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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."
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.
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!
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.
No, because the public will never be able to spend as much on bribery/lobbying as most large corporations.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
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.
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.
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.
No, because the public will never be able to spend as much on bribery/lobbying as most large corporations.
In the case of software patents the lobby in favor of them isn't really the corporations. It's the lawyers.
Think about it: If software patents went away tomorrow, Microsoft et al wouldn't be able to collect patent license fees anymore, but neither would they have to pay them out. For most companies it comes out as a wash, give or take. And if software patents went away, none of those companies would have to continue paying their armies of patent lawyers, which would save them each millions of dollars.
But that would put all of those software patent lawyers out of business, so it is the lawyers who supply the driving force behind the status quo. What confuses people is that they frequently hear corporate lawyers advocating software patents and assume that they take that position in the interest of their employer rather than their occupation.
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!"
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?
Uh... yes! Millions! And I'm suing for damages.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
Software patents have always been about raising the cost of entry to new competitors.
Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, etc fight each other for business, but its sort of a gentlemen's game, with the players, stakes and products well known.
New players shake up the status quo, change markets, obsolete product lines. Stuff that big companies hate.
Years ago, I argued here on /. against software patents, arguing that despite what developers thought, they were really for the benefit of large companies, not upstart new companies.
I'm actually sorry that I was proven correct.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
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!
Yep, I've been thinking that the lawyers are the real problem for a decade.
"The software programming community seems largely against patents. When the only people defending software patents are patent holders who make money from licensing, patent lawyers who make money from patent applications and patent litigation, and the Patent and Trademark Office who make money from granting patents, is there any reason to believe patents are in the public interest?" -- me, in 1999 (slightly edited for clarity)
This American Life is distributed by PRI. Yes it plays mostly on NPR affiliates, but NPR has nothing to do with making it.
Note, however that this week's episode was a co-production if This American Life and NPR's Planet Money.
Normally, this statement would be correct, but not always.
Software patents have always been about raising the cost of entry to new competitors.
Yes and no. That is certainly an advantage of software patents to large corporations, but it is weighed against on the other side by subjecting the large corporations to shakedowns by patent trolls. Ask Microsoft if they think i4i deserves more than a quarter of a billion dollars of Microsoft's money. To say nothing of what will happen one of these days when a patent troll gets a permanent injunction against a major software company for a patent claim that can't be worked around without breaking protocol or file format compatibility with the version currently in use by customers.
At the end of the day, the only winners when it comes to software patents are the lawyers. They get paid when companies stockpile patents for defensive purposes. They get paid when their employers file a patent lawsuit. And they get paid when their employers get sued over patents. And all of that paying the lawyers comes out of the coffers of companies that could otherwise be spending that money innovating. The only way the lawyers lose is if people decide that the purpose of software patents should not be full employment for patent lawyers, and get rid of them.
One of their best.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/
As far as I know IV does sue. They have sued in the recent past. Remember IV is owned and run by an ex-microsoft big-wig.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
"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?"
No. The public are too stupid to understand the issues.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
In the meantime, patent trolls spell the doom to the small entrepreneur. How is the small guy to know that the logic he writes and creates with his own logical thought processes is a violation of someone elses' patent. The only thing we can do is continue developing here, but register your product with a business that is resident off-shore in what is a safe haven.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
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.