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Ask Slashdot: When Is Patent License Trading Not Trolling?
LeadSongDog writes "A piece in yesterday's Forbes offers arguments on why not all 'Non-Practicing Entities' are 'Patent Trolls.' Comments here on such businesses are often critical. Is there a right way to trade in patents for profit without abusing the process?"
From the article: "The Founders’ decision to foster non-practicing entities and patent licensing proved crucial to America’s rapid technological progress and economic growth. Patent records from the nineteenth century reveal that more than two-thirds of all the great inventors of the Industrial Revolution, including Thomas Edison and Elias Howe, were non-practicing entities who focused on invention and licensed some or all of their patents to others to develop into new products."
More of less the article says that NPEs encourage innovation by allowing people to sell patents. Everyone agrees that patent trolls/ NPE by being willing to buy patents help to make having a portfolio of patents a valuable asset. That's not a point in question. The point in question is whether the damage NPEs cause exceeds the benefits of their funding since the money for those buys comes from lawsuits. And Forbes doesn't even attempt to answer that question. Lots of terrible things often have some side advantages that don't come close to covering the downside of the terrible thing.
The problem is junk patents.
Imagine you invent a device that pulls water out of the air for free (unlike anything cold, which will do it for $$$). Anywhere. Even in a desert. This is a great innovation. I have zero problem with you selling your patent to someone else. The problem I have is that right after you invent this, a horde of lawyers will storm the patent office and patent things like drinking water that came from your device. Watering a lawn with water that came from your device. Making beer with water that came from your device.
The problem is the ridiculous deluge of patents for trivial and obvious things. They litter the business landscape and make it impossible to solve any real problem without tripping over them as you solve 100 trivial problems in obvious ways along the way. Cuz you know, who ever would have thought that the optimal number of clicks to buy something in would be 1? That must have taken a talented team of web developer (singular) literally hours to do.
I'm of the opinion that if you didn't create it, and your entity exists to do nothing than extort people for royalties on your patent ... you are a patent troll.
At the risk of burning karma, I disagree... licensing organizations are not the problem. Bad patents are the problem.
Licensing organizations are very useful, to big companies, small companies and individuals.
There are a fairly large number of companies that exist to profit off bad patents, but that doesn't invalidate the work the "good" companies are doing.
Yeah, Edison profited off the research of his students, and everyone around him......a bad example to be used if they want to prove patents are useful.
And an even worse example if you want to show that NPEs are useful today. That fact that independent inventors were useful a century ago is irrelevant. They play very little role in modern innovation. Many companies refuse to even talk to independent inventors, because knowledge of their patents can expose the company to liability. What most NPEs do is sit on the patent and wait for someone to independently come up with the same innovation, and then demand payment. They are just parasites.
they just license the patents.
You make it sound like they hire a salesperson to go around and market their patent to potential customers. Or maybe you think the customers search for useful patents to license and then contact the inventor. Neither of these scenarios is common. What is common, is for the NPE to just sit on the patent, wait for someone to independently come up with the same innovation, and then demand payment. This is not contributing anything positive to the process.
Patents were useful in a time where the written word was expensive to produce in quantity and ideas could easily be lost. This is just not the case anymore. Our population alone has put us into the million monkeys on typewriter range.
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