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An inside look at Intellectual Ventures
A reader writes"Nathan Myhrvold has started a multi-hundred million dollar firm to develop new inventions and patent them. It has remained a very secretive organization, despite recruiting reclusive geniuses and buying up thousands of patents from other companies. Now Business Week has the scoop: "As his cash-rich firm snaps up thousands of patents, fears emerge that it will become a leader in litigation - not innovation..."
Oh, and if you think putting something in the public domain prevents some company from patenting it, think again. Sun has a patent application on stuff I put into the public domain 3 years ago. People have suggested I write to the USPTO or something. Wake up! I don't make any money from open source and it's not me who's being impacted. It's the people who would use the open source software who would be affected and *they* need to do something if they want to use it. If the public doesn't want to protect their own rights, then the public be damned.
These kinds of companies are hardly new:
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Since patents reward being the first to come up with an idea, not being the first to come up with a way of turning that idea into reality, getting a couple of industry-specialists/bright-people in a room and asking them to imagine what kind of things there might exist in the future is a very good way of getting a lot of patents, some of which will become money makers - some companies have already made it their business model to get patents this way, sit on them until somebody does de actual work of truning them into reality, and then squeeze those people for all they can.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that somebody out there is picking ideas from Science Fiction books and patenting them
The only news here is that Business Week has picked this up - hopefully this is an indication that there is a growing awareness in business circles of how broken the patent system really is.
Or in otherwords, imagine a Beowulf Cluster (pardon the phrase) of Open Source patent filers. Intellectual Ventures wouldn't stand a chance.
Personally, I'm very opposed to Software Patents, as the EFF is. However, I can really see no other way of effectively changing the system in the near term other than this. Especially if, every so often, one files a suit against a closed-source company, and ends up with hundreds of millions of dollars to fund futher suits (E.g. What happened with RIM and their Blackberries).
I can well imagine that, if you make the big companies scream loudly enough, by hitting them where it hurts, they will end up running to Congress for protection. And, if done right, the only protection is eliminating Software Patents.
Aside from the distastefulness of dealing with Software Patents, I can so no reason why this type of strategy won't work. If anyone can spot what I'm missing from a strategic view, I'd appreciate knowing about it.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
What's the difference between Apple or Microsoft plunging millions of dollars into R&D and then licensing their technology out to other companies? Isn't this exactly the same?
Well, for a start, MS and Apple are likely to implement the inventions themselves, as well as licensing them to others. That's much, much more important than it may seem at first - by implementing them, it quickly becomes obvious that the patent exists. If you patent something and sit on it, then someone else has the same idea, it's a lot less likely that they'll spot the patent, if they believe they're the first to have the idea. That allows for much greater scope for surprise litigation.
Wake up people, fear mongering about this company is completely misdirected, they have a good opportunity to do a lot of good, the true fear that should be exposed here is the ability to abuse the intellectual property laws in america, IV has nothing to do with it.
I agree, up to a point. They do have a good opportunity to do a lot of good, but they also have equal opportunity to do a lot of harm. Until such time as they show their hand one way or the other, you'll have to forgive me for being suspicious of them.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
In my opinion, the law as it is is unfixable. The very structure of monopoly rights is inherently unbalanced and is an aberration in a free market, one whose costs are huge but unaccounted for, while the benefits in terms of innovation and rewards to actual inventors are dubious.
Redesign the system as stipend rights instead, conferring, in exchange for disclosure, the right to an actual monetary payout upon a certain level of use of the invention in question. That way the system is automatically balanced; with a standard government budget the costs are controllable (government spending tendencies aside), if too many 'patent stipends' are granted, the rewards for each shrink so all involved parties have an interest in only valid ones being granted. Companies would not need fear litigation; they could browse the patent databases as they please and just note which ones they include, combine and mix and match, etc. The litigation burden would go down; the inventor would not need to sue anyone for using their invention; the more the better, as their payout would increase.
Financing such a system isnt really that hard, once you accept that the current system isnt as 'free' as it seems, but is actually more or less equivalent to a taxation on new technology (which is _not_ a good thing, as it slows adoption rates even more). A flat 'innovation VAT' rate would be a large improvement, or even better, rates geared towards phasing out undesireable old technology. But above all, it should be accounted for, with measurable economic impact, not the current 'more or less years that does something or the other that we cant really tell to innovation and costs but you dont see it as it's in the price of goods and insurances'.
The problem with patents is way deeper that that. The big problem is not now, but 20+ years from now as society will likely start to enter the replication age and 3d-printer/nano/bio technologies will eventually shift manufacturing away from the factory and back into the home. When this happens, some people will see this as a way to create tremendous wealth by offering creation related services. Unfortunately, others will see this as an opportunity to extract nearly infinite licensing royalities. In sum, manufacturing will become commoditized and there will be this huge pressure for the powers that be to coerce themsleves into every aspect of peoples private lives.
History teaches that when the labor force became commoditized in the mid 1800's - it blew up the plans of the plantation systems to leverage industrial technology to expand their plantations for unlimited growth and profit. The consequence was the most bloody war in human history - the US civil war. It was considered the most bloody in human history because they were just beginning to figure out how to use these new technologies to kill people, but hadn't developed any adequete defences yet.
The point is that a similar problem will happen when patents become commoditized, and when those who wish to impose patent controlls resort to coercion to impose them. People don't seem to understand that patents by their very nature are violent and genocidial and could easially lead to the ruthless murder of billions as manufacturing becomes commoditized. In fact, their track record today isn't too impressive: eg, how safety devices in autos were held back 20 years because of patents, and how millions Africans died needlseely of AIDS because people tried to forbid them from making generics by suing in the world court. These are just some in a long list of exanples that have caused millions to die or suffer needlessly, right now most of the ruin is not obvious to us - but it certainly will eventually become so.