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Hard Drive Imports to be Banned?
Arathon writes "Apparently the International Trade Commission is beginning an investigation that could lead to the banning of hard drive imports from Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba, among others, on the grounds that they fundamentally violate patents held by Steven and Mary Reiber of California. The patent apparently has to do with "dissipative ceramic bonding tips", which are important components of the drives themselves.
Obviously, a ban would be unthinkable, and yet the ITC has 45 days to settle on a fixed date for the end of the investigation. If the patents are found to be violated, and the Reibers do not allow those patents to be bought or otherwise dealt with, the importation of almost all hard drives would actually be ceased."
It certainly harms the progress of useful arts to stop sales and/or development. Instead, patent violation should be assessed only in the amount of money owed from one party to another, calculated as a reasonable fraction of the profit earned from goods in violation of the patent.
If the inventor has a great idea, but an incompetent marketing and/or development, the patent should allow others to compete on the basis of marketing and development, using the same idea, but the patentor should get his due in any case.
In other words, I think all licensing of patents should be compulsory. I can't see any argument why any party should disallow any other party from implementing their patents. It seems this is only ever used for anticompetitive purposes, which harms the market and harms consumers, and is illegal when done in other ways.
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Maybe, by allowing these kinds of bans based on claims of litiguous bastards will finally get real patent reform going. It's just plain stupid that patents are allowed to cause damage like this.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
The patents here appear to be for the tools used to build the drives. IANAL, but I thought that patents covered only the end product. In this case, the patented tool can be claimed, but not everything ever built with the patented tool. This claim would need to be filed in the country where the tool was used, assuming that country has issued a patent on the invention.
Someone who will have saves millions of dollars on the R&D of previous companies. In fact, the previous company you're talking about got to save millions of dollars on R&D, too, because they didn't have to spend 3 years coming up with a new way to get to where the original patent holder is already without infringing.
The fundamental difference between you and GP is that you think that people should have some sort of entitlement because they have an idea, and GP doesn't, necessarily. There's a lot that goes into being valuable to society. For example:
I have Idea, and want to get it to market. However, I am terrible at implementing Idea. Idea is a great great idea, but my product is not. OtherCo comes by and sees my shitty product on the market, and thinks they can do better. So they take Idea and use their own ideas to create GoodIdea. GoodIdea is a good product, whereas my product is crap. I start seeing losses in sales, because GoodIdea just makes more sense then Idea. So I take GoodIdea, and add a couple things that I learned while supporting Idea, and come up with VeryGoodIdea.
In the above model creates 2 good products, starting from one good idea that turned out to be a bad product. If my original idea had been really good, I could have coasted on it for a long long time, but it wasn't, so I couldn't.
Where's the crime?
Please stop stalking me, bro.