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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.
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?
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.
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."
In 20 years you can get "The Perfect Phone of 2007."
In 20 years, there will be a host of new technologies around, all encumbered with patents, that people will want to have in a 'perfect phone.' The stuff that's under patent now will be like pulse-dial rotary POTS equipment. If you're lucky it's still use-able, in the most basic sense, but it doesn't do much of what people want.
The problem is that innovation is now moving so much faster than it was when the patent term was set at two decades -- by the time something works its way out of patent protection now, it's generally pretty obsolete. And this will only get worse as the pace of innovation continues to quicken.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
That's the way the patent system is supposed to work. The patent system is a tradeoff... we slow down progress slightly (by making people wait at most 20 years to build the perfect device), but hope that we speed it up more by giving people extra incentives to innovate.
Unfortunately, that's not the way the system actually works. When the patent office lets you patent things that were obvious 10 or 20 years ago (eg. patenting xor, or patenting the idea of VoIP/POTS integration when the idea was an integral part of the design of various VoIP standards released years ago), then the patent system doesn't just slow things down 20 years, it's actually 30 or 40 years instead. And when there aren't realistically sufficient checks to prevent obvious things being patented, it means that a bad patent examiner can slow things down for 50 or 60 years in a few cases where they really screw it up.
Also, in the modern world, clearly companies already have a huge incentive to innovate. Was the dot-com boom driven by the fact that companies could patent things, and monopolize the area for 20 years? Or was it instead driven mostly by VC's hoping to profit from first mover advantage? In my mind, it was clearly the latter.
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.
What if every feature I could want on a cellphone isn't softmoddable? I might want more RAM, or a faster CPU, or an advanced GPU. I might want a bigger screen or a different form factor. I might even want it to make me eggs.
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That's not how patents work. If you change one thing and patent the new "invention", it's a new patent, completely separate from the original one. You have to reference the original, but there are no fees to be paid.
True. But if you try to create any instances of your patent, then you will have to pay fees to the original patent-holder (or get sued.) See, patents are like class definitions, but to create an instance of that class, you have to pay. You may extend someone else's definition, and then they will need your permission to change it, but you still need to create an instance of the base class with yours.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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"
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:
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.