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When Patents Attack — the NPR Version
fermion writes "This American Life is running a story this week on Intellectual Ventures, a firm some consider the leader of the patent trolls. The story delves into the origins of the term patent troll and the rise of the patent troll industry. Much time is spent presenting Intellectual Ventures both as a patent troll firm and a legitimate business that allows helpless inventors to monetize patents. It is stipulated that Intellectual Ventures does not in fact sue anyone. It is also alleged that Intellectual Ventures creates many shell companies, presumably to hide such activity. Intellectual Ventures is compared to a Mafia protection racket that may never actually burn down a business that does not pay the dues, but does encourage such burning to occur."
Presumably to hid it!
grammar police: Intellectual Vultures, that's how you spell it...
I thought it said "Intellectual Vultures"... my mistake!
in all their "Mafia protection racket" analogies, they didn't use the phrase "You gotta really nice lookin' business here", which nearly always precedes "It'd be a shame if something happened to it".
Nice piece, though, over all.
I just finished listening to the story and it does a great job of explaining current situation of software patents and trolls in the industry.
Does anyone think that getting people (non-slashdot crowd/lamens) informed on this issue will make any significant changes to current way the industry is operating?
But it would be nice to, at least in theory, RTFA. Is it just me or do I have to wait until Sunday at 7:00 PM (timezone unknown) to download the MP3 and LTFA.
Or should I just whine about how bad patent trolls are without benefit of absorbing any new material? It's not like we haven't been down this road before.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This American Life gives me hives.
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While much of the slashdot community is aware of the insanity the way software patents work, this show does a pretty good job of explaining the process for the uninitiated. I tried to explain the problems associated with software patents to my girlfriend last week and she could barely believe how screwed software patents are. Thanks to NPR, I can send her to a more clear and thorough explanation than I was able to give.
Hopefully this helps to convince non-technical Americans that patents should rarely, if ever be awarded for software.
Facts have a liberal bias.
and loved it. Everyone should listen to this. They tried to find a usefull (protected an inventor who wouldn't have been protected otherwise) patent issued from the last few years, and couldn't find one.
I listened to the whole thing live streaming from my NPR station. I was interested to hear that almost everything considered "common knowledge" here on Slashdot held up under their scrutiny. They visited a company that makes software to find duplicate patents, and they said that about 30% of patents granted are duplicates of the same idea. They also said that the one case Intellectual Ventures gives as their "poster child" of an "inventor whose idea was being used illegally until IV came along" actually had over 5500 duplicates granted in the same time frame (nevermind all the prior art that existed). That one patent, by the way, was traced to a patent troll company that is obligated to give Intellectual Ventures a cut of their revenue from it...and the creator of the patent is trying to sue them, IIRC. So much for "encouraging innovation by helping poor inventors".
Another interesting statistic is that they cited polls claiming that 80% of software engineers say patents hurt their business and creativity. I know we've been repeating this to each other for years, but it's nice to see it backed up every now and then.
As the field is shaped by actual legislation, the only winning move in software development is being patent troll or big lobbyist. For anything else big success is probably followed by bigger setbacks by that kind of players.
OP sounds like a lawyer him/herself.
This American Life is distributed by PRI. Yes it plays mostly on NPR affiliates, but NPR has nothing to do with making it.
Is there anybody here that has a had a great idea, physical or software, but not brought it to fruition "because" of the patent system? Because of the headaches of the process or even just the thought of the slight chance of being sued in to oblivion?
in all their "Mafia protection racket" analogies, they didn't use the phrase "You gotta really nice lookin' business here", which nearly always precedes "It'd be a shame if something happened to it".
Nice piece, though, over all.
Becareful, they may become a Slander/Libel Troll and sue anyone that calls them "Mafia" or their business a "Protection Racket".p/.
We like to blame companies that do shit like this, or the lawyers and lobbyists that enable and push them on, but the real problem is the underlying system that makes the appearance of such entities necessary and inevitable. In a world where software patents exist, you will have patent trolls. In a world where the idea of "intellectual property" is taken seriously, you will have lawyers defending said property. Fix the system, and these sorts of behaviors will go away as they will no longer be economically productive. We've let it fo unchecked for too long, and now the big players put money into the feedback loop of lobbying to perpetuate the same system that allows them to make money to lobby with; I admit that I am at a loss for a solution to fix the problem while working within established channels. The average person has virtually no knowledge or understanding of patent law, and has no interest in becoming informed. The minority of us who do care and are informed are easily ignored with no political consequences for our elected representatives.
It seems that the best we can do on a personal level is make the choice to disregard those bodies of laws that are illegitimate, while shielding ourselves from repercussions as best we can.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Becareful, they may become a Slander/Libel Troll and sue anyone that calls them "Mafia" or their business a "Protection Racket".
I wonder why the music and film industry associations haven't already done that.
"Intellectual Ventures is compared to a Mafia protection racket that may never actually burn down a business that does not pay the dues, but does encourage such burning to occur."
Nice, innovative, lucrative computer program you have there. It'd be a shame if something "happened" to it (pats pile of patents on desk and glances at lawyers just outside the door).
There has got to be a time limit imposed on patents other than the 17 years. If a patent owner does not have a functioning product in production, say, within 5 years of the patent being awarded then the patent should be released to the public domain. If you have it, use it, otherwise, let it go.
As a somewhat regular (minus long hiatuses) player of kingdom of loathing, I couldn't help but read the title like this >.
From the podcast it mentions a photo sharing site that got sued along with some 130 different companies. If 130 some odd companies came up with the same concept independently, doesn't that make the patent invalid as it would fail the obviousness requirement?
This American Life is a Public Radio International (PRI) show, not a National Public Radio (NPR) one.
You know, those folks suing apple developers directly? They've already collected money from Apple, but they're suing their customers... hmm... sounds like our friends from Utah an awful lot.
Um, how can the company be a troll if they don't sue anyone?
Someone who works at Intellectual Ventures had a feature in Make magazine recently about his project to zap mosquitoes with lasers in order to control malaria.
Also, they developed a plan to build a very cheap way to solve global warming by building a hose to spew sulphur into the upper reaches of the atmosphere just like a volcano does. This was described in the book "Super Freakonomics." I hadn't heard this idea before, and it is ingenious.
Not everyone who owns a patent is a troll. It's was created by someone who used to work at Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold. From their website:
"We believe ideas are valuable. At Intellectual Ventures, we invest both expertise and capital in the development of inventions. We collaborate with leading inventors and partner with pioneering companies. By providing access to our portfolio of patents, we help our customers innovate and reduce their risk by Bridging the Invention Gap between the invention rights they currently have and the invention rights they need."
It sounds to me like a legitimate operation involved in developing and monetizing ideas. Just because there is money involved doesn't mean they're automatically trolls. This story seems like sensationalism: "They have halls loaded with empty companies.....buh buh bum! Hide your children!"
They also said that the one case Intellectual Ventures gives as their "poster child" of an "inventor whose idea was being used illegally until IV came along" actually had over 5500 duplicates granted in the same time frame (nevermind all the prior art that existed).
Not quite... Actually, it's pretty clear that the journalists have no idea what they're talking about - they note three patents that [OMG] have the same title... while failing to note that two of them are continuations of the first one, and that they have very different claims. Their evidence for all of those duplicates, again, are the titles. Any patent practitioner, including myself, will tell you that titles have no legal weight, and the fact that two patents have identical or similar titles says absolutely nothing about whether they're duplicates or not... but apparently, This American Life failed to ask anyone about that.
Frankly, the transcript shows the lack of investigation that you can expect from NPR and PRI's fluff shows. Some producer did a few minutes of research on Wiki, made a couple phone calls and recorded some soundbites, and then threw it together into a story without checking any of the conclusions from those soundbites. This isn't journalism... this is "he says X. She says Y. The end."
Full disclosure: I am a US patent agent, and formerly worked for a major NPR affiliate station group. Some of the shows do great work. Others, not so much.
I've been saying the same thing for years myself, and experienced it firsthand. The bigs just cross license, no money need change hands. A little guy with just one patent can't play in that game, and can't do squat without violating some bunch of stupid patented stuff.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
One of their best.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/
This is a problem of incentives. We could pass one three sentence law and clean up the patent mess within a couple decades:
1. For each claim of a patent later overturned in court each defendant shall be paid $5,000,000 out of the general budget of the PTO; adjusted for inflation each year.
2. Patent fees shall be be set by the PTO to be at minimum $1,000,000 per claim.
3. Fees shall be set so as to collect sufficient revenues to fund all spending by the PTO plus an additional 5,000% (to account for some of the cost of patent holder's rent seeking to the greater economy.)
The first sentence helps clean up the backlog of existing bad patents and the other two will help stem the flood of future crap.