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Beware the King of the Patent Trolls
superapecommando writes "If you haven't heard of Intellectual Ventures, you may want to check this out. Set up by ex-Microsoftie Nathan Myhrvold, with investments from Microsoft among others, it is basically a patenting machine – filing and buying them in huge quantities. Note that it doesn't actually use these patents – except to threaten people with. In other words, Intellectual Ventures is a patent troll – or, rather the King of the Patent Trolls. So I was interested to come across this extremely positive blog post on the company. That it is so positive is hardly surprising, since the blog is called 'Tangible IP,' and subtitled 'ipVA's blog on adding value through intellectual property.' Nonetheless, it provides valuable insights into the mindset of fans of intellectual monopolies. Here's what it says about Intellectual Ventures: 'They are an invention house, and have adopted and reinvented leading edge patent strategies to create a portfolio of their own IP which, in its own, would be of high high worth.' They don't invent anything in the proper, deep sense of the word; they merely file and buy patents – with no intent of ever making stuff or solving real-life problems."
Excellent first sentence, really gets that article off to an awesome start.
If you haven't heard of Intellectual Ventures, you will do.
Is that some sort of threat?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Someone invented something which otherwise would not have existed, and in return they got paid money in a chain of payments which ended up with this company. That's how capitalism works - the free trade of commodities.
The problem lies with the original inventor, if you want: the guy who wanted to be paid for an idea, rather than giving it to the public domain. How many good ideas have you given to the public domain, reader?
Information economy only works if you have mega army to enforce it.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
"If you haven't heard of Intellectual Ventures, you will do.
That was the first line of the summary. Really, can't slashdot get an editor? Or even someone with journalism experience who would know to read something over before putting it on the front page? This story could not possibly have been so time-sensitive that it needed to bypass some common sense editing.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Sorry that you went in that direction. You are already fucked since this won't work in the long run.
Their Wikipedia entry implies that they actually do a decent bit of R&D themselves. I wouldn't call a company that does R&D and licenses the heck out of its work "King of the Patent Trolls." Of course, that assumes that the Wikipedia entry is accurate and all that. I can handle a company making money off of pure R&D. What I cannot tolerate is a company that makes money off of patents that it bought from someone else when it has neither a R&D base nor a manufacturing base.
" with no intent of ever making stuff "
That is not, nor has it ever been, the point of patents.
You could argue they do deserve the patent because they never intend to license, and thus is against the intent of the constitutionality of patents. However event that would be weak since congress determines patent laws.
What they do is well within the patent concept.
However, if you are talking about software or business methods, then those are clearly outside the intent of patents.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I don't know if anyone else around here remembers the state of slate/pen computing in the mid-to-late 90s, but there used to be a company called "General Magic" that made a touch-based graphical operating system for handhelds named "Magic Cap".
As the company kinda fell apart, there was an effort by some of the developers to open source it. But their intellectual property had been sold to Intellectual Ventures, because of some agent technology their stuff included. (Basically, imagine setting up a search on the handheld, and then briefly connecting to the internet to let your "search agent" run around inside a cloud, analyzing data and performing calculations. Then you reconnect and your agent comes back to you and presents the stuff on your handheld.)
Intellectual Ventures never really wanted most of the Magic Cap stuff. But they've made it so difficult to disentangle that the developers eventually gave up. Here's a writeup from one of the people involved.
http://joshcarter.com/magic_cap/faqs/the_future_of_magic_cap
General Magic made a graphical OS designed for handheld touch-based use, not based on a port of a desktop OS. And the people who built it tried to open-soruce it, but were blocked by Intellectual Ventures. If things had worked out differently, we might have had some really interesting work going on in the slate area long before the advent of the iPad.
(Heck. I'd love to run MagicCap on an iPad. It's the perfect hardware platform for it. I have three MagicCap devices myself.)
Yet another reason to completely scrap the patent process as the original intent of patents has been completely corrupted by lawyers.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
WARNING
Parent post filled with misinformed bullshit.
The US remains the leading manufacturer in the world by value: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Economy#Manufacturing
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
And, and a tip of my hat to Microsoft "innovation".
Please help document there here:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures
en.swpat.org is a way to build a wealth of info for when we need it.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
What more need I say?
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
It's a legitimate issue in the technology sector. All we keep hearing from political pundits and professors in the classroom is that innovation will drive the economy, lead you out of your bankrupt and unemployed community, solve world hunger and cure cancer.
And yet the patent system is structured in such a way that encourages this sort of corporate behavior, culminating in companies like Intellectual Ventures who, given that they don't produce anything per se, exist almost exclusively to stifle innovation. And they're making a truckload of profit in doing so.
Yes, there are certainly other issues that still need working out - can software really be patented, is something intangible really able to belong to someone, should monopolies be regulated, WHEN IS THE US PATENT OFFICE GETTING THEIR ACT TOGETHER (sorry, fingers slipped there), and countless others. But this would appear to be the poster child for everything that's wrong with the current patent system.
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
Instead of clicking through to the patent blog, here's the economist article that started the debate.
meep
Profit, or payment? They aren't the same thing, you know. Fair payment for honest work is not evil. Unfair profit from someone else's work is at least a little evil. And there is a middle ground between giving it all away and lazy, parasitic, rent-seeking behavior.
Copyright, trademark, and patent rights are defined by the government here in America. They are not natural rights. Thus, it is up to us to decide how to use them to our advantage. That is why we created them: for OUR advantage, not for the artists and inventors. And certainly not for money grubbing parasites who have spent their lives doing nothing more creative than shuffling numbers in an accounting ledger.
Whenever a capitalist talks about "adding value" or "creating wealth", they're really talking about creating scarcity. "Intellectual property" is the purest form of artificial scarcity, restricting the use of ideas, which otherwise can travel freely from mind to mind with negligible actual cost. A more mundane example is the way building houses drives up the cost of property by reducing the pool of available (or at least desirable) undeveloped property. (The housing bubble pushed this past the point of viability by building more houses than there were buyers for, but between inevitable population growth and the physical decline of abandoned houses, the situation will eventually return to normal.)
We end up with deceptive terms like "creating wealth" because few people would be enthusiastic about creating scarcity except, of course, for the people who already own the commodity being made scarce. Everyone else just ends up paying more for less. Intellectual property is particularly egregious in this sense because the scarcity is completely artificial, as opposed to real estate, where there really is a limited supply of raw material. Ideas, even good ones, are cheap and plentiful and very seldom actually unique; "ownership" is rather arbitrarily awarded to the company that has the resources to afford the patent process and gets it through the door first, with a strong incentive to do so as vaguely and broadly as possible so as to throttle as much actual creativity as possible.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
There's only one tiny little problem. There is no fair way to decide what fair profit is. Our current attempt is the let the market do it, which seems to work pretty well in a lot of cases.
What a lot of the entitlement crowd seems to clamor for I can't really determine. They want to benefit from the output while paying nothing. I'm not sure how that is ever going to workable.
I'll probably get blasted for calling that mindset entitlement oriented, but I honestly can't imagine another description.
If anyone would like to read a somewhat middle-of-the-road (neither "IV IS GREAT!" nor "IP is the DEVIL!") discussion of Intellectual Ventures, The New Yorker did a somewhat in-depth article on them last year that I thought was interesting. I (being of the IP is the DEVIL! mindset) don't think he addressed the problems to society at large with having companies that primarily chew up intellectual advancement space by pre-emptive patenting. But, on the other hand, patents are time-limited, and if they patent lots and lots of stuff that just isn't feasible given current tech, in 20 years when it IS feasible, there will be prior art and the areas won't be patentable, so that could be a plus.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
What if you could only own a patent if you manufactured something that used it? That would mean old unused patents would become public domain once they weren't needed (as determined by the market - if nobody was buying things that used it, and nobody made anything that used it, then the inventor could not hold the patent) Similarly, it means no one could buy a patent unless they were actively using it. It would remain with the original owner, or revert to the public domain if they went out of business.
I guess you might need protections then, to keep companies from just destroying another company to force the patents into the public domain. That could get sticky.
Could we do this with copyrights too? Ex: If you stop selling a book or piece of music, or stop selling a piece of software, it becomes public domain. That would help a lot with old video games. Hmm... what about art, where the artist doesn't want to make copies. Hmm....
Thoughts anyone?
The question I have is how many of these things are down to earth inventions, and how many are just academic ideas that they just decided to patent? When I say academic idea, I mean something along the lines of "Hrm, an observer model would be good for notifying an application about a change in a sensor". Even if nobody had done it before, does that make it an invention that should be patentable? And what about the delineation between method and implementation? You can increase the power band of a car engine by using variable valve timing. Should that in and of itself be patentable? What about the specific method that uses oil under pressure to laterally move the camshaft along a threaded "valley" to alter the timing (Basically Honda's V-Tech)? One is an idea/concept, and the other is an implementation. IMHO, an idea is useless without a specific implementation, and ideas should not be patentable. The problem with this, is that most of the software patents I've seen patent the idea, not the implementation. Now sure, with software the line between idea and implementation is much finer, but that's more of an argument towards the patent-ability of software in general, not what constitutes an implementation...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
No you can not, at least that is what the law says. It says you must "reduce to practice," your idea. The patent office has been doing a poor job of late making sure application fulfill that requirement. Patents can be broken in court even if they are issued by the patent office if it can be shown that they were issued in error, such as not properly reducing to practice. The problem with taking it to court is that it is very expensive.
If the market were to decide on a fair price for intellectual, non-rival works, without government granted and enforced monopoly, that price would be near zero.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
They *paid* money to someone for their invention. Someone, supposedly,
figured out something interesting, and, for whatever reason, decided
to take his money and run rather than let the invention stagnate.
Now, I don't like it when the patents are not for anything interesting
or novel, but simply being a patent troll is not a bad thing. Being a patent
troll of "obvious stupid" patents does seem like a bad thing
and is more of a fault of the people who *granted* the patent
to begin with.
You make the mistaken assumption that IP adds value to an economy. It doesn't. It's a way of redistributing, and eventually, removing value from the economy; those paying for the IP are in the economy subject to the IP, those receiving the payment may or may not be. Fundamentally it's equivalent to a taxation form where the recipients may be outside the economy where the tax is levied.
So saying we need IPR to make a profit in the future is the equivalent of saying we need more taxes and we need to give corporations in other countries a lot of the proceeds or we're fscked.
Somehow that doesn't exactly sound like a very good business plan to me. I'm sure it's great business for the recipients (who tend to be the only stakeholders represented as by calling it 'property' instead of 'tax' some seem to assume that the money isn't taken from someone else), but for everyone else, it's simply another of those economic burdens that are making rapidly making western economies uncompetitive.
they're buying ideas & patents. Shouldn't we sell them ideas and patents - lots and lots of them?
That's what the market says.
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http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=121034 Cites a Federal Reserve Report for last November.
For the year 2008, the Federal Reserve estimates that the value of U.S. manufacturing output was about $3.7 trillion (in 2008 dollars). If the U.S. manufacturing sector were a separate economy, with its own GDP, it would be tied with Germany as the world's fourth-richest economy. The GDPs are: U.S. ($14.2 trillion), Japan ($4.9 trillion), China ($4.3 trillion), U.S. manufacturing ($3.7 trillion), Germany ($3.7 trillion), France ($2.9 trillion) and the United Kingdom ($2.7 trillion).
More data from the same Federal Reserve report from last November:
http://blog.american.com/?p=8593
Manufacturing has seen the same changes over the last forty years that agriculture saw over the previous two hundred: Productivity per worker rose so much that fewer and fewer workers were needed to produce just as much stuff. This freed those workers to do other things, increasing the wealth of society. So manufacturing jobs have fallen--but we produce more than we ever have, and more than anyone else, including China. This is a GOOD thing, because it frees those workers to do other things, producing more goods and services for society as a whole.
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I don’t know how it is in the US, but in Germany, if you don’t actually use a patent, then after a specific time, your patent automatically becomes void.
This is to stop people who aren’t serious about doing something with it. Because then, the original point of the patent goes away.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
No, they haven't. Data from a Federal Reserve report from six months ago says the same thing:
http://blog.american.com/?p=8593
Multiply the Chinese economy by a factor of 5 to 10 to give you the real value of Chinese manufacturing. The USA is far, far behind.
No economist with half a brain would endorse this. Even on a PPP basis (the actual adjustment an economist would use, which gives a factor of less than two), the US is not behind.
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Are you claiming the Federal Reserve is lying about basic economic statistics? That's actually a far more serious charge than saying they failed as regulators.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
These guys have worked up wave-based pumps for circulating ocean water (to reduce surface temperature, and, thus, storm risk), and UV laser mosquito-killers to reduce malaria risk.
They have very real target applications and very concrete inventions. Sure, they're a patent-filing think-tank of inventors, but they're hardly just rights-purchasing patent trolls.
The original story is a troll.
Those are export numbers. The original post was claiming we are number one in total, not exported, manufacturing.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
the entitlement crowd
Is that referring to those who feel entitled to an artificial monopoly that distorts the free market and leads to huge inefficiencies?
If you let everyone copy, nobody does any R&D
Ah, but this is not even remotely certain. Actually, several economic papers give documented facts about how patents actually discourage innovation. (I remember that one of them was linked to in a recent discussion, but I don't have the time to search now)
Are you claiming the Federal Reserve is lying about basic economic statistics? That's actually a far more serious charge than saying they failed as regulators.
Are you kidding? The government manipulates the Consumer Price Index on a regular basis, this is a fact!
If sector X (ie energy goes up in price), then X's weighting is magically reduced. By their standards we all own computers that would otherwise be worth millions of dollars in the 60's so we're ALL rich. Of course, the average person can't afford proper health care or a diet of non-processed food, but WE'RE RICH!
Well, productivity numbers from the government count productivity from foreign workers toward the US number, while not including those worker's salaries. It just doesn't make any sense.
The numbers our government puts out are so far skewed that they aren't worth anything any more. If you want real basic economic numbers, try shadowstats.com
While this is encouraging, I wonder if these numbers are in local currency. We might produce more, but in comparison to China the immediate $ value is higher (in China, the output is cheap enough that even after shipping it across the world it's still cheaper).
My other concern is that we're not going to see the advancement due to less manufacturing jobs as we saw with farming. Farmers had to be self-motivated (to at least a certain point), be independent, and show ingenuity. Being a factory worker doesn't require any of that (generalizations for both). More specifically, a auto-union worker who spent most of his working life protecting his union job isn't very likely to go out and do something drastically innovative. The industrial revolution already happened and the tech revolution isn't as accessible.
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The book mentioned is copyrighted:
© Michele Bouldrin and Daniel K. Levine 2008.
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exemption and the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
The original poster has correctly stated a fact, which I acknowledged, but he failed to provide context for it. The richest country in the world having the highest value of manufacturing is what would be expected. Now, do they outperform other economies in terms of manufacturing per capita, per gdp, or exports as a percentage of GDP? These numbers would indicate a strong manufacturing sector.
The GPP stated
We don't actually make much anymore, we just invent it and have someone else make it. If we don't control the profits from the inventing, we're fucked.
And, judging from the export numbers, he's right, so I said
We're between Burundi and Cape Verde, at number 179 [in exports per gdp]... These numbers are by "value added" manufacturing. So, we've got a lot of bullshit that we put together that's manufactured almost entirely in east asia. Gluing it together, shoving it in a box, and then raising the price is not what I would call manufacturing.
Per the norm, these reasonable conclusions are modded down because no one takes the time to understand what they say.
Nathan Myhrvold is a friend of Bill Gates. They wrote a book together, The Road Ahead.
It seems to me that abusiveness is their business. They feel they have to be against something to make money. They scrupulously avoid doing something positive.
The book was an example of that. It was amazing. It seemed as though several editors went through the book carefully and removed any information that might be of interest. I say that because I don't think anyone could write a rough draft of such a long book that was entirely free of anything useful.
Intellectual Ventures is the parent of TerraPower, which we discussed here on /. a few days ago. You may recall: Bill Gates May Build Small Nuclear Reactor.
Just because you never make anything and don't ever solve a real world problem doesn't mean you didn't invent something. If I design something that does something in a new way or does something not done before I have invented something. Even if I take that design and lock it away in a draw for all time, I still invented it. You might not like thier business model, you might not like what they do to IP, but to say the never invented anything just because they don't make anything is a pretty narrow view of invention yourself.
I haven't crossed paths (yet) with IV, but I do believe that they are fundamentally evil. They're a natural consequence of bad laws and legal practice.
They like to describe their model as "Hey, Mr. Inventor, we'll buy your patents, or help you patent your stuff, and even pay you to work on it". This approach is appealing in principle, and to be sure, it does put some money in the hands of those inventors.
The problem is that what the Patent Office treats as an "invention" is almost completely unrelated to what constitutes an "invention" in the real world of commerce. A patent-office invention is just an idea. It doesn't have to be manufacturable, it doesn't have to be a viable product, it even doesn't have to work. It just has to be interesting and complicated enough that a relatively unskilled patent examiner cannot find a good reason to deny a patent. And since the examiner has only limited time (small number of hours) to examine each invention, and he's goaled on patents issued, not denied, well, pretty much anything can be patented.
(When I refer to examiners as "relatively unskilled", I don't mean that they're dummies--but rather, that they are generally less practiced in the art of patent management than the high-powered patent attorneys who craft the applications they're reading. Indeed, an awful lot of good examiners end up turning into those high-paid attorneys, after taking a few yeas of "training" at the Patent Office.)
A real-world invention, on the other hand, has to be something that makes money. It has to work. It has to be manufacturable. It has to be sufficiently well-developed as a product that people want to buy it. And getting to there from the idea stage requires real resources: money to pay engineers, money to advertise and market, etc. And ultimately, of course, a real-world invention has to make a profit: the costs ought not to exceed the revenues.
So what IV is mostly doing is creating or buying patent-office inventions and using those to extract money from entrepreneurs and companies that are trying to create real-world inventions. They're a tax on the real resources that are required to turn an invention into a product, and in that role, they far more often prevent useful products from reaching the market, by increasing their development costs too much for a profitable result. Sure, there are a few poster-child inventions where IV has invested their own resources, or where someone else's profit is feasible even at IV's royalty rates, but those cases are rare--and exist for press releases.
IV's costs are minimal, because they mostly just get smart people together to brainstorm. The ideas are copied down by patent attorneys, turned into applications by IV's legal team, and pushed through the Patent Office. Once issued, a patent is presumptively valid, and fighting it is a crapshoot. So if IV comes to you, you either license or fold, because they have more and better lawyers. They generally do nothing to turn an IV patent into a real-world invention, and they bear none of those real costs.
It is a brilliant business model. At minimal costs, IV exploits a fundamental and likely unfixable problem with the patent process, namely that most modern inventions are too sophisticated, complex, and interrelated for the process to address--yet the government guarantees a monopoly, so you have to play within the system, or be subject to patent litigation that is completely unpredictable (except for its multi-million dollar cost). The patent "reform" proposals floating around just nibble at the edges; the system itself is fundamentally broken.
Slashdot editors are Americans. The people who are supposed to edit stories speak the American dialect. So what is your point exactly? That because there are people in the world for who English is not the first language it is okay for a person for who it is, to suck at it?
By that logic, a doctor doesn't have to know medicine since lots of people don't know medicine.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Purely focusing on exports per GDP is a problem too, though. I live in Germany, which ranks very high on that scale. However, the trade volume within the country itself is suffering from focusing on export. We have pushed export numbers by any means, those means including reduction of real, inflation-adjusted wages inland, loss of spending power of the average citizen, erosion of our middle class. You gotta strike a balance between exports and domestic economic activity. I completely agree that you are at the opposite problematic end of the scale at the moment.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
People do, it's called licensing.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
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Look at our standard of living in the U.S. How did it get so high?
By blatently ignoring all the european and british patents and copyrights 100 years ago :-)
On the other hand the People of these united States also benefit from IP that becomes public domain, so that the "fire" of invention can light the minds & lives of all. To quote Jefferson:
Take for instance, the tables of M. de Buffon... according to which half of those of 21 years and upwards, living at any one instant of time, will be dead in 18 years 8 months, or say 19 years as the nearest integral number. Then 19 years is the term beyond which neither the representatives of a nation, nor even the whole nation itself assembled, can validly extend a debt... This principle that the earth belongs to the living, and not to the dead, is of very extensive application... Establish the principle in the new law to be passed for protecting copyrights and new inventions, by securing the exclusive right for 19 years.
A computation using life tables from 1992 gives a Jeffersonian copyright term of 30 years. (Vital Statistics of the United States 1992, Volume II--Mortality, Part A, Public Health Service, Hyattsville, 1996, Section 6, Table 6-1.) That is a reasonable amount of time for an inventor (either person or corporation) to profit from his labor.
It means that the Mickey Mouse character which Walt Disney created would have fell into public domain in 1959..... just a few years prior to Disney's own death. e could have new Mickey Mouse cartoons, created by any American who desired to do it, rather than have "him" locked in a vault and rarely seen.
It also means the if Intellectual Ventures "lock up" these ideas behind a wall and not develope them, the damage to society would be less, since the copyright/patent would expire circa 2025 and become public domain.
P.S.
One of Jefferson's most famous statements on patent law was in his often-quoted letter of August 13, 1813 to Isaac McPherson, in which he wrote that, since there is no natural right to property in land, how much less is there a natural right to a property in ideas.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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Owning patents is a very lucrative business beyond merely patent trolling. I've worked with a number of clients who own a bunch of patents, ranging from a handful up to a few hundred. They're routinely traded, sold or licensed. Sometimes I'm left with the impression that it's like trading Pokemon or baseball cards. Its basically trading in information. In one particular case the patents all fall under a range of related of technologies and services which the company is actively developing. In other cases it seems like investors pick and choose patents they consider to have potential and develop the technology to a point where it can be sold off for a hefty sum to another company.
To be honest, I'm not sure how I feel about it. In many of these cases they end up doing something with the patents but there's something about this that leaves me with the impression that it's violating the spirit and intent of the patent system. But one thing is certain, we're unlikely to see any substantial and profound changes in the patent system because too many people have too much to gain from the system in its current form. And I think one of the underlying problems here is the litigious nature of this country. Perhaps we need a loser-pays system introduced?
So you're basically saying, "Don't hate the playa, hate the game". I agree.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
The free market would price non-rival works at near-zero. Not having any incentives to invent or create art is a pretty big inefficiency. How would your free market fix that?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The problem with taking it to court is that it is very expensive.
Enter the patent troll. If they can make threatening you, and having you pay them cheaper than you defending yourself in court, they win. Since they do this in bulk, they've beat the system.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Obviously since I was referring to the current situation, I was also implying the condition of the government granted monopoly.
The price when the rules are ignored is zero for everything. If I ignore the government enforced protections against shoplifting, the retail price for goods in a store is also zero. Does that have any bearing on anything?
the value of U.S. manufacturing output was about $3.7 trillion (in 2008 dollars)
So, I feel that there may be some room to argue that America is not the same kind of manufacturing entity it once was. According to the numbers (which, admittedly, come from different reports and cannot be guaranteed to be the best for this comparison), the food processing industry drives about 84% of the manufacturing total in America. The biggest manufacturers in the food industry are Nestle and PepsiCo, not the Hoover (now a part of Techtronic Industries, in Hong Kong), Fridgidaire (now a part of Electrolux, which appears to be made mostly in Eastern Europe, though there still may be an Ohio factory), and other manufacturers that were synonymous with the "Made in America" quality of the 50's and 60's.
No doubt those applications had merit... but what is the benefit to society? How did writing the applications provide incentive for the inventive process? What useful products will result from the protection granted by those patents, if issued, and who will invest the resources to turn those ideas into products? And if the patents end up (as so many do) being used to block others from pursuing products that are in any way potentially infringing, exactly how does that "promote the progress of science and useful arts" (to quote the Constitution).
Interestingly, even you imply that some of IV's applications have little merit, and you're paid by them. What might a disinterested party say?
So saying we need IPR to make a profit in the future is the equivalent of saying we need more taxes and we need to give corporations in other countries a lot of the proceeds or we're fscked.
And you wonder why companies are moving, no RUNNING as fast as they can to the one place left on the planet(China) where none of this applies?
No. Without society, you take your fucking LIFE into your hands when you shoplift. Get it? You might get SHOT. The price is not zero. Look at the underground economy. Physical goods in the underground economy still have value, and are traded for cash. Without government intervention of any kind, these goods are still traded for cash. Intangible goods have very little value in the underground economy. Understand the difference now?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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These numbers are bogus. They include products made abroad by nominally American companies. All the cars produced by GM in China are counted as part of this. If you remove the offshore production, the GDP and manufacturing has been in decline for more than a decade. This has been exposed multiple times in the business press. BusinessWeek had an excellent article on this about a year back.
The patent system have value to society. In this particular case, a negative one. We are advancing and improving too fast and need something that slow the entire civilization down, and with a bit of luck, take us several steps backward, and this kind of patent trolls are one of the best tools for that thing.
Or at least work as a perfect case study to show to even the dumbest (honest) bonehead in governments that there is something very wrong in the system around this.
I'm pretty sure I understand better than you do.
You see, the government is preventing copyright holders from killing pirates. It still all comes to the same thing. All property is an illusion enforced by common agreement, whether you can hold it in your hand or pass the bits along the internet. Your tangible examples are no more meaningful than my illusory ones. It still comes down to common recognition.
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No its not socialist. You don't understand the meaning of the word.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
The accountants don't explain it, shareholders don't ask about it, most business leaders don't understand it.
Amazingly though almost nobody outside of the IP community...
Ask people who know anything and they'd say that if IV breathes in your direction, take a license.
Emperror's clothes are awesome aren't they?
What is believed though is that this number puts them in the Premier league (up there with IBM, Nokia, Qualcomm and others) in terms of IP influence.
The same way Enron was at the top of their game?
Some say they have 30,000 patent families, but it is impossible to know exactly how many.
Bet you can't.
But they don't want to see seen to be litigators...that's bad for reputation so they outsource that part to others who aren't so bothered about what the outside world thinks of them.
You mean like the guy from Buffalo who keeps calling, threatening to sue me for an old debt? The same guy who for the sake of his own life can't tell me what the dept was for, who bought it, whose behalf he is suing me on or why he isn't instead suing the guy who had my phone number 8 years ago and incurred the actual debt, but dammit, he is going to find truth and justice just as soon as I write him a check for whatever sum he can squeeze out of me? Yeah, I wouldn't want that guy's reputation either.
Still, I'll give him credit, he filled out a page without resorting to righteous indignation.
Do those statistics include goods manufactured outside the US by US companies, using local labour? It seems disingenuous to tout the value of the US manufacturing sector if it only profits its owners and workers in foreign countries.
If they haven't, then their patents may not be valid.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
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since you lived in a house about 50% smaller than today's homes.
Try ~75% smaller. My house is from 1962, it's very typical of a house from that era at just under 1200 sq ft. When I bought it in 2004 I couldn't interest a builder in anything smaller than 3,000 sq ft and 4,000+ was the norm. If I could have built a reasonable sized house with modern efficiencies I would have but as it is I have a small inefficient home that still costs me a way smaller percentage of my wages.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Suppose I cut down a tree. I can sell the log, or else I can mill the logs, turn them into wood, build something with the wood, and sell it as furniture.
Each of those steps "adds value" because there is profit to be made at each step.
Similarly, if I suck up oil from the ground I can sell the raw crude, or I can refine it and sell various types of distillates for significantly more money. More value added.
I agree that there are problems with the current intellectual property system...but to claim that all forms of value add are due to scarcity is just wrong.
reduction of real, inflation-adjusted wages inland, loss of spending power of the average citizen, erosion of our middle class.
We've had that in the US too without the increase in exports...
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Are you missing the difference between trillion and billion? Or did you say mean to say that the food industry is 3.2 trillion?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The main requirement for entering this business--inventing things--is a complete lack of a soul (or conscience, if you'd rather).
It is pure greed and power mongering the way things stand and in the end the result is LESS innovation.
When I was 20, I used to do Q/A for a company that made lancets (a device to prick the skin to draw a drop of blood for analysis, usually blood sugar levels). One day I realized that there was a better way. The device I was inspecting daily had over 30 parts and ended up costing the retail customer around $35. They still had to purchase disposable tips that were one-use only and had to be safely discarded so as not to infect others.
In less then a week I had a flawlessly-working prototype of a disposable, single-use device that not only was sterile (didn't rely on packaging to achieve), but also cost less then $.10 to make and had ONE moving part (for a total of three parts in its entirety) and was completely safe to simply throw away (the needle that did the actual pricking was drawn back inside the case after it did it's thing), making it particularly attractive to hospitals.
I tried to shop the idea to my employer who seemed totally unimpressed and never brought it up again. I then tried to shop it to Becton-Dickenson (the worlds largest maker of syringes) and was pretty much told they didn't accept submissions from outside their own R/D dept.
A few months ago my mother hands me one. The device I designed. It turns out the doctor she saw that day had used it on her and she decided to keep it and show it to me. It was essentially my design with the sterility factor removed. They relied on the packaging to keep the device sterile until used.
After some research, it turns out that not only did my ex-employer have his name on the patent for it, but also the guy I spoke to on the phone at Becton-Dickinson. They had somehow both found out the other knew about the idea, waited 7 years to patent (since I did not patent it in that time) then simply co-submitted the patent, then went into production. They sell it to this day.
In short, they could have written me a check for $5k (I was hurting for tuition back then and could REALLY have used it), had full rights to the idea and not had to wait 7 years. Instead, they CHOSE to simply fuck me over. Nice guys.
Now, I ask you slash-dotters, what fucking incentive do I have to EVER bother trying my hand at inventing again? The knowledge that my idea at least made it to people that can use it?
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These numbers are bogus. They include products made abroad by nominally American companies. All the cars produced by GM in China are counted as part of this.
So what are the numbers for manufacturing and asssembly in the US by companies which are wholly or in part foreign owned?
Toyota, for example, currently employs about 30,000 industrial workers in in Alabama, Indiana, Texas and West Virginia, with a new plant slated for construction in Mississippi. The car in front is still a Toyota
So use GNP instead.
$ make available
They pay for ideas accepted (that they will then patent), and they share in the royalties of patents licensed. They don't just patent anything; I've had about 20% of my ideas actually accepted usually because others were seen as outside a large-enough need base (meaning not enough licensing opportunities - reduce to practice here) or not an area of interest for them. It's actually a great way to be compensated for tinkering outside your main area of expertise and income, and earn a little bit of cash for it.
And yes, they have a full lab/workshop that can be available to inventors for R&D.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Lets say I were to invent something for the benefit of society. And I wanted to share my idea freely with the world so that everyone can benefit from it.
Patents are expensive me being a poor Joe, and just wanting to share my idea, I'm not going to patent something just to give it away for free.
If I just told everyone I knew, what would stop them from taking that idea and patenting it and thus 'owning' the idea?
Is there a way to freely publish an idea in such a way that it will not be patentable? -similar to say the GPL software licence but with allowance for the 3rd party to profit?
Is there an organization that can review these public ideas for possible applications?
Perhaps this organization could even award prize money for worthy ideas, such as the nobel prize system? (on a much smaller scale)
And what if this organization was well funded and actively sought IP rights for the explicit purpose of releasing them to the public?
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
You misunderstand the objections to patents. Your argument is that they stifle innovation in the short-term in return for more innovation in the long-term, and if you were right, it would indeed be a silly complaint. But that isn't true of a lot of patents these days. They ONLY stifle innovation — the theoretical effect of spurring R&D doesn't happen in a lot of cases. In fact, they retard R&D by making it increasingly risky. These patents aren't meant to protect the owner from copycats, but from people who unknowingly make something even vaguely similar to the idea behind the supposed "invention." These patents don't merely grant you protection from somebody copying your invention, but from anybody creating practically anything in the same market for the lifetime of that patent.
... patenting the business model of a patent troll?
If the right person pulled it off, they could use it to shut all the others down.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
20 years from now (or whenever Intellectual Ventures gets so mired in whatever befalls it that it can't open another lawsuit) this giant backlog of IP will all be free. In the meantime these guys are doing a kind of cheesypoof R&D shop that gets to the idea stage.... Wouldn't it be awesome if that was the hard part?
Every rule has more than one consequence.
The car in front is still a Toyota
I hope the car behind isn't.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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Not having any incentives to invent or create art is a pretty big inefficiency.
Neither free markets or monopolistic driven "markets" are good solutions for dealing with the need to increase the knowledge base of society. I do believe that free markets are to prefer as inefficiencies don't scale up as badly as in monopolistic markets, but that doesn't say much.
But in truth, with the increasing focus on knowledge driven societies, running economies based on free market theory is becoming increasingly difficult and less efficient. It is a very difficult and precarious situation that humanity as a whole is in right now. Especially as there is a misplaced faith in the free market due to its efficiency in the manufacturing growth phase of a society. And the current solutions looks to be worse than the problem itself.
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Well hey, we agree! As an aside, look at Cybersyn Project that Allende spearheaded back in socialist Chile. There are alternatives to the price signals of the free market. Coincidence that he was ousted right after creating Cybersyn? Maybe.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Whats up with corporations and their instance on changing the meaning of words?
Inventing means, well, you make something new. it does not mean you buy IP from others and claim that you invent things. Sheesh, what your doing isn't even new...
Be seeing you...
I'm hardly a free market fundie.
Of course there's a limit, which is why as goods productivity rises more workers move into services. There are problems with this, but most of them could be at least partially solved by 1) treating capital gains as regular income (because rising goods productivity tends to favor capital gains income over wage income) and 2) adjustments over time in the wage structure of the service sectors.