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UN Wades Into Patent War Mess
Rambo Tribble writes "The BBC is reporting that the worldwide, tangled mess of IP litigation has come to the attention of the UN's International Telecommunication Union. The agency has announced it will be holding talks aimed at reducing this massive drag on the digital economy. Good luck."
If there's one organization I think of when it comes to taking effective, decisive, timely action - it is the United Nations.
#DeleteChrome
I think this may actually not be a waste of time. A lot of the mess we see now is due to the inclusion of patented technology in international standards (be they ITU, ETSI, ISO-IEC, ANSI whatever). And the fact that there was so little oversight on this, the validity of patent claims and subsequent licensing, was due to the direct wishes of the telecom/technology companies themselves. The standard bodies were all to happy to accommodate their constituents in this point for years.
Now the companies, and the government who are in the awkward position of depriving their citizens of the latest cell phone because of some obscure patent law issue, are realizing that they are in the process of hanging themselves with the rope they had requested.
This is a very broad issue and the ITU has had a decent track record of elevating previously obscure tech issues into the international policy realm. If anyone expects overnight binding measures to come from this, they are deluded. But raising awareness of the issue and getting the various actors to take a position is the unavoidable first step in resolving any complex issue.
Good luck to them.
I'd love to see the UN troops with their blue hats march into the courtroom and tell the lawyers of both sides to back off.
And a nice little red cross tent outside taking care of the wounded lawyers who burned themselves choking on their coffee.
For some people, the UN could announce a cure for cancer, free unlimited food for everyone, a low-cost solution to global warming and a Mars colony project on the same date, and they would comment with NWO paranoia, evil overlord nonsense and "don't mess with my rights" bullshit.
A huge majority of those comments come from americans. Are you so unconfident that you can't accept someone else besides the "land of the free and the home of the brave" (which has long since turned into a joke to everyone outside the US) as someone setting international agendas?
We have a similar phenomenon over here in Europe, btw. - it is directed against the European Union, which is always blamed for everything that goes wrong, even though at least lately they have made a ton of excellent decisions (rejecting ACTA being the most prominent one). That is in part caused by our coward, corrupt, evil politicians, who abuse the EU to push through laws they want but know would never get popular support for. It goes roughly like that: Come up with law, test it with a few controlled "leaks", notice popular outrage. Publicly call the scapegoat you prepared for a crazy idea and ascertain public that the party line is different. Quietly move law to the EU level and get it passed as an EU directive. A year or two later, dig up old law again and complain how you really don't want to do it, but the EU forces you to...
So I wonder where the anti-UN sentiment in the US comes from?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
1) All patents expire after 2 years. If you can't make money from having a 2-year monopoly on an invention, it obviously wasn't very good anyway. 2) Getting a patent costs a €LARGE_AMOUNT of money, which goes into a fund that the government uses to invest into research. 3) No sales bans. The only penatly for "violating" a patent is compensation for actual damages, the burden of proof for which lie on the patent holder. 4) If out of a random sample of five university students in the appropriate field, at least three find your idea obvious and/or trivial to come up with, your patent is rejected. 5) (Very) generous exemptions from the all of the above for non-profits, educational users and independent (non-corporate) inventors.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
This whole patent mess reminds me of the animation movie "Finding Nemo". Somewhere a flock of seagulls attacks, mindlessly screaming "Mine! Mine! Mine!"
This is what the industry is like today. Lawyer driven madness, where everyone is trying to put a claim on any thought that might be remotely original. It is a huge drag on innovation and leads to destruction. I can only hope the ITU will be able to put up a sail between these gullible seagulls and real innovation. Just like in the movie.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Other acronyms are going to quickly get dragged into this, mainly the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) which is much more about this sort of stuff, and possibly the World Trade Organization (WTO) if, for example, Korea were to complain that the US ITC is being overly kind to Apple and should be letting Korean products in.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
The only way to actually solve the issues with monopoly rights like patents is to turn them into non-confrontational compensation rights where a third party (such as the patent office) provides compensation due based on usage.
No, there is a third way: drop patents completely. Like copyright, they began as ways for a king to get additional funds: by legalizing bribes, so someone could pay to have his competition declared illegal. And like copyright, they never has any purpose that's beneficial to the society at large (despite what their proponents say).
I don't think anyone can say with a straight face that patents promote innovation.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
For some people, the UN could announce a cure for cancer, free unlimited food for everyone, a low-cost solution to global warming and a Mars colony project on the same date, and they would comment with NWO paranoia, evil overlord nonsense and "don't mess with my rights" bullshit.
A lot of people would comment on that because where do you think most of the money for those programs, or the free food would come from? That's right, the US. We already have enough problems ourselves that we have to fix first.
A huge majority of those comments come from americans. Are you so unconfident that you can't accept someone else besides the "land of the free and the home of the brave" (which has long since turned into a joke to everyone outside the US) as someone setting international agendas?
You know, we here in the US do kind of have cause to be uncomfortable with being controlled by a higher body. I mean, the country itself exists only because Americans got tired of being ruled over by a government that they saw as foreign and insensitive to their needs and only wanted to exploit them to fund it's wasteful wars and other expensive programs.
We have a similar phenomenon over here in Europe, btw. - it is directed against the European Union, which is always blamed for everything that goes wrong, even though at least lately they have made a ton of excellent decisions (rejecting ACTA being the most prominent one).
That is because people don't like to give up sovereignty. By giving up power to a higher regional entity, the "local" (state) governments lose their independence and quite a bit of their power. Look at what is happening in Greece and you can see how people like getting told what to do by an outside power overriding their own sovereignty. The same situation happened in America 150 years ago. Hopefully Europe can avoid the war we were unable to.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
A lot of people would comment on that because where do you think most of the money for those programs, or the free food would come from? That's right, the US. We already have enough problems ourselves that we have to fix first.
I can relate to that argument better than you think, because I'm german and we germans are the ones largely paying for the whole EU thing.
However, we are also profiting from the EU a lot more than the mainstream media or the politicians care to admit.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same would be true for the US. Of course, the facts won't be easily available, because politically, the UN is the perfect scapegoat.
You know, we here in the US do kind of have cause to be uncomfortable with being controlled by a higher body. I mean, the country itself exists only because Americans got tired of being ruled over by a government that they saw as foreign and insensitive to their needs and only wanted to exploit them to fund it's wasteful wars and other expensive programs.
That's pretty ironic because the end result of it all has been that you've created your own government that is insensitive to your needs and only wants to explout you to fun its wasteful wars and other expensive programs.
And give you an illusion of control. When's the last time elections in the US really changed anything?
That is because people don't like to give up sovereignty.
Strawman. They already have. The question is not giving it up or not, the question is solely to whom.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You know, we here in the US do kind of have cause to be uncomfortable with being controlled by a higher body.
Doesn't everyone?
Look at what is happening in Greece and you can see how people like getting told what to do by an outside power overriding their own sovereignty.
Don't be so sure about it. They HATE their complacent and stupid government, but most of them see the Europe as the only way out of the third world. So all in all, quite the opposite of what you're stating.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
bullshit. the US hasn't paid their UN dues for decades. they use the UN to inflict their policies on the world, and then expect the rest of the world to pay for that "privilege".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_United_Nations#The_U.S._arrears_issue