flow will solve every conceivable issue in this world. As we have seen, money is also generating problems for us, because these corporations are beginning to have a life on its own! "We have to do it because our stockholders will sue us." "They have to do it because they have to maximize capital." Etc. Etc. The excuses begins to pour in. Corporations should not be ammoral entities to an extent where they can control the people who "runs" them!
Decisions are being made based on money every day, and if it doesn't get out of hand, this is a good balance. Nobody should do nothing and be rewarded for it, certainly. But if we let it take control of our planet, it will go very wrong.
Especially information is not suited to The Economist Dream. Information is intangible and can be copied almost without cost. Indeed, when information is shared it enriched everyone and leads to innovations the original author never thought about! If it is withheld it enriches only the few who hold it, if it ever does any good. The biggest potential for information is when it is freely shared, instead of going through a toll-booth.
However, those who believe in The Economist Dream believe EVERYTHING should be made a transaction. They fail to realize that a transaction also constitute a friction, a lowest barrier that must be overcome, while the natural state of information is frictionless. Software will naturally become commodized, because over time the market forces will force the value of software down to the natural cost of information. Open Source and Free Software (GPL) is only a catalyst for this process.
Just like many dreams, The Economist Dream is a partial solution, but it shouldn't be applied to areas where reality dictates otherwise. We shouldn't challenge reality, the natural way of living, because building a card-deck house will crumble to the slightest wind.
The Economist Dream also has fundamental problems in the very decision-making. It makes our mind go to our thoughts and intellect, more than go to our hearts. Good decisions are made from a mix of heart and intellect, but when decisions are made only from the intellect, it can quickly turn "cold" and cynical. When we lose our innocence in making decisions, conflict arises. However, when we make decisions from the heart also, we will not try to trick others or otherwise make "cold-hearted" decisions. We will want what is best for everyone, and thus any mistakes we do, can be forgiven, because they were just that: mistakes, and not intention.
The Ec
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
"Without the patent system, you would basically have a wild west business climate where the only way to protect your inventions is to hire your own thugs to deal with people who infringe on your monopoly."
You have no natural exclusive claim to an idea just because you had it.
I can open a chocolate shop in Alphabet street and just because I'm the first person to have the idea of doing that, doesn't mean I can stop other people opening a chocolate shop on alphabet street. Many people can have the same idea independantly, each has the same moral claim to the idea.
THERE'S NO REASON A PERSON HAS AN EXCLUSIVE ON AN IDEA JUST BECAUSE THEY THINK THEY ARE THE FIRST TO HAVE IT!
Patents were to cover a very special case:
The case where to develop the idea to a working invention would cost a lot of money, but the cost to copy it was low and so there would be no way to recoup the development costs. For example, you invest in a drug, spend 10 years getting it approved then release it only to have it copied within a year. You've borne 10 years worth of development and testing costs, and the copiers haven't and you only had 1 year of sales to try to recover that cost.
It that situation wasn't corrected, then nobody would develop new drugs because there would be a net loss of each development no matter how clever they were.
But now they're issuing patents to anyone with nothing but an idea, and they're no even doing a search to see if they just read it off the internet, or got it in a suggestions email.
The idea cost them nothing, they have no cost to recover.
My English teacher told me you don't put possessive apostrophes to common nouns, only to persons, so you'd say "My friend's car", but "My car wheel" instead of "My car's wheel". Wasn't he right?
funded that would all but disappear without patents to protect the work. If you read the article carefully, you realize it isn't much of a big deal. Only about 10% of respondants (not a random sample, by a longshot) reported giving up a research project because a patent stood in the way. Most of the time, the respondants were just claiming that the licensing issues delayed their research. However, if you think about it the other way, without the licensed technology in the first place, the research would never have been done! Better late than never.
Do you really think eliminating patents would advance science? In the absence of patents, corporations will be forced to hide their research as a last-resort. I fail to see how this helps science in any way.
Given that his claim is totally inconsistent with common use and that there is absolutely nothing ambiguous about a phrase like "my car's wheel", no, he was totally wrong.
I'd suspect UK/US law to be similar regarding research use.
I find patents quite scary!
I invent something, let's just call it the Dribblecatcher.
I go through lots of research to make sure it is unique, not infringing on other patents and that it has all the qualities demanded of a patent.
I patent it, start production and sell a good number, almost ready to make a profit on my substantial investments ... when Big Bad Company Ltd. introduces their product, the Droolstopper, which clearly infringes on my patent.
I get my lawyer (I cannot afford more than one, so it isn't "lawyers") to write Big Bad to stop them from selling the infringing product. Their lawyers reply that they have no intention of stopping a lucrative business and that they'll rather see me in court.
Now, I could go to court, but I would only be able to sustain the expenses for a very short time and thus have no real choice but letting Big Bad go on with their business.
Then suddenly this letter drops in, "Your product, the Dribblecatcher, infringes on our patent for droplet recovery, US 1234..... Please refrain from further sales and marketing of said product and furthermore please pay us $xxxxxxx for the improper use. We reserve the right to seek damages, etc ..."
Even the best effort on my part to find the above patent has failed and my business is in shambles because of an unscrupulous, big competitor and a "hidden" patent.
What do I do? (Apart from crying myself to sleep every night.)
It's the same in the UK - we are given amnesty from patent laws for purposes of research. But if you try and distribute your code or anything similar you will be punished (if caught).
Microsoft's biggest customer is the US government. In conclusion, you are wrong.
I think the decline will be more insidious. I also think that the Chinese/ Indians/ Martians whoever will be wise enough not to pick a straight fight so it won't come to that. Luckily the world was sensible enough not to try to beat the USSR in a straight military fight, too many realised that would be too messy, to put it politely. I think the same will happen next time round. I think the next shift in global power will be more subtle and is already happening - the shift in the next generation of key industries to another country/ region, with it finance and wealth, bringing national shifts in influence. I'm from the UK - in the medieval period England was one of the big countries because it had sheep, and wool, a major trade.. who cares about wool these days?
I also think that the USA is fortunate compared to many countries that it hasn't experienced a modern war on its own soil and so there is a more Victorian attitude towards war (it's something that happens in far off exotic countries, you wave the brave boys off in their shining armour and they either march proudly back as heroes or at least in tidy coffins). I think most countries are a little more reticent about sabre rattling and if a power struggle is to happen they will try other alternatives first. Nobody in their right mind would try to take on the no.1 nuclear power in the world if there are more clever ways to win ground.
...for the right to create variable speed windshield wipers? That certainly seems obvious and I know I'd never pay for such a ridiculous thing, merely on principal. (Unless of course I somehow couldn't figure out a mechanism and theirs worked well... but c'mon any halfway decent ME could figure this out in their sleep.)
I read that as "Parents Chilling Effect on Science", and was quite confused.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
Well, we got to gits us a committee together to make sure stuff isn't an evil invention of Popery. They don't even believe in the Creation Story, what kind of Good Christians are they?
I'm a little confused by this article. (IANAL) First off, I'm pretty sure patents can be used without license for research activities anywhere. I am sure this is true in academics where patents mean very little. Good luck suing a university. I'm wondering if these dropped 'research projects' were either cases of researchers being scooped (another group publishing first) or not really research at all, but product development. If you want to do research with patented material, go to a university. You can do all the research you like and no one will care. You can't sell products based on patented material, but that doesn't constitute research.
Research projects get dropped all the time. Scientific research in biotechnology and pharma is very, very expensive. If patents didn't exist, many companies would work on the same problems, science would become completely based on trade secrets (the alternative to patents) and innovation would probably be stifled.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
However, if you think about it the other way, without the licensed technology in the first place, the research would never have been done! Better late than never.
Nonsense. Much if not most research gets done for the same reason much software gets created: Someone needs its results for their own use, or to benefit a product which has functions above and beyond those which an individual patent might cover. Even if their competitors copy the fruits of their research, one still had first-mover advantage in applying it first.
I say this as an individual holding a substantial stake in a small software company. I personally stand to benefit substantially from software patents if we can sell or license them -- but this does little to help our vulnerability from either (1) a larger company with a substantial patent portfolio wishing to force a cross-licensing agreement to allow them to use our technology for free, or (2) a holding company with one or two widely applicable patents we infringe on, and no product development of their own by which they might infringe on our patents (which are mostly specific to the field we're in, anyhow). Personally, I would be happy to clear the playing field altogether and compete on the merits of our product (and the difficulty of reproducing the years of research that went into our product even when one is able to observe that product's behaviour) without these risks in play.
Even so, I'm not saying that the patent system needs to eliminated. Rather, I argue only that it needs to be scaled back dramatically, particularly in areas like software where invention is comparatively cheap and low-risk. Adding an affirmative defense of independant invention makes sense in almost all cases except those where the initial invention incurrs very high risk (such as the pharma industry).
Uhm, exactly what style of aikido are you talking about here?
Perhaps you were thinking about karate?
The emphasis of aikido is on grappling and neutralization without harm to the attacker, not leveling with blows. It's probably the best martial art to use for self-defense from the point of view of your post.
In practice, however, if the attacker is stupid enough to ignore the pain which his body is using to warn him to submit, he still can hurt himself by strongly resisting being controlled or pinned.
There is a serious problem with overly-broad software patents, and this needs to be addressed. I am not an expert in that field but it is pretty obvious even from the outside that there is a problem. However, copyrights at minimum are still necessary in software development (or else everyone will just copy all your hard work for free).
At least in my field (chemistry) patents are all but a necessity. There are basically three facets to introducing a new chemical to market - figuring out how to make the chemical, proving it works in the customer's process, and figuring out how to scale the production to commercial levels. By just waiting for your competitor to do the research, you can get a free ride on all but the last step. Honestly, by the time they could actually get the product validated at the customer's site, you could be up and running with an identical product.
Industries should also be somewhat limited in their actions. In Brazil, a topic that worries people is biopiracy. We had some bad experiences in this area. A Japanese company, for instance, tried to secure a patent for the cupuaçu fruit, a chocolate-substitute from the Amazon. Pure theft. The government put up a fight and won. Anthropologists have also denounced excursions by biologists collecting Amazonian and Xingu indians' native medicine know-how. There have been a few arrests in that area. There's been some concern about evangelical missionaires amongst the indians, as no one knows for sure who they are.
In another example, Mr. Craig Venter wanted to collect microorganisms from the shores of Brazil, but the government did not allow his boat to come in a 200-mile distance from the coast. Today, he's on newspaper saying the Brazilian government hinders research, but all the government wants is that any commercial benefits be shared. All Craig Venters wants is to steal.
Biopiracy is another aspect of the patent system gone wrong. Except, it's one that doesn't affect developed countries. Brazil is a Latin-American powerhouse that can and will muster a reaction everytime this happens, but there are smaller countries that cannot.
In fact, the whole thing of biopiracy and patents is absurd. The notion that organisms found in the Amazonian rain-forest "belong" to Brazilians is absurd, but so is the notion that a foreign company can come into this country, collect plants and organisms, go back to its original country and file a patent for a molecule or a gene.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
The word is SHEER you incompetent American cunts.
Don't forget that there's a lot of information in the negative results. Perhaps that report from the AAAS has information on this, but I would be curious to know why the 4/5 of research projects were supposedly stopped due to patents. I'd bet that a similar number of research projects are not started since published material in scientific literature already exists.
Talking about a "chilling effect" makes for good heebie-jeebies in an article, but there's bound to be researchers that do not start research projects because much of the big work has already been done. Unless there's a really big profit on the horizon, once the "low-lying fruit" have been claimed, many researchers don't bother dealing with the details, because you're not going to get a Science article based on those. So, without knowing what stopped those 4/5, it's a big step to say the patent system is ruining research.
Also, remember that patents are only as good as the person writing them, and a large portion of them can be worked around rather easily by evading only a single claim. Also, patents only allow you to stop someone from making money on your invention, not from researching to improve an invention. If Big Company makes Widget 1.0, I can still make Widget 2.0 and patent the improvements. If those improvements are substantial enough, Big Company will want to make their own Widget 2.0, but then they'll have to license from me to do so, even though they made the original invention. In the end, the lawyers are the only definite winners, but without patents a big motivator for research would be gone.
If anything needs fixing, it's probably the area of biotech (patenting genes?!!! maybe we do need to invoke a creator...it'll be the prior art) and maybe software (say what you want, but 1-click checkout is an innovation, and if there truly is prior art, the patent and the company's $25,000 spent on getting it go pffft). Additionally, it would be good if the patent office maybe were more progressive in their pricing, allowing for some small business exemption or funding.
Wouldn't a good solution be to just limit the time people can hold technology-related patents? No one should be able to hold onto "a system of navigating websites through links" for 10-20 years. Especially since, at the moment, we are innovating so fast. Give them 3 years to take an idea to product, and then its free territory.
Of course; it's easy to recognize the future that Roddenberry (and countless others) have vividly described. As an end game, it's great! The only problem is during that pesky (and highly non-trivial) "transitional" period, when lots of stuff is free and lots of other stuff is not. We have to solve some basics first--starting at the lowest tier of the Maslow hierarchy of needs--before we can realize the potential. Some may argue that software may help satisfy some of these basic needs, but certainly software alone can't do it. And to bring this back on topic, it's debatable whether a limited monopoly would encourage or discourage the fundamental research required to satisfy these needs.
If you talk to most patent examiners they don't care. They think its their job to approve as many patents as possible and the courts can decide which ones are valid or not. They honestly don't see anything wrong with the current system.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
If Congress were to pass a law granting "exclusive rights" to smiling it would be ruled unconstitutional. The powers of Congress are fairly broad in that a lot can fall under the umbrella of promoting general welfare. But ridiculous laws that forbid smiling are overstepping constitutional authority. It's similarly ridiculous to say you cannot put an idea to use that you came up with yourself just because someone else filed a patent on it. However, this is authorized by the constitution in the context of promoting progress. A few bad patents can be expected, but if the system as a whole impedes progress rather than promoting it, then it's unconstitutional.
A post full of false information should be modded down! Please, does none of you know the length of a patent? Geez..
"without patents to protect the work."
You mean, without appropriate economic incentives. Patents are not appropriate economic incentives; the monopolistic nature of such a 'protection' has no place in a free market capitalist system. The very idea of artificial scarcity through legal monopolies is antithetical to a free market economy.
The ability to _prevent_ others from using specific knowledge is what causes the problems, not the ability to recieve economic reward from the use of such knowledge.
"Do you really think eliminating patents would advance science?"
Without a doubt. There are far more appropriate ways to reward increased R&D without incurring the economic damage caused by monopolistic competition-free zones and artificial scarcity in the market.
I can't offer any information about the actual patent. However, there was some talk about a court decision in the early '90s. I had just purchased a new 1991 vehicle and within about two years at the most, talk was going around that the big auto-manufacturers were going to have to pay royalties on the intermittent wiper action. I noted this because shortly after I bought my vehicle some deffective attmpted to steal it, breaking the steering column cowling and hot-wiring the horn. Evidently he didn't notice the lock was in the dashboard. When the car was repaired, they had used a slightly more costly set of switches in the cowling and I then had intermittent wipers without knowing it. I turned them on accidentally and thought the repair was faulty for about 10 minutes.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Patents could be renewed during the 19th century for repeated terms of seven years for a fee at each renewal. If you look at the patent dates on various objects manufactured then you will often see a "pat." date, frequently followed by additional dates at seven year intervals. I originally thought the patent term was seven years because of this.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
...because their editing is far superior to Slashdot's.
Wake up, editors.
Or, hire someone who knows grammar and spelling.
Yes, it matters. No whining.
What makes humanity strong is for one person to build on the ideas of those that came before. If North Americans and Europeans don't build on what humanity has, I guarantee that others will, and it will be our loss.
1968???
...seems that this is not a *new* problem afterall...if in 40+/- years we have gotten worse (certainly not better!) under the current system, then perhaps the minimum we should look at is the total abolition of the protection systems.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
...that was stifiling science in the US.
7 &threshold=0&commentsort=0&tid=103&mode=thread&cid =13782904
Here's the reference: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=16518
Mod me a troll/flamebait, I don't care. My point is STILL dead on.
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
And I have two cases as proof.
Did you know that squaring something is exactly equivalent to taking the absolute value of it? I have two cases as proof:
There you have it! Conclusive proof!
Seriously, while those examples may be interesting, picking any two examples really doesn't tell you anything about the overall balance of the impact of the patent system on our technological development.
The Slashdot analysis is slapdash. The summary of the AAAS/SIPPI report itself is as follows:
Early in 2005, SIPPI undertook a survey of about 1,100 AAAS members to determine what effects patenting, if any, has had on research conducted by scientists in academia, industry, government, and nonprofit organizations. Among its results, the survey found that by a suprising 2:1 margin, industry scientists reported having more difficulty in accessing patented technologies than academic scientists. However, this could be the result of the greater volume of intellectual property created by industry, as well as industry's heavy reliance on licensing-a process more sophisticated and time-consuming than the means used in academia for technology transfer.
First, the numbers the original poster used are fabrications. The numbers quoted are not representative of the entire sampled population (1,111), but are percentages of those who answered a specific question. The numbers [n's] from the body of the report have been plugged into the following analysis , which should make this clear. Remember, this was a relatively small sample, but still one of the largest to date on the topic of patents and research) Of the 40% of respondents [n=72 of the 179 of the 1,111 who answered this question] who reported their work had been affected, 58% [n=42] said their work was delayed, 50% [n=36] reported they had to change the research, and 28% [n=20] reported abandoning their research project.
In the detailed sections of the survey, they do indicate that some scientists changed or discontinued research due to IP issues. They also seek IP protection in large numbers - so there is at best a mixed message. For those for whom IP was a disincentive, it is not clear what really lay behind it - lack of sophistication, lack of support from tech transfer offices, a desire to just not hassle with it, the fact that the reseach was more late stage (nearing commercialization) than early (more academic) or what. The IP devil here really is in the details and without that detail an appropriate policy response (other than the sky is falling) cannot be made.
The constant truth here is that Bayh-Dole has worked and technologies are being brought from academic research to the market. Without IP, research efforts would satisfy academic curiosity, but there was no incentive for the investment to develop that research into market able products. The report makes it clear that this is the general rule - academics use the IP system to protect what they have created. Other evidence makes it clear that obtaining this IP protection - as noted - leads to products and services being brought to market.
So, where does this leave us. The AAAS study has brought to light issues we all know about intuitively. That is, that IP issues are complicated and sometimes lead to changes in behavior. But that does not mean that we throw out the systems or discredit it - in particular if the same community that is discomfited by the system also enjoys its benefits. It means that we need to improve the system - patent reform, training, improved tech transfer operations. It also means that certain systemic issues can be addressed in a systemic way. For example, the AAAS has an ongoing program of study on "humanitarian licenses." (http://sippi.aaas.org/hue.shtml#Report).
The effort there is to really understand how intellectual property can be managed to facilitate humanitarian use and applications of technologies - in particular those that arise out of the academic sector. The particular focus in such humanitarian efforts is to promote the use of health and agricultural product innovations by poor and disadvantaged groups, particularly in developing countries. It beggars belief that the same organization - AAAS - can on the one hand be reporting (as Slashdot suggests) that research projects in the United States are being chilled by patent holders while at the same time providing information as to how patents can be managed to further health and agricultural programs in the developing world.
A sig?!? I don't think so.....
...that you are retarded.
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Even if their competitors copy the fruits of their research, one still had first-mover advantage in applying it first.
But did the research and development for the "first-mover" come free? Who cares who got something first -- if I can freeload off of the "first-mover" and not have to do my own research and development, I can pass the savings on to my customers, who will buy my products because I can sell them cheaper.
Yes, this is good for consumers, because it tends to drive prices down to their free market level quickly. However, who then is going to pay for the R&D if they are unable to recoup their costs via above market pricing?
What incentive is there for any company to invest in R&D if a freeloader can then come in and undercut your prices because they didn't have to pay for the R&D?
Now, if it is very difficult to reverse-engineer your advantage, then fine, maybe you don't really need the patent protection, because you essentially have a "natural" monopoly. But many inventions are easily reverse-engineered -- look at any patent that gets brought up on this board, and how quick everyone is to say that it's obvious -- sure it's obvious, after someone else has figured out how to do it.
That's the point of the incentive -- not so that we ensure that companys make profits, but to incentivize R&D by keeping freeloaders from driving down prices before the company that actually paid for the R&D can recoup their costs and make a profit.
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
There are far more appropriate ways to reward increased R&D Have fairies from the Magic Forest come and wave their little wands, while their leprechaun friends bring pots o' gold? I am especially interested because you used "reward" in a transitive sense. Exactly who is doing the rewarding? The government? God, what a mess that would be. I'll take a temporary monopoly, thank you very much.
What incentive is there for any company to invest in R&D if a freeloader can then come in and undercut your prices because they didn't have to pay for the R&D?
Just because the freeloader isn't prohibited from using the same methods you use doesn't mean they need to do no R&D whatsoever. Particularly in the case of software: My company has patents on our UI. That's not to say that the man-years of skilled (artists') labor involved in implementing that UI (which is very, *very* heavily graphical) can be duplicated without a lot of time and effort -- during which we're busy getting ahead with other improvements, such that even when the copycat comes out with a product it's substantially inferior to what we then have. It's not that the patent-protected portions of our UI are necessarily hard to reverse-engineer -- it's just hard to implement all the copyright-protected work that goes into it.
Yes, this is good for consumers, because it tends to drive prices down to their free market level quickly. However, who then is going to pay for the R&D if they are unable to recoup their costs via above market pricing?
Did you notice where I suggested that the patent system, rather than being scrapped, be modified to have an affirmative defense of independent development? So long as the practical barrior to meeting that defense is high enough that clean-room reimplementation is expensive, there's still enough incentive for 3rd parties who wish to get into the market to license preexisting patents rather doing a clean-room reimplementation -- so long as the patent holder is reasonable (and the patent is on a technology difficult enough to develop that a clean-room implementation isn't completely trivial -- which should make the kind of useless idiot patents we're seeing lately go away, and bring market forces into the determination of what level of monopoly rents a patent-holder should be able to extract).
Current patent law really only serves the really big companies.
It may seem that way, but it's not really true in practice. There are numerous firms that will take a patent infringement case on contingency these days, which makes it a lot easier for small companies or individual inventors to fight off even massive companies. And it does happen -- the firm I work for a year or two ago helped a client settle a case with an individual inventor who was going around gaining multi million dollar licensing agreements from various big players in the industry, because he had a righteous patent on a fundamental technology.
You don't hear much about the mom-and-pop companies or individual inventors suing other small companies (or even big companies), but it happens a lot more than you might image. Not every patent infringement case is between IBM and Microsoft, or whatever two behemoths you want to discuss. If anything, individual inventors or small companies are MORE likely to engage in litigation to protect their patents, copyrights, trade secrets and trademarks than are big companies -- the big companies usually just end up in cross-licensing agreements, it's the little guys that often end up in court.
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
I think you have some good points here, but I have to disagree with "blaming" the problem on the"Economist Dream". The first thing I learned when taking Micro/macro Economics 101 was that economics is the science of allocation of scarce resources. I think for this purpose, economics is an excellent tool. the problem is when people try to apply the tool on the wrong problem. Information is not scarce, and so the government has imposed false restrictions on information, to try to make them behave like scarce resources. Of course the way they did this is by giving out monopolies, thus eliminating competition and fucking everything up even more. Like you said, information can be copied for no cost, and gains everyone when shared.
The theory of supply and demand is a good one, it just doesnt apply to information, because it is not a scarce resource.
Did you notice where I suggested that the patent system, rather than being scrapped, be modified to have an affirmative defense of independent development?
Well, that's one idea, but I'm not sure that it's the best idea. The problem is, a patent must disclose the "best mode" or operation -- even though the patent drafters attempt to obfuscate the best mode in their application, the fact is most patents, once published, contain enough information to give a considerable head start to anyone else. In fact, that's the "tradeoff" -- the government grants you a temporary monopoly in trade for you coughing up the details of how your invention works to the public. Further, most patent applications are published after 18 months, long before the patent actually issues -- so where do you start the timeline for "independent development?" Once the application is published, another company has access to the inventor's "best mode," and will have a considerable head start. Maybe if you set the "independent development" clock so that you had to be working on an invention prior to the application being published -- but then, what would qualify as "independent development?" If I am just sort of messing around with a GUI, see your application, then implement your invention, is my earlier messing around sufficient to qualify as "independent development?" While your idea appears sound, it just seems like it would be just as complicated to prove "independent development" as it would to prove any of the other defenses to infringement (noninfringement, invalidity, unenforceability, inequitable conduct).
I think some changes need to be made to the patent system, but I'm not sure that this sort of defense would really add much to the equation.
Besides, like I noted in my post, if your system is so complex or time-consuming that any reverse-engineering would take as much or nearly as much time and effort to implement as coming up with the idea from scratch, then maybe in your case you don't need the patent protection anyway!
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
again and again, everyone always forgets what patents are supposed to be about.
and it's not about encouraging innovation.
ok, perhaps, the availability of patents encourage inventors (corporate or individual) to innovate by dangling the promise of a limited monopoly in front of them, but the real reason is to encourage innovators to publish their inventions.
consider what the technology landscape would be like if you could not patent anything. for example, rca might've spent the money inventing television in the 1930s, but would then treat the insides of television sets and cameras as trade secrets. the only way you could buy a television would be to sign an agreement stating that you will not open up the back of a teevee or use anything else to decode a television signal.
thomas edison might've spent time and money inventing the light bulb and then not tell anybody how they're made. he could have maintained a monopoly on electric light bulbs for a long time since it's not readily apparent that what made them work was an effective vacuum or inert gas.
in short, practically everything technological would be bound up by end user licensing agreements preventing tinkering and reverse engineering. if you think patents are retarding technological development imaging how hard it would be when almost nothing about technology is freely published and everything is a trade secret.
patents also have defined lifespans while trade secrets can be maintained for indefinite periods of time, at least in theory.
the problem with patents began not with submarine patents or patent extortionists but with a supreme court decision that said that the only people who could look at patents wouthout worrying about infringing on them were patent lawyers. i don't know the decision - perhaps someone else can dig it up?
anyway, the decision made a mockery of the basic value of a patent being published and all research related to a patent is shut down becasue the people who could build new technologies from existing patents are now no longer allowed to even look at them. and patent holders now have a monopoly not only on the invention named in the patent, but also on all the research building on the patent too.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
Basically, the same (expensive, process- and documentation-intensive) rigamarole that's traditionally been used by folks who need to legally reverse engineer trade secrets -- such as how Compaq got the PC BIOS. It was expensive -- but since IBM wasn't offering licenses to 3rd parties, it was the only route available.Sure, I may not need a patent -- but let's say I get one anyhow, and then set the price of licensing said patent at 10x the cost of developing the technology from scratch. Even though this is blatently unfair, I can do so under the current system -- whereas allowing clean-room development (with legal, documentation and process requirements making it nontrivially expensive) would mean that I *couldn't* make excessive demoands, but would still allow sufficient benefit to repay my expenses. In short, it keeps the initial inventor honest, while still allowing one to make back one's costs (in cases where nontrivial R&D costs exist -- which, for software patents, is frequently not the case).
See the summary here, which references the following papers on the topic:
Maurer, S., and S. Scotchmer. 2002. "The Independent Invention Defense in
Intellectual Property." Economica 69:535-547.
Ottoz, E., and F. Cugno. 2004. "The Independent Invention Defence in a
Cournot-Duopoly Model." Economics Bulletin 12:1-7.
You succeeded in making me feel very small. http://tinyurl.com/7aaca . I feel like I'm in my own dimension. http://tinyurl.com/eyf8b . Perhaps with some extra effort, I could EVOLVE. http://tinyurl.com/cyqph . Maybe I should join everyone else, start praying someone (else) comes up with an honest-to-goodness MANHATTAN PROJECT 2005. http://www.newpath4.com/01manhattanproject20056789 fromnewpath410302005.htm .
Hmm. Do you think it would be better to file suit (shot across the bow) or to approach them before pursuing legal action?
Running a litigation shell sounds risky...but worthwhile.
I am John Hurt.
I have tried several different methods of "protecting" some of my inventions. Nothing works unless you have a billionaire in your back pocket, and many times he's a lawyer... I finally decided that publishing to the Internet under a Copyright was my best bet to at least making certain the world knew it was me who invented "it" (meaning any of my inventions). One fellow was sitting on 4 inventions of his own but lacked a critical part which I placed on my websites. Within a week of my website pages going online, he incorporated his company plus maintains he did it. hahaha I had documented my device TWO YEARS before he claimed "he did it". (I purposely held it back so Time would secure me.) Could have been a coincidence. Anyway, I wrote him and suggested we work together. He never wrote back but the one time. I imagine his lawyers told him it was a bad idea to write me. I kind of think he made a mistake: http://www.newpath4.com/01manhattanproject20056789 fromnewpath410302005.htm . Right now, our world runs on electricity. So much of what we make uses it. What I have is an engine that generates more electricity than the power it needs to keep cycling. Which of course BOO HISS sounds like perpetual motion... and the death bell tolls for me. It's going to be one helluva tsunami that hits everyone when I release it, but a good tsunami. It's going to raise everyone higher than ever imagined. With some adjustments, instead of turning a generator it can direct its force upward, so it also accomplishes anti-gravity. It's mind-boggling to think of a hybrid car not needing a battery, instead obtaining "real-time" electric on demand from one of my devices. Or to have these engines in a smaller version, embedded in straps that go around yer ankle, legs, arms, and enables us to fly. This device has so many applications we won't run out of new jobs for 30-50 years. If then. I don't imagine I'll get paid but I will anyway. My disability check will go further. Anyhow, someone earlier was mentioning previous inventors, how they failed one way or another to get rich. Neither getting rich nor perpetual motion should be the objective. Helping everyone have a better life has to count for something. My device makes Perpetual Power; perp motion is an after thought, a side effect, not the objective. You take those poor people in New Orleans, being in surgery and the lights going out, or being in a hospital room and the power to their machines cutting off when the hospital generators ran out of fuel; some generators were drowned by the rising water. Won't happen with my vaporgenerator. Then there's all the other applications, things we could have if it didn't mean having to lug heavy batteries everywhere. We could live, breathe, swim underwater, have underwater homes, live in the deserts or atop mountains. Life without powerlines is going to be right nice. (There's a Fox News Special this coming Sunday at 8pm ET about Global Warming. They're doing one heckuva job selling my engine, whether they know it or not.) No fossil fuels, no heat, no exhaust. The entire global warming thing goes away in 5-10 years. Species extinction will slow, then stop. I've cracked the egg on getting to Mars fast, living on the Moon, manned exploration of our own Solar System. Did I mention how little it will cost to make this? hehehe Guess I left the icing for last. Mass production will have it at less than a new PC soon enough. Altho, of course, it will be cheaper in China. Oh well. I tried to work with the D.O.E., tried to work with USPTO. Nothing worked. Too bad. "The United States was a great country once Momma, back in 2005. I wonder what happened to them? You know, before they became a Third World Country." Who knows? Perhaps they forgot to view inventors as a NATIONAL RESOURCE WORTH PROTECTING. Even Riley cracking the egg on power-on-demand wasn't enough. Well, no matter. We still have time to turn the ship around and prevent downward funnels from Space like
Things that are not reverse engineerable are not easy to make, but not impossible. Hell, Iran has been trying to produce replacement jet-turbine blades for its aged f-14s for decades and hasn't gone anywhere. The former communist blok managed to reverse engineer Apple 2s and IBM XTs only through spying, not pure reverse-engineering. So, strive for novel fabrication ideas in your technology research, and tell noone. Period. Then, figure out what to do with the novel materials science you've come up with (or old materials science, novel fabricaton recipe), that can't be done by other means. It has been like this for ages. Cast iron cannons, damaskine swords, slow burning gun-poweder.. Materials science is what has historicaly driven technology forward, since the dawn if times. They arent called "stone, bronze, iron etc. ages" for nothing. You dont lose 20000 USD per year maintainig a patent, you dont lose money defending it. I have great sympathy for the Wright brothers, who lost their patent rights in suits with Glen Curtiss, but ..hey? They lost, didnt they, like so many others..IBM to John Atanasoff (first computer, and it was actually Alan Turing who invented it in the first place to crack German codes).. Marconi and the radio.. is there ever a happy patent story involving a great invention? PCR inventor, anyone? Well, it doesnt work and it has never worked, when it comes to things that matter.
So, lets scratch it off altogether and save our money and mental health.
If you are an egnigneer (and not rometely conected to materials science/chemistry/physics) - Publish, be famous, get given money to invent more for everyone (a la Leonardo Da Vinci and the Medici familly)
HEE HEE! U r dum :)
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
As Slashbotters, we're often quick to deride patents. And there is certainly a growing case to suppor the "dark-side" of patents. However, we need to remind ourselves of the equal, of not greater, chilling effect of no patents. For many, patents are the only thing which keeps a new invention or idea from being canibalized by the army of companies who do not innovate or contribute new ideas but simply thrive off copying others ideas and make a quick buck. Have you ever had a great idea? If you knew the moment you put in all the effort to make your idea a reality that there would be hundreds of copy-cat vultures ready to take your idea from you and never give you a dime for it, would you really want to put the work into creating it? I do not dispute there is a negative side to patents. But we can't forget there is also a negative side to allowing copy-cat vultures to remove all economic incentive to innovate. It's a balancing act where finding a middle ground and balance is essential.
For instance, an iPod (succesfull) competitor could potentially be a portable MP3 player that uses voice/audio interface (and no power wasting screen). You talk to it ("play"/"stop" etc..), it talks back to you in you ear with song titles etc. - no buttons, no click wheel - outside existing patents. So the existance of patents make no diference to its impementation by a competing company. But then, one could say, Apple would immediately introduce it in its own iPods (if there were no patents). Except that this idea is patentable but not enforcabe to begin with, as it is too general, and voice/audio interface has been arround for a long time (hey, the first "reading" machine was an Apple 2:) So, it makes no difference.
what this all comes down to is that ideas are not patentable (patents on them are not enforcable) as there is noone thats qualified to say what constitutes an (original) idea.. and especially not a jury of truck drivers. And it's ideas that matter most to competitiveness, or making and selling new products. Embodiment of ideas (how its been done) is patentable and enforcable, but there's never a single embodiment of an idea. Rolling/axial control of an airplane is a good idea, but it can be embodied in many different ways - by wing wrapping, that the Wright brothers patented, or by ailerons (that Curtiss invented to kill the Wright brothers monopoly, but its also an idea - so - not enforcable). A current switching device all it takes to have digital electronics (good idea), but it could be a vacuum tube, a transistor, a relay, a CMOS device, a molecule..the list is endless - some rely on novel fabrication solutions, some are ideas. Again - the only things that are patentable and enfoceable are materials science/fabrication solutions - and those dont have to be patented in the first place, as they are (mostly) not reverse-engineerable.
First, most of your "solutions" involve taxes. Income, sales, and property taxes are also massively economically inefficient, as much so or more than a monopoly. You are going to solve the fundamental market-failure problem this way.
Systems A, B, and C are not equivalent for a number of reasons. Maybe A and B are depending on how you define B (I have no idea what you mean...can the company tax anyone, or only people who buy its product? Can it still exclude competitors?). Assuming these, then yes, there really is no difference, though at this point, calling it a "tax" is rather misleading. We normally call this "selling". C is completely different, though, as you have not stated how the Magic Fairy government is going to know whether to issue a 500% tax, a 5% tax, or a billion % tax.
Thing is, if they think that they can successfully litigate you into oblivion, they might just try and do that rather than settle (or they may offer way more less than what the patent is worth.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.