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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.
huh? Where have you been for the last 100 years dude? Yes, this is a good example of why the patent system is broken.. but its been that way for quite a while now.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
Played by patent proponents, it's a useless distinction which holds no information. Empty words and misdirection.
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?
"So how are they making their money? By litigation. So they're not actually helping progress, they're hindering it."
evidence to this light is found here: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/348
a company by the name of thorium power, is designing a real thorium based fuel that would run in a conventional Russian atomic reactor, and along comes this patent troll company trying to eat up the US thorium reactor patents... which will mean Russia and China may be using thorium reactors while America finds itself unable to because 'the patent troll drove the cost too high'
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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?