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Former Intel CEO Andy Grove Wants Struggling Industries To Stop Slacking
lousyd writes "Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel and current instructor at Stanford Business School, has a message for industry. He believes that health care and energy, especially, could learn a lesson from computing's innovative and relatively government-free history. He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was. On the issue of computer patents, he insists that firms must use their patents or lose them: 'You can't just sit on your a** and give everyone the finger.'"
The private sector was clearly interested only in hoping "data islands" from which "publishing" could be strictly controlled (and billed) along with limited interconnection through proprietary network protocols, and not in creating some kind of generic interconnection as such where network services and data could be offered by any participating peer. If we did not have the government funded Internet at the start, we would still be today essentially experiencing some decadent of or something like Compuserve or AoL, that is a metered data service delivered from an isolated digital island, and perhaps even things like broadband may never have become widely available outside of businesses looking to connect ipx over x.25 networks :).
I have been thinking lately, (don't let that scare you), that instead of the patent system granting exclusive rights, it should grant exclusive royalties.
In other words, it becomes a registration system that grantees payment of royalties to inventors for a specific period of time, paid by anyone that wants to use a patent.
So a patent holder can not restrict use of an invention. this allows others to use it as a base for further invention and innovation. It also removes, to a big extent, any reason for companies to fight patent awards, or try to steal or use patents without paying, which might lower the number of lawsuits, etc. Why risk paying lawyers when you can just use it cheaply and legally?.
I am not certain how to determine the royalty rate though. Could an auction system work? Or maybe a percentage of the cost to manufacture, which would be harder to fudge than percentage of profit?
One reform does need to be made, similar to what the parent mentions: You should not be able to file a patent application for anything that is already being produced and marketed by anyone, including yourself. If you forget to file and it is sold or produced before the patent application is filed, well, you screwed up. It should automatically be in the public domain, regardless of what ever kind of excuses or prior evidence you can mock up.
The world has changed since the 18th century when the basis for the U.S. patent system was formed. (I dunno about other systems). It is far easier to keep track of what people are making and selling in distant places than it was 300 years ago, and easier to assess royalties, etc. There seems to no longer need to be a simple ban on anyone else using a patent.
Yeah, lots of details lef tout, and probably lots of holes, and a bunch of new problems different than the current ones. But would it be an improvement over the current system? Maybe you patent gurus here can comment.
The hardest part about long term waste storage is getting people to give it as little thought as they give the millions of tons of material pumped into the atmosphere by coal power plants (and it is becoming clear that they actually put more radiation into the environment than nuclear, so it isn't just a matter of the potential problems associated with the CO2).
The idea of creating institutions that need to stand for thousands of years is a little scary, but I'm a lot more scared of turning off the lights.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The other difficulty is setting the rate for the royalty. Should a component for a car gearing system get the same royalty as a component for an MRI machine, even though the latter cost ten times as much R&D spending and will ship a tiny fraction of the number of units? If not, how do you decide how much more it should cost? I'm in favour of compulsory licensing for copyright and patents, but setting the royalty rate is difficult.
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