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Do Patents Stop Companies From Creating 'Perfect' Products?
Chris M writes "In a recent CNET article, the mobile phone editor writes about what he thinks would make a perfect phone. Unfortunately, as someone in the comments section points out, much of the technology that is used in this concept phone belongs to separate companies. 'I'm sorry to be the Devil's Advocate here, but most of those feautres are patented to separate companies. It would require almost all the major manufacturers [working together] to do this, which is highly unlikely.' Do you think patents are stopping companies from creating 'perfect' devices, or are there other factors at work?"
I did not RTFA (glanced at first page), but first off, I doubt there is a perfect phone that is perfect for everybody. Every product has tradeoffs, and certain product directions appeal to some people but not others, especially when they affect price. Sometimes it is just plane personal preference.
I think in certain respects patents spur competition and make every phone better. Each company tries to come up with something that their competitor hasn't thought of to help differentiate their product. They would be less likely to invest the time and effort to develop innovations if they knew their competitor would just immediately copy it. The really perfect phone would not be possible to begin with without all these previous innovations. One could argue that patents made the author's ideal phone possible, but it is more a business issue whether it ever comes to market.
During WWII, the British and Germans both independently and secretly discovered chaff as a radar countermeasure. Neither side used it in the beginning because they were more afraid of the enemy copying them and gaining a bigger advantage than they themselves would receive.
(I do think software patents need to be drastically reformed or completely done away with altogether)
Except that in the modern world, features frequently are patented. Or the method patented is so broad that it covers all possible implementations.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Patents are a big problem, when someone patents the equvalent of a hammer, and you're stuck without a really basic tool.
Other times, someone patents "the way it's done" and the result is, when you try and find another way to do it, you actually find a better way.
The problem is, you never know which one you're going to get when you're just starting. I definitely thing innovation can overcome most patents, but a lot of time that's a real pain in the ass, when all you want to build is a slightly better breadbox.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Would be a piece of software on your computer that has every possible feature anyone could want for their cell phone.
Then you could drag and drop the desired features onto the phone that is plugged into your computer via USB.
That would be the perfect phone.
You can improve a patent and then get a different patent for it. So it seems to me that someone saying that it's patents holding this back only show their ignorance of the patent system.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
At worst, in twenty years we'll get the perfect phone. I suppose I can wait that long for perfection...
Perfect Devices are bad for business because it leaves no room for failure, improvements, and other features which companies rely on. If your computer was always easily upgraded, and you never needed that new Video Card, what good would it be for the companies?
"Do you think patents are stopping companies from creating 'perfect' devices, or are there other factors at work?"
...twice, if you have to.
No -- Yes.
I say that because the patent system, good, bad or otherwise, has been around long enough that if there was genuine smothering of genius going on, it would have been a major topic long since, and because everyone has a different interpretation of 'perfect' devices. (left handed versus right - textured vs. smoothed...)
For those that need a concept to wrap their heads around, read the book 'The Difference Engine'
This guy's "perfect" phone sucks for me, why?
No QWERTY keyboard. I use my phone more often for email than actually using it as a phone. A QWERTY keyboard is a necessity - there is nothing more frustrating than trying to type an email on a standard phone keypad. Predictive typing software mostly sucks.
If a company could create the "perfect" phone, the financial rewards of such a device would make either patent licensing, or litigation acceptable costs.
The problem is, no one knows what the "perfect" phone should look like, or how it should operate. For every person that wants a QWERTY keyboard there are those that don't.
The whole argument reminds me of the "cancer cure" conspiracy theorists that say the cure for cancer is not available since it would hurt the profits of those companies that provide treatments. Baloney! The cure would be worth 10 times the entire treatment regimen of the patient.
The perfect phone doesn't exist because it can not be defined.
-ted
To me, a layman, it does seam like basic tools have most of their "methods" and "apparatus" patented, so that startups have no hope of making anything more complex than a wheelbarrow without stepping at least one patent or another. Maybe it would be a good idea to farm recently outdated patents for business ideas. Anything made to those patents' specifications should be immune to newer patents, and a good way to invalidate copycat patents.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
I'm so bleeding smart that I don't know the basics about what I've just claimed to be so smart about.
Check out Amazon's "One Click" patent. Go ahead.
The intent of the patent system is to foster innovation by protecting new inventions.
New Inventions, not new concepts An invention is a specific implementation of a concept. If you can't specify how it's built, it's just a concept. (Or rather, that's the way it's supposed to work. Software patents are a slightly different kettle of fish, but the same rules should apply)
The protection garnered by a patent grant is one of an exclusive monopoly. You can prevent anyone else (within the patent office's jurisdiction) from stealing your invention, even if you would be infringing on other people's patents if you tried to make it yourself.
So, Mr. Lim could go ahead and apply for a patent on his ideal phone, and turn around and license it to LG or Samsung or Motorola or Nokia and let them negotiate with the individual patent holders. Meanwhile, the phone doesn't get built due to ongoing negotiations, but it stays patented, and if any manufactures are sufficiently interested to license the design, Mr. Lim collects royalties.
(IANAL - but I am a law student writing my senior paper on patents)
Company A patents technology X, but has no interest in making a product that has technology X plus feature Y. Company B would like to make a product with technology X and feature Y, but is stumped by the patent. Result: the world never gets an X+Y product.
This is not just theoretical. I work in a field knee deep in patents and I see this sort of nonsense all the time.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This is not a big problem - for a big company. A Big company could easily license the IP from their competitors to build the 'perfect' phone.
Of course, that elimenates all the little guys from competing because they can't afford to license the technology.
On the other hand, companies prefer to purposefully 'differentiate' their products so the customer is presented with a choice - which the company is banking on. You will probably never see the 'perfect' phone, as a result. It is the nature of the beast.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
CDMA.
Try building a phone that works with the CDMA cellular network, and doesn't violate Qualcomm's patent. It's not going to happen. They've patented too much stuff that's too fundamental to making an interoperable device.
If you piss them off, or if they decide for some reason not to license their patent(s) to you (e.g., you want to make a multi-network phone and their other customers -- the telcos -- don't like the idea), you're S.O.L. as far as most of the U.S. cellphone market is concerned.
Video compression is the same way. Try to build an MPEG-4 encoder that doesn't violate the MPEGLA's patents; it's not going to happen. Sure, you could build some completely unrelated video encoder, but that's of extremely limited utility in a world where standards matter.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
There's plenty of devices with unused space in ROM. And do you know how visionaries become recognized as such? They spot opportunities before others do - perhaps even before the market is aware of their desire - and they exploit them.
In other words, no one serious has attempted to create a market for ogg. It might not be a very hard sell, but who's attempted it?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I miss the perfect phone, the base Bell System model. Something fundamental has been lost: The experience of hanging up. You could hang up a Bell System phone as violently or as delicately as you liked. It was indestructible. There were few things more satisfying that slamming the phone down on the hook, pounding the receiver against your desk or hurling it at the wall.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I assumed it was so that you can run out of "feature battery life" without disabling your phone for that important phone call? Seems a bit tenuous to me, as presumably you get less lifetime per oz. of battery with dual batteries unless you happen to use both batteries at exactly the same rate and you could accomplish the same thing with software...but, perhaps the power needed to transmit a cell phone call is higher than that needed by music or camera features. So for one application you need high power short use, while for music you want low power long use. Could be that a different battery could optimize them. Anyone know?
All of that sounds great for lawyers, corporations, and patent holders, but it sounds horrible for consumers. I thought the purpose of patents was to foster innovation for the benefit of the society - if so many great inventions get trapped inside patent hell, exactly how does that benefit anyone?
Sounds more to me like a bunch of individual monopolies each trying to force their competitors either out of business or to their knees, resulting in a slew of competing products that do nothing but frustrate consumers due to their lack of interoperability.
How many picture card formats do we have now? 15 major ones? Is that REALLY necessary? There's something to be said for innovation and competition, sure, but there's a reason we invent standards.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Ideally. However, it seems like various US courts since the 80s or so have severely weakened the obviousness and enablement portions of the patent-granting procedures. Without enablement, for example, you are basically patenting features. Have a look at all the business method patents being granted and tell me that those are patenting specific implementations, rather than concepts. Things are even worse with patent lawyers being trained to write the patents so as to abuse the system by being as vague as possible.
But his conclusions are entirely wrong. Patents give you the right to keep others from using your invention, but they don't give you the right to use it. Thus, when you take someone else's patent and improve it, you can patent the improvement, but you still can't make the device without the permission of the original patent holder. Likewise, the original patent holder can't make use of your improvement without your permission.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Communication is now essentially instantaneous. Bob in New York patents a better belt buckle in 1850, Jim in San Francisco designs something similar. It'll be a minumum of a few months before someone who's seen one happens to see the other and he almost certainly won't care about whether it is or isn't patented and Bob isn't going to go to the expense of sending his lawyer across country for several months to find out. Even if there is a clash, the markets are so separate, it's not worth pursuing getting both sides in a single courtroom.
The pace of invention has continued to dramatically increase. Modern machinery turned up with the industrial revolution. Electricity only became a common power source in the last century. Computers are 60 or so years old. Home computers are less than 30 years old and only common in the last 15. The internet has only really spread in the last 10. And, right now, 3D prototyping tools are becoming available for the first time. Combine those increases in the power of tools for realizing ideas with the increase in population and you're comparing a patent system designed for one level of patenting with one that's being asked to handle exponentially more.
What can be patented has changed. The criteria of "That a reasonable person couldn't come up with on their own" sure as hell doesn't apply to One Click shopping (Wow, really, people would prefer less hassle? Rocket science!) nor does it apply to, Creative's "I have a large collection of music, I'd like to divide it up somehow, perhaps some kind of a folder analogy." which Apple got sued over for daring to copy from the desktop where it was common to MP3 players where somehow Creative were the only people who could ever think of it. Add in being able to patent everything from genes to ways of doing business and you've got a system that is in no way representative of the past.
In the scheme of things, 25 years isn't that long to wait. In a world where computing of 10 years ago is utterly different to the computing of today, a 25 year patent means "a means for using a casette player to store data" would just be coming out of patent protection. So, yes, in terms of digital technology and gene research where 25 years is the entire lifetime of the field, it absolutely stifles things and makes a great case for those mediums to have a 10, or ideally 5 year patent term limit - enough to benefit from your invention, not enough to stifle the whole industry for as long as it's been around again.
You mentioned FUD. A big problem is patent FUD. What matters is what people think. Chilling effects. Many people think patents might be violated even when not. Or they feel they're not in violation but don't want to get in long expensive court battles even if victory is certain. Or they know they will be in violation of patents that should never have been granted, and calculate that trying to get them invalidated isn't worth the expense or that going ahead and hoping they aren't sued is too risky. These problems are made worse by the government's attitude of "when in doubt, grant the patents and let the courts sort 'em out." The patent office rakes in more fees, the lawyers get richer, the justice system hires more people to handle the load, and the rest of us foot the bill for this very expensive system.
As for examples, how about Apple's "Look and Feel" patents on the MacIntosh GUI? Microsoft was not allowed to use a trashcan icon. When they opted for a "recycle bin" they were nonetheless challenged again by Apple, weren't they? How about the hundreds of patents on the hundreds of tiny variations on arithmetic coding? While LZW and the GIF image format weren't too hard to work around, arithmetic coding was another matter. Only takes one of those hundreds of patent holders deciding to sue to make arithmetic coding not worth the trouble, not when Huffman is almost as good. The result is, no one will touch arithmetic coding even though the basic algorithm is free of patent protection. Instead, everyone uses Huffman coding. The primary difference between the long vanished "bzip" and "bzip2" is in bzip2, bzip's arithmetic coding was replaced with Huffman. People would not even use bzip because of that.
Note that we're talking about the users who by rights should have nothing to fear from whatever alleged patent violations authors may have committed. Instead, the possibility that a court might pull the plug, as nearly happened to the Blackberry, is enough to scare off users. Then there's the stunt SCO pulled, trying to shake down Linux users for $699 each in licensing fees, lest they convince a court that they aren't blowing a bunch of smoke and do manage to get an insanely draconian and unenforceable injunction ordering everyone to stop using Linux. That anyone actually paid SCO is sad. That patent trolls might have such leverage is ridiculous. Dell customers don't have to worry should Dell be found in violation of some patent. Dell's PCs won't suddenly stop working. But somehow Linux users do have to worry, with MS claiming Linux is in violation? WTF?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
But isn't this what the patent system is designed to do, to slow down adoption and reuse?
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
If _I_ "make the device without the permission of the original patent holder" then it's fine.
/ 5609/1018?siteid=sci&ijkey=kOiAnw9uhtbsM&keytype=r ef
Why? It's non-commercial "R&D" use. I (personally) can use the disclosure to create a device for "R&D" as long as it's not used commercially (which might include giving it away as that could cause commercial harm to the patent rights owner or licensee).
This stands in most jurisdictions but the US non-commercial use allowed is very limited and R&D by businesses (which includes Universities in US patent law) is not allowed unless licensed by the patent holder.
There's also the issue of territorial rights. I'm sure you can find somewhere in the world in which even WO patents aren't recognised (ie outside EPO, OAPI, ARIPO, US, etc.).
IANAPA
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/299
As with all instances of pedantry I'm sure there is an error (at least) in this post!
This is a well known phenomenon, referred to as the Tragedy of the Anticommons. Yochai Benkler describes how multiple patent holders delayed the development of radio until the U.S. government intervened:
I believe Chris Rock said it best:
Why the hell would drug companies want to find a cure for AIDS? There's no money for a cure. The real money's in the treatment!
For an interesting essay on the topic, read Boldrin & Levine: Against Intellectual Monopoly. Actually, just read the first couple of pages, describing the effects of James Watt's patent had on the development of steam engines in the late 1700s. It seems that his rabid enforcement of his patent pretty much blocked all further progress in the technology until his patent ran out in 1800. He didn't even profit from it himself until after his patent ran out, when he switched from patent enforcement to steam-engine manufacturing. And his own development was blocked by others' patents on other parts of the mechanism.
;-)
There's plenty of historical evidence that things like patents and copyrights are primarily a barrier to progress, unless the government steps in a second time and decrees some sort of mandatory licensing. (But this doesn't have much effect on the doctrinaire arguments that we read here so often.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The obvious conclusion is to not allow patenting of anything necessary to follow an industry standard. Tell someone applying for a patent that they can either patent it, or make it an industry standard, but not both. If it becomes an ITU, ISO, IEEE or other professional body standard, all patents necessary to implement that standard become invalid. Coincidentally, this would nix most software patents as well.
Qwerty is all you need? You make it too easy. My perfect phone would:
When I read the topic, it was exactly what I thought government should do - step in to give it a push forward. Well, not exactly force cross-licensing, but to cover royalties for a very useful or obstacle patent for everyone who needs it for further progress, if it is essentially important for everybody: i.e. patents that are needed to make environment-friendly mass produced products. I mean, there is similar reason behind that as it is behind spending for national defense or fundamental scientific research: common money for common good. Oh, another thing is: holding a patent without using it or licensing it to others who use it, should greatly shorten the protection period to prevent "anti-patents" (when you patent something for the sole purpose of forbidding anyone from making it).