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Nathan Myhrvold and the Business Of Invention
elwinc writes "There's a great New Yorker story about Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures company, whose business model is to nurture ideas, write patents, and sell them. Apparently they're filing about 500 patents a year including a passive thorium reactor which consumes waste from conventional reactors. On the lighter side, you can read how Nathan has achieved 'dominant T. rex market share.'"
Though we've discussed Myhrvold and his company in the past, the New Yorker focuses more on how incredible it is to have a group of very intelligent people sitting around a table developing ideas.
First of all, the article goes on and on about brainstorming... which is universally known to be a really bad way to come up with ideas. If you have an idea and you want to flesh out what it is good for or, better yet, what it is not good for, then brainstorming is great way to do it, but inspiration does not come from brainstorming - it comes in the shower or when you're walking the dog or whatever.
Then there's this whole "ideas have value" thing. Their whole business model is based on that tenant. Which is why they're not actually selling these patents to anyone, no-one goes out looking for a great idea to pour money into and create a business from.. investors go looking for *people* who have both a great idea and the technical skills to turn it into a workable business.. you can't just pick up someone else's idea and run with it, no matter how well the patent is written, and there's never written well. So how are they making their money? By litigation. So they're not actually helping progress, they're hindering it.
All in all, its a dot com era idea for a business.. "let's get smart people together and invent stuff" and leave all the pesky marketing and sales to someone else.. but that's what business *is*, so you're basically saying you want to be in the business of not being in business.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Developing ideas? Give me a break, they buy patents and sell licenses. It's your basic patent troll outfit.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
An idea pimp!
An company that invents your ideas for you. How lazy can you get?
-- (this is a sig) My Computer Programming Forumhttp://www.programers.co.nr/
I always thought that a working model was required in order to patent a 'thing'. How can they possibly know that it will work or what other patents are required in order to impliment said patent if all they did was to sit around a table and discuss ideas found in other papers?
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Patentable Subject Matter. Assuming the criteria described in the next section are also satisfied, any new and useful process, machine, manufac- ture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement of these things, can be patented. These cate- gories are quite broad, but the courts have identified certain types of subject matter that cannot be patented, including laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas.
(from Can You Patent That?")
Please help metamoderate.
What? You mean TF2 is real?!
Played by patent proponents, it's a useless distinction which holds no information. Empty words and misdirection.
This month is going to be bigger. It's
actually going to be the biggest month
we've ever had. We've got a new issue
I want to talk to you about. It's
called Med Patent. They've just
designed the world's first retractable
syringe. This means that doctors and
nurses will never again have to worry
about infection from dirty needles.
This is not going to be an alternative
in the medical world, it's going to be
the standard. We all know we're here
to make money, but if we can do
something good like this, then all the
better. So I want you all to go out
and buy yourselves a new car, or a
house. Whatever you want. Go into
debt. You will make a million inside
of six months. -- from Boiler Room movie script.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
What Myhrvold demonstates is that helping run a monopoly is a great way to make enough money to hire people to create patent monopolies to make more money to make more patent monopolies.
Great idea, but Myhrvold didn't invent it. Luckily, he can't patent it, either.
--
make install -not war
New Yorker is a pathetic tribal mouthpiece that would celebrate anybody with the name Nathan.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
not that the NY times is very credible, but all the SMART people are actually out there making things work, not just sitting around like a bunch of stoners cooking up 1/2 baked idea's.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
"the New Yorker focuses more on how incredible it is to have a group of very intelligent people sitting around a table developing ideas."
Hey, maybe the place where they THINK could be called a TANK. I can't believe no one's thought of this before!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The chance of people being assholes is wholly uncorrelated with their intelligence. As far as risk/reward/effort goes patent trolling is a better deal than being an engineer in a start up.
With 500 pieces of shit some of it will stick in the end ... and unfortunately that's all patent trolls need to turn a profit.
I saw a post on the blog Technology Liberation Front that pointed out that most of their ideas don't pan out. They just don't even work. You know what many of those "inventors" sound like?
The same sort of person who would fit in well with "social scientists." It's great that you are smart and have ideas, but I could give a shit less about your "ideas" if you cannot make a functioning prototype of them.
Our society should have precious little tolerance for people who only come up with ideas on paper, without being able to put them into practice.
English majors who write on scientific matters for laymen seem to delight in such unexpected phenomena as near-simultaneous discovery and invention by geniuses working independently.
At least one researcher has come up with a more prosaic explanation for the coincidental telephone patent filings - he believes that Bell bribed a patent office employee to show him Gray's filing, after which Bell returned to his lab, completely revised his approach, and soon re-filed with a description of his triumphant "invention".
This strikes me as entirely believable. I've learned that even among highly educated engineers, there are pathological liars who have no qualms about taking credit for excellent work done by others, if they think they can get away with it. Think of it as the engineering version of "Bosnian sniper fire". And don't believe everything you see on a resume.
Oh, I see, these are good patents not evil patents. Yes...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
While this shit may sound good for some of you, I recently began doing research on a project to build water transportation using alternative energy.
Well guess what? One guy ownes ALL rights to the most common sense approaches, yet refuses to bring his product to market. Prior to my investigation, all my 'original' ideas have already been thought of , registered, and accepted. The only way I could move forward would be to pay someone who didn't do anything to help my work some money for every sale. That is, if he'd even respond to inquiries.
It gave me an edge for the future. If the system is going to be bound by such things, I am going to register every stupid thing I come across that hasn't been registered yet. If I can't invent without being stifled, why should anyone else?
>> Nathan Myhrvold
Gesundheit
Clearly, there is a branch of storytelling and artistic creativity which is highly in tune with the scientific method and Socratic thought. Not all, sure, or even necessarily a whole lot, but the two are not exclusive. On the other hand, you are correct in saying that no quality science is conducted in a purely creative sense. "Thought experiments" come the closest, being a form of daydreaming and roleplaying, but they are still more entrenched in rational thought than emotional whim.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.
I dunno...patenting an idea which is impossible to implement, such as a perpetual motion machine, or which (more realistically) is wildly unprofitable to implement, isn't any real bar to progress. No one's ever going to implement those ideas, right? So that kind of "business" seems like just a honey pot for impractical dreamers.
These people are patent trolls. Very simple. Since he has dinosaurs, people think he's interesting. But they're still trolls.
I was going to jump in and describe this company as being a bunch of parasitic patent trolls, who create zero value for the world, but instead suck value from people doing REAL work.
But it looks like plenty of people have already made that point. Excellent!
These people should not be glamorized, they should be roundly criticized for being lowlife parasites.
But since the patent office will now take "patents" on "a system for ..." that pretty much means that anyone can patent anything and then wait for someone to actually invent the device.
... and then claim that a new battery system infringes upon my useless patent. As long as I'm willing to "license" my patent for less than an actual court case would cost, I'll make money.
I can patent a perpetual motion machine
And I'll hinder REAL innovation and progress.
That's the goal with that company. They aren't improving anything. They're abusing the patent system (with the patent system's willing support) to drain profits from real inventors.
And don't forget, this is the Nathan Myhrvold who asserted (while working for Microsoft) that Microsoft deserved a cut of every transaction made over the internet.
maybe you guys should get in on some H1B Visas and start patenting weapons systems
and yes, that does kinda make us great.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168820&cid=14072468
Bottom line, patents are anti free-market, they are not property, they are not incentive, they are not protection. Rather brought to their logical conclusion they are genocidal.
There's an rather insightful comment by Mike Masnick at techdirt.com about this New Yorker story.
As he notes, the story first tries to show that many important ideas are invented simultaneously by multiple parties ... but then completely fails to ask the obvious question: If such ideas' "time has come", so to speak, why are we granting a legal monopoly to someone who has no intention of developing them?
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Sounds more like Intellectual Vampires, to me...
There definitely is value in getting different kinds of scientific people together to talk about specific problems. I've been to some conferences like that, and it's great. ... but I won't patent the hoped for results of the experiments I'd like to do over the next ten years. Most of us in science can't get away with that kind of stuff, we can't afford it financially and we value the respect of our peers too much. Most of us can't afford to put a T. Rex skeleton in our living rooms, or have lawyers around to record our dinner conversations either.
there's another thing, somewhat different. The article is kind of naive: It claims "ideas are in the air" ... but that (ironically) thae same process that was proposed by Marx during 1860's. He said ideas and "insights" were all conditioned by their historical circumstance(whatever we can think is a product of our current society). I'm not going to go deep into Marx, it's just that its kind of a downer to read a "novel idea" of a statement that was made more than 150 years ago.
That's the problem with these types - they do the 2% inspiration, but skip the 98% perspiration. If somebody else does the 98%, they sue.
So much for "promoting science and the useful arts..." - ergo, IMHO, unconstitutional.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I was about to post, encouraging people to write the author of that column, but the idea struck me: what if there was an open source "community" for ideas?... and that's when I realized that that is pretty much how the patent system was originally meant to function.
There should be a website where people can make known to the world their ideas. At least might that act as some prior art and save an idea or two from the patent trolls?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
There are ideas, there are engineers, there are marketing and sales people... Companies, let alone *people*, rarely do it all. This company is simply placing its focus on the idea part of business, which is a completely viable thing to do. Whether they will succeed is another story, but to argue they are BS is BS.
Are they patent trolls? Maybe. But ideas do have value, as long as patents have value. Litigation can only happen if patents are being violated, and that is why IP management is so important. The system is what it is, and these are the rules we are forced to deal with.
Here's a standard that would help fix the kind of behavior which, as you point out, does the opposite of the founding fathers' intention with patents.
When you show up with your idea that you think deserves protection, the patent examiner's first duty is to look at what evidence you provide that this idea has been economically feasible for 20 years, and no one has done it yet.
If it has been feasible for 20 years, then there is a market that could support it, and there are big players in that market, and the lone inventor knows that the minute he puts the idea out there, one of the established players will swoop in, copy it, and laugh at the inventor. The inventor, knowing this, just doesn't bother making it because going through all that work to have someone else come in and cash in on it doesn't make sense (not to most people, I mean).
We know the idea is clever and/or hard to come up with because no one has come up with it for 20 years, even though it has been feasible all this time.
Take the Chip Clip (a wide spring clip used for holding plastic bags of snacks closed after they have been opened to keep the remainder fresh). I have no idea whether it was patented or not, but it deserved patent protection, in my opinion, because it was clear that it had been within the ability of humans to make such a clip 20 years previous. Just no one did it. So we say "ok, it was feasible for 20 years, no one did it, you can have a monopoly on it for the next 20" or whatever the term is.
Now, Amazon's one-click--they just look at that and laugh, and say "sorry buddy, come back and tell us something interesting when the web has been around for 20 years, kthxbye."
Liberty uber alles.
Are they patent trolls? Maybe. But ideas do have value, as long as patents have value. Litigation can only happen if patents are being violated, and that is why IP management is so important.
Ideas have value, but what they don't have is natural ownership. By unnaturally imposing ownership on them through patents, the value they have for the community of producers is reduced, while the value they have for legal leeches who produce nothing is increased. And that's a disastrous tradeoff for community.
Apparently you're under the impression that the Patent Office is run by morons.
Fair enough, you're entitled to whatever POV you like. But there's no way to argue logically with you, since your assumptions are so fantastically different from mine.
FWIW, I assume the PTO is run by pretty clever people who do the best they can, given the general difficulty with predicting the future, and who have a pretty decent -- albeit not perfect -- track record over the past 200 years, and who would normally see right through any such transparently bogus scam, and, since they're human beings exercising judgment, and not Pentium Core Duos executing a giant Perl script written by Congress, would use the discretion the law gives them to just deny such an application forthwith.
Please don't use the word "Muslims" like that... it's tarring all people of one belief with the same brush.
It's probably equally as accurate to say that most Christians who die violently do so at the hands of other Christians. (although I have no cite for this, just as you have no cite for your Troll)
(disclaimer: I'm not a Muslim or a Christian - in fact, I'm a staunch atheist that thinks both the Muslim and Christian faiths are COMPLETELY ridiculous. I just don't like it when people fuel hatred in this manner)
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Pretty decent track record? When companies who hold thousands of patents agree that the patent system is broken, then there should be general consensus on this point. They've made some improvement on the processing time and quality of review, but we still have too many things that should be unpatentable receiving a patent. The assumption should be against the patent, unless the application is persuasive and complete. Sometimes it seems like they rubberstamp it, letting interested parties fight it out in court.
This story and too many others like it show that the purpose of incentivising real inventions for the eventual benefit of society is not being met.
This company is typical for Myhrvold. Read about Myhrvold's "cool idea for image compression" here. Trouble is: he hadn't done his homework, and this stuff had been invented several times before. But, hey, he is a physics Ph.D. who studied with Hawking, he must be so much smarter than everybody else that it isn't necessary to do his homework, right?
His patent troll company is likely to do the same thing: reinvent a lot of stuff that people already know, and get a bunch of patents that nobody who actually knows the field would have even considered patenting.
The whole concept of patents is so 1900ish. There was a time when people could create something and then keep it under wraps, and nobody could discover what they were doing under the hood. Mostly because mostly people with the knowledge were not near the devices.
This allowed a lot of ideas to get lost. Patents were specifically designed to prevent this act. But now in 2000 and the internet this idea is totally useless. There will be always people who can reverse engineer to find out how the thing works. So that particular reason for Patents is patently lost.
Now there is another use of patents to allow people to invest into projects that have a very high risk value. Pharmaceutical companies do have these kinds of projects. I would think there is some use of patents for these sort of companies.
But for the rest of the market Patents are an abomination. They should be abolished. Software industry definitely does not need patents. They already can use copyrights, to control their creations.
One thing that the patent office should do is to require a working prototype. No prototype no patent. And the complete plan should be made open.
It's not about competence, it's about money.
When a big corporation submits a patent application they use highly paid pros to slide it through. It's cost-effective for them, as they do it fairly frequently. If you or I submit a patent app, it's probably on a shoestring and will be something we do rarely. This results in a totally different process.
Big Corporations are patenting ideas at an alarming rate these days. It's analogous to the big real estate scamming which began in the 1980's and has resulted in ludicrously high property values today.
Caveat Utilitor
They are trying to find steps which are unavoidable in the development of technologies. Not quite the same thing.
... if they actually developed a technology that would not be true.
A person skilled in the art could not make anything which actually worked from their patents without making many more innovative steps
Where the marketing budget is bigger than the R&D (which would include the very expensive testing and certification etc)?
Just because Pharma R&D is expensive proves patents are worthwhile no more than it proves Marketing must be protected as an intellectual property.
I think many slashdotter's don't understand the patent system. You can't just patent the idea of "a nuclear reactor using thorium for fuel". You have to patent the actual way your reactor would work. If your patented way isn't technically or economically feasible then your patent is worthless. If I invent a technically and economically feasible method of "a nuclear reactor using thorium for fuel" then I am free to patent it and you can't do a damn thing about it. A patent protects HOW you would do something. If I can do it a different way then great. Patents also become published and anyone is free to examine the method and make their own evaluation of the possible success of the described method, or find a way to work around the claims. One is then free to either work around it or negotiate a license fee to develop and sell the product. If it's a great idea all involved can profit. If the idea sucks then someone wasted a bunch of money patenting it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's the second time in a short while that I've seen someone on Slashdot use the word for someone paying to live in a flat in that way.
I think this fellow meant 'tenet'.
FWIW, I assume the PTO is run by pretty clever people
I assume it's run by government employees, take that as you will. As for the office itself, it gets paid when you file a patent, paid when they grant a patent, and paid when someone wants to challenge the patent they granted: follow the money and you'll see that the entire thing is set up to not reject bullshit.
Take a look at the linked list patent posted by an AC in the firehose. It's a bit old news, it was granted in 2006, but it's very straight forward, there's no mystery as to what the patent does, and it covers anyone who doubly links their list in a sorted order, because apparently this company invented the idea of combining a linked list with a sort algorithm sometime around 2001 (a year before they submitted the patent in 2002). If I looked through the big box of floppies hard enough, I'd be able to find my highschool CS homework where I created a linked list of peoples names sorted in last name and first name orders, using ^.nextfn and ^.nextln in turbo pascal in '95 or so. That's the level of this patent: high school homework.
Next up comes the "flip camera" patent: Read this and tell me HOW to implement compression and decompression on a single chip. You can't, can you? Funny, that was the POINT of patents: to force inventors to reveal their innermost secrets in exchange for years of protection, so that everyone else could learn from their genius. Maybe you can tell me what's so special about doing this using only one chip? Do you not think that in the past 4 decades of miniturization, that it would not be "obvious" to a "person having ordinary skill in the art" of electronics that two chips could be combined together? Remember, we've been getting entire Systems on A Chip for years now, the time for inventing "... on one chip" was well over a decade ago (in fact, the system on a chip "first appeared in the LSI market 12 years ago" in 2006, making the idea (which, face it: the idea is the only thing worth mentioning in this patent) at least 3 years older than the 1997 filing date on that patent).
So, as the old saying goes, it's better to keep your mouth shut and let everyone assume you're an idiot than to open your mouth and prove it. Based on the junk coming out of the patent office's "mouth", how do you support the "pretty clever" assumption you have made?
Well aren't you the tolerant little turtleneck-wearing latte-sipper? Thank you for coming down from your mountain to grace us slobbering Neanderthals with your wisdom of a pointless existence - which is the only logical conclusion that can result from your world view. Now please do the world a favor and contemplate the hour of your suicide, because in your world it makes no difference if you die now or 50 years from now. BTW, MUSLIMS have done a pretty damned good job of painting themselves with the "same brush." The Muslim community's silence regarding the violent fascists that have kept their religion from adapting to the 21st century (deliberate targeting of civilians, honor killings, female circumcision, Theo Van Gogh, I could go on and on forever) is indicative of their tacit support.
I'd use the words 'business of extortion' rather than 'business of invention'. Patent hucksterism, is one of the most filthy of all forms of corporate criminality.
How is this insightful? Please don't feed the trolls.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
"Intellectual Ventures company, whose business model is to nurture ideas, write patents, and sell them"
.. Malda are you listening ...
No, that should be buy up old, out of date and defunct patents, reregister them, wait for a real company to make something (like Blackberry) and then extort revenue from them under threat of litigation.
"the New Yorker focuses more on how incredible it is to have a group of very intelligent people sitting around a table developing ideas"
Are you s******g me, I'm sorry but since when did SlashDot become a conduit for self serving corporate bunf
davecb5620@gmail.com
I walk through the eating room, lick my hand and touch every sandwich there is, yelling 'Mine!'. A company that has a business which is based on generating as many patents as possible in the hope of others doing actual work and 'infringing' by chance is the perfect example of what the patent system was never supposed to be.
Myhrvold's business model is hardly new. In fact I'm surprised those ur-clowns in Incline Village didn't patent it long ago.
You are fucking crazy.
Here's an oldie-but-goodie to refute your operating assumption: Patent 4022227.
Need I really say more?
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Pretty decent track record?
Yeah. Check your immediate surroundings. See any cool devices (iPods, personal computers, Internet) that use technology recently invented in the United States? Call up some of your older friends and family. Any using medical technology (knee replacements, cholesterol-lowering statins, heart-attack preventing stents, implantable pacemakers) that was invented here? Clear evidence, if you're actually paying attention, that there's been no slackening in the pace of innovation and invention lately. If the PTO is dragging the inventiveness of Americans down, it ain't showing, not where it matters, not out in the marketplace.
When companies who hold thousands of patents agree that the patent system is broken
Oh dear, someone is complaining and has a nice theory of how things can be improved? Gosh, how surprising. Next you'll be telling me that sometimes it rains in California, or that folks living in $1 million mansions occasionally take antidepressants.
People complain. Always. They'll complain in Paradise about the flying speed limit or the lubricity of their virgins or the texture of the roast beef. What you need to find, to make any kind of case, is actual, you know, facts 'n' figures, that suggest that American inventiveness and technology improvement is being throttled by PTO policies and actions. Good luck with that. You complain about the PTO just accepting flimsy arguments based on pure logic and zero actual measurements and facts and working models -- and do exactly the same yourself in criticizing them. If that isn't irony, I don't know what is.
Uh huh. Sure. And your proof would be....?
Sounds like generic mindless Big Bidness Been Bery Bery Bad Tuh Me sloganeering to me. Try thinking for yourself. Much harder, but more rewarding in the end.
Well, in the first place, even if I granted your arguments, the fact that two recent patents (out of several hundred thousand) don't make sense to me is not much of an argument. You might as well pick out two cases in which grad students have taken out student loans and used them to buy cars to prove that the student loan system is fscked up and all grad students are cheats. As they say, the plural of anecdote is not data. You'd have a much better case if you could point to multiple cases in which patents clearly stifled important innovation (that, say, had to succeed outside of US patent protection, in some other country).
/..
Secondly, you're basing your criticism of the validity of the patent on your own ignorant opinion (unless you happen to be an IP lawyer) of what actual effect the patent has in the real world. Having had a few experiences with the law and lawyers (ugh), let me assure you it ain't nearly that simple. If you think an ordinary joe can read the law and predict exactly (or even roughly) how it's going to work out in the real world, in the rulings of actual judges, then...er, to be kind, you must be mystified by why lawyers make as much money as they do. People don't actually read the law? They're just idiots and hire expensive trained legal minds to do what any logically-thinking layman could do?
Uh, no. Ha ha. The practical effect of patents is something only someone pretty skilled in the field could predict, and even then, experts predict it wrongly often enough that we have actual patent litigation. (There wouldn't be any litigation if the lawyers for both sides could predict with near certainty who would win, right? No one wastes $millions on a trial if he can guess the outcome beforehand.)
It sounds to me like you're criticizing the patents based on the fact that their grant doesn't seem consistent with some five-page Cliff's Notes version you've got in your head about how IP law works. Perhaps you're right, or perhaps you're not. I wouldn't know, myself. I know enough to know that there's no way I could ever predict accurately what the effect of a particular patent is out in the real world. I'd have to hire a clever lawyer to do that, and obviously I'm not going to for a naive argument among amateurs on
Finally, you seem to rely on a certain programmer's or compulsive personality's assumption of precise definitions of words to make arguments about inconsistency and illogical in PTO rulings. The problem with this is, as I said in my original post, lawyers and regulators do not think like this. They don't run on rigid logical rails, where the meaning of every word is as precisely defined as the length in bits of a double in Java. They have a very different way of thinking, one much more flexible and fuzzy and based on empirical observations about how people behave. It may be confusing and frustrating to programmer types, but that does not mean it doesn't work, or make sense in its own context of application. The typical male programmer would have better luck understanding the mind of women he's trying to date than the mind of lawyers working over in the IP department.
Wait, this is discussion. You must be looking for baseless accusations and insults.
Caveat Utilitor
Implementations only have value to the extent of their unclonability.
If you come up with an idea for a new type of Web app, write it, and launch it, the only thing stopping a competitor with greater resources from cloning it and wiping you out is both a patent on the idea and the time it would take them to clone it.
That is, only the idea has any significant value. The great bulk of work done developing the idea into an nice implementation is a negative value in the sense that it provides a ready template for cloning, and is a positive value only in the difficulty of that cloning.
This positive value can be lost very quickly if a competitor has access to huge resources.
1 - Patent idea /.
2 - Post story on
3 - Charge people for reading
4 - Profit!!!
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.