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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
Why not shorten the standard lifetime of patents from 20 years(I think its 20, anyways), to say, for example 5?
In this way, the owner of the patent will have motivation not to sit on it, maximize profit and then move on to the next innovation.
Seems like this wouldn't be a bad idea, although, I will be the first to admit, I only understand the very basics of the patent problem.
Thoughts?
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
In this gushing article Malcom Gladwell implies that this sort of patent trollism is some great innovation on it's own.
Bill Gates, whose company, Microsoft, is one of the major investors in Intellectual Ventures, says, âoeI can give you fifty examples of ideas theyâ(TM)ve had where, if you take just one of them, youâ(TM)d have a startup company right there.â
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
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.
And, I don't really care, so long as the linked article is interesting and informative, and I doubt I'm alone.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Consider the following replacement patent system, let's call it the fractional pool system.
Let's say ACME Inc invents a new wonder drug at an approximate cost of $1 million. Let's also state that I is the "innovation incentive", a quasi-fixed constant specified by the government - sort of like the central banks base rate. I is expressed as a multiplier. For simplicity let's say I is 1.2
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. Anybody who wishes to license this patent (and anybody can - there is no exclusivity in the fractional pools system) must enter the pool by paying enough into it to split it evenly.
For example, if MegaCorp wishes to compete with ACME Inc, they'd need to pay $600,000 into the pool, which is transferred to ACME Incs bank account. Now both companies are down $600k each. ZCorp sees that the wonder drug is popular and wants to enter the market too, so ZCorp pays $400k into the pool, which is split evenly between ACME Inc and MegaCorp. Thus all three participants in the pool are now down $400k.
This continues until the cost of entering the pool reaches some minimal floor at which point the pool is cancelled and the invention becomes public property. There is no particular time limit on this. It happens whenever it happens. You can see that ACME Inc will eventually make back their $1 million plus an additional profit of nearly (but not quite) $200k.
This scheme has some big advantages:
Of course there are some disadvantages too:
Despite these problems I think fractional pools are a more robust and flexible way to promote R&D than the existing patent system, which not only has arbitrary fixed constants but also gaping loopholes of the type we witness in this article. Discuss.
The problem isn't that businesses litigate over patent disputes. The problem isn't even so-called "patent trolls". It's the legal framework that creates it; The deeper judicial and legal principles. Patents were meant to cover an applied technological advancement; Not a theoretical one, or to intangibles like a process. But the patent system has been expanded to cover these, and it was done in a haphazard fashion by people who didn't fully understand the implications of doing so.
The net result is that the patent system is being used to protect intangibles -- markets, processes, and "intellectual property". This was never the intend of the patent system. Even worse, the time limit of 7 to 14 years was needed due to slow business processes of the pre-computer era when it would take years to develop something and bring it to market. Now, development to market time can be weeks or months. While this was originally designed so that the inventor (an individual) could profit from his invention while safely making available details of how it worked to the public (thus advancing the state of the art), it nowadays functions as an impetiment to invention because of the long life of the patent and the nearly endless variations that are possible to keep basic inventions protected in perpetuity.
What's needed is a radical rethink of business process and economics, and the removal of the extreme reliance upon the legal system to protect it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
And, I don't really care, so long as the linked article is interesting and informative, and I doubt I'm alone.
Yes, ever since I was old enough to make up my own mind all I need is a link to the source and I'm golden. I do sometimes need people to tell me if my dress makes me look fat, but I think that is a different story entirely.
i r in ur
Myhrvold's enterprise stunk to high heaven since the day it was conceived. Especially the part about paying scientists to come over to an exciting "tell us what's on your mind" conference and start brainstorming together, which was obviously done so that Myhrvold could collect, patent, and monetize those ideas.
Reminds me of reading Dick Feynman's book about the U.S. government doing the same thing, asking scientists to come up with all sorts of uses for atomic energy that they could patent. Except, that's the government, and presumably they're accountable to someone. At least they ended up giving Feynman a dollar per patent so he could go buy some cookies. I've worked with companies who abuse scientists in similar ways, and to be honest I think our system trains scientists to be scientifically smart and realistically dumb - if you could explain to these guys that they don't have to sell out in order to make money, maybe we'd have MUCH better products and services today.
Exactly. We are all pretty steamed about this and I would not qualify this behavior as childish sarcasm; I would qualify it as sarcasm generally held by a community reflected through the medium delivered to the community. I think it is pretty safe to say that 80-90% of people here on ./ would like to see some serious Software patent reform and we are pretty exasperated about that reform not happening. I am willing to submit that certainly, that is not every ./ reader. However, the fact that new businesses are being established which further exploit the broken system could easily anger the ./ reader whom is exasperated(I would like to clarify that I don't think that is the intent here). While sarcasm in journalism is generally not called for or necessarily professional (there has been far too much of it lately, I will agree with you there), sometimes it is admissible because it reflects the elevation of tension in the community, and that is really what the reporter's job is - to tell everybody else whats going on on the ground.
It is important to realize that /. is not a pure news site, being in the transient twilit realm of new media. It mostly links 'real' (old media) news, and the rest of its independently generated content mostly consist of reviews, journal entries, and interviews. However, I am not surprised that people expect ./ to follow some journalistic standards.
kdawson does lay it on a little thick sometimes, and I wish he would have more discretion in using that particular journalistic device, but I will give him a personal 'pass' on this one.
I wrote that text and it was passed unaltered, so blame me for the pissed-off tone.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Acquiring a fortune isn't the same thing as actually accomplishing something. Frequently, it's a matter of being at the right place at the right time. Come to think of it, I know of no fortune that would be possible without that essential bit of luck.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
You're both Slashdotters, so of course you're alone. So very alone.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
And, I don't really care, so long as the linked article is interesting and informative, and I doubt I'm alone.
If you click on the link and read the article, you are alone.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
The Supreme Court's review of Bilski is the first time since 1981 that they've decided to look at the patentability of software. The Supreme Court needs facts, studies, and opinions (but only if they're
from very respected people, which includes Timothy B. Lee). You can help gather and document these things on the public swpat.org wiki:
This is our big chance to fix the problem!
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki