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Intellectual Ventures' Patent Protection Racket
David Gerard writes "Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures doesn't sue people over patents, because that would be patent trolling! No, instead they just threaten to sell the patent to a known litigious patent troll. So that's all right then. Timothy Lee details how using patents to crush profitable innovation works in practice, and concludes: 'In thinking about how to reform the patent system, a good yardstick would be to look for policy changes that would tend to put Myhrvold and his firm out of business.'"
When is something going to actually be done about this??? It's been a topic of discussion for years, it impacts major companies in a net negative way and still nothing gets done. I don't understand it...
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Please, summarize without injecting your childish sarcasm; save those for a comment reply. For example:
I much prefer the latter summary to the former, and I doubt I'm alone.
Despite his considerable intellect, he didn't accomplish much of note at M$ and now has sunk even lower. He should stick to cooking
and taking photos.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
make it the lesser of three, 20 years. or 5 years from the first licensed product containing the patent being available for sale, or 7 years from the first infringing product being available for sale.
The only thing I can see there it wouldn't worth it for the inventor is if he invented something that can't be priced to recoup the investment in R&D , let alone make a profit, in that time frame.
Then there are inventions that are ahead of their time and there aren't too many profitable applications for a while - the LASER comes to mind. The Laser was invented in 1958 at Bell Labs, bit it didn't see widespread use until what, the 1980s? So, what will happen in a time from of 7 years or less would be that the inventor has spent all that time and money on R&D and would be unable to reap the benefits.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Some time ago I was having a conversation with some people about whether extrajudicial killing can ever be justified, and Nathan Myhrvold was the one person who we agreed there was really no good argument against it.
The
Many (like myself) will point out that the difference between the time of invention and the expiration of the patent correspond with the time it took for the invention to become popular.
AT&T had more than enough monopoly money, so Bell Labs didn't patent their research. And we (everyone other than AT&T) are collectively better off for it.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Big pharma would cry bloody murder, since it costs about a billion dollars to bring a single drug to market through theoretical research, synthesis, isolation, pharmacology, clinical trials, more clinical trials, and final FDA marketing approval.
Also, we signed an international agreement saying we wouldn't.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Which means that only rich inventors are able to accomplish something. Great!
Considering that corporations today are seriously allergic to anything long term and often barely manage to see beyond the next quarter, it's doubtful that anything that couldn't fully recoup development costs and turn a nice profit in 5 years TOTAL would be pursued at all. Even Bell Labs has turned away from the sort of basic research that gained it it's reputation these days to focus on shorter term profit.
We need a metric that doesn't involve a court trying to determine if some fuzzy thing is true. Part of the damage from patents now is the extreme cost of patent litigation.
give me one GOOD reason why copyright should extend BEYOND the author's death.
To discourage big media companies from ordering hits ON, rather than FOR their stars.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Multiply the cost of development by I to arrive at $1.2 million. ACME Inc applies for a patent on their wonder drug, and it is deemed novel thus granted. A new pool is created with a value of $1.2 million.
I question whether using the actual cost of development is viable. In the case of drugs, a company may have to pay to develop 20 drugs before they get one that actually works and is profitable - that area research has a very high failure rate (drugs that don't work, have too many undesirable side effects, etc). Using actual cost of development could kill areas of research where it's expected that a small number of successes will offset the expenses of the large number of failures.
Pro - the size of the pool is determined by the audited cost of development. Thus you cannot make millions off something trivial or obvious.
I would consider this on a Con, rather than a Pro. You're basically setting up a system which will only benefit "big" inventions (meaning those funded by wealthy individuals or corporations). Consider the following scenario - working in my garage, I come up with some invention for a trivial amount, but which has massive utility (let's use the "better mousetrap" as an example). I only spend a few hundred dollars working on it, so the pool would be very small. MegaSuperEverything Corporation then jumps in, and for a trivial amount of money obtains the rights, and proceeds to sell many millions of them thanks to their existing marketing/distribution channels, while I can only sell a handful because of the competition. Knowing that this is likely to happen, what incentive do I have to patent the invention?
Con - The second entrant to the pool has the advantage of not needing to do the R&D yet can immediately benefit from the invention. First mover advantage might not be enough to offset this. Perhaps could be solved by throttling the entry rate to the pool.
Just have a decaying rate. For instance, in year one, the pool would be cost of development times 100 (or higher). In year 2, it drops to 75x. Year three down to 50x. Have a floor, so that after 10 years, it's at 1.5x, and remains there until the patent expires. This would tend to preserve the first mover advantage, without compromising the concept (provided the decay rate is reasonable).
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
Good ideas are a dime a dozen. The hard part is making a business out of them.
Apple, for example, has hardly ever come up with any original ideas, but they have done an excellent job turning other people's good ideas into successful products.
The creator's family is actually a pretty decent reason. (And, I suspect, the reason that the law was put in place.)
Only if you think companies should be legally required to continue to pay their employee's salaries after they die.
Consider two people, one who creates tangible goods, such as gas stations, and one who creates intellectual property, such as novels. If both of them died today, what would they leave behind in their estate? Of course, both would leave behind any financial earnings from their business as well as things that they had purchased. But what about each person's 'legacy.'
This is simply a matter of timing. If the gas station owner dies while he's still owing a large proportion of the initial expenses endured acquiring it, then his family will get squat. On the other hand, if the author dies after releasing his first blockbuster (but while finishing the second), then his family are going to get a lot of money.