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Study: Royalty Charges Almost On Par With Component Costs For Smartphones
Bismillah (993337) writes "An interesting study by WilmerHale lawyers and Intel's assistant general counsel Ann Armstrong looked into how much royalty payments and demands actually amount to per device, and found the cost so high it threatens industry profitability and competitiveness. 'As the bank robber Willie Sutton is reported to have said, he robbed banks 'because that's where the money is' - so too of smartphones for patent holders,' the authors wrote."
If people wanted to sell a royalty free cell phone they should have invented one, along with all battery and display technology and infrastructure technology. Otherwise you're just the final link in a long chain of innovators who made cell phones possible.
They could, but since there are phones for less than $120 with being subsidized, I'm going to guess they potentially aren't.
and then they won't pay any royalties
just do all the R&D for the thousands of patents that cover antennas, modulation, encryption, LTE, beam forming the signal and everything else it takes for a modern phone to work
Cost A is almost the same as Cost B!!!!!! Cost A is INVALID! Obviously! Kill cost A!! Only Cost B can be valid, because I said so!
Because he basically invented all of it, didn't he give up all patents? So prior work nullifies all of the new stuff? :D
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Very good, now figure out what percentage is regulatory overhead, paperwork shuffling, compliance, lobbying the gov't to keep them from raiding your offices for doing perfectly legal things, etc.
and then they won't pay any royalties just do all the R&D for the thousands of patents that cover antennas, modulation, encryption, LTE, beam forming the signal and everything else it takes for a modern phone to work
And yet if they did reinvent the wheel, they'd get sued into oblivion by these companies nontheless. With the speed at wihch technology progresses increasing as drastically as it has been, we need to rethink the we we grant patents. Software patents need to pass the CS201 stink test (if a CS201 student can figure it out, it ain't novel), and important hardware patents should have a shorter lifespan.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Why is it more important for the bosses of the people who glued the bits together to get more money than the bosses of the people who designed the bits to be glued? How many angels fit on the head of a pin?
It does not work that way. Even if Apple or Samsung or anybody else invents all the components themself, they still have to pay the same royalty to the original "inventors", because they received monopoly for 20 years.
On the surface, the patent system seems like a good idea. Underneath you have to license 1000 patents from 1000 different companies to create a device, each patent holder feeling like they deserve the biggest chunk of your end sale profits. Always interesting when the research to back up logic is released..
If you void patients then companies will stop sharing their innovations with people and instead rely on trade secrets to protect their intellectual property.
You think progress is slow now? See what happens when companies actively hide how they do things rather then relying on patients to protect their IP.
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Actually Samsung has done a lot of that research, however it is handwaved away by the US courts and valueless.
Samsung and other companies participating in the active development of standards for such important techniques also
cooperate, cross license, and charge very little.
Apple however slapped 'on a capacitive touch screen' on a mountain of prior art it is held up and important and innovative.
Apple then uses this 'high value patents' as a weapon to try and exclude competition from who markets so they can protect
their astronomically high per device profits (compared to industry norms).
THAT is the problem.
Why should there be software patents to begin with?
and of the rest of these fucking patents, how many are non-obvious and/or without prior art?
Patents were intended to promote competition and a viable public domain, they were not intended to be a cudgel to keep the little guys from playing.
With commodity hardware what it is, there should be thousands of cell phone manufacturers. (or hundreds? either way, vastly more than what we have today)
When rent seeking companies succeed, they are taking away from the public. I think that gets forgotten sometimes. :(
Since most smartphone royalties are charged as a % of the price of the device, they have to do the calculation given a hypothetical device with a specific price. They chose $400, seems that seems to be near the average price of a high-end smartphone. /., but if you have such a basic question about the article perhaps you could take a quick look...
I know it is
In general I can understand basic technology royalties like LTE etc. I mean, somebody spent a lot of money developing a technology essential for a device type, so you'd have to pay to enter the market of that device which would not exist otherwise. Ok, with so many companies involved the royalties may get a bit high. But in addition to that, there are companies allowed to patent obvious things (that most of the time they did not even "invent" first) like swiping the screen, or even generic designs like rounded corners that essentially had near ZERO cost in R&D and yet either demand high royalties or try to block competitors...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
then apple and samsung need to open up a modern day bell labs and invent new stuff
like that australian university that invented most of wifi. or the german one that invented mp3
If you made a general-purpose pocket computer that has a LTE addon module (which you license as a single unit), how much of that royalty pool just melts away?
They have no place in the modern world, if they ever had a place at all. Creating art is a privilege and invention is the nature of intelligence, they will happen just fine without greed as the motivation. Down with unfettered capitalism, live like rational humans instead of psychopaths.
most of those were design patents
and the holder of the most design patents in the usa is, Samsung. patenting their designs for fridges and microwaves
CSIRO didn't invent most of wifi, and the Fraunhofer Society didn't invent mp3 alone.
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You seriously think that a company could keep secrets for more than a product cycle? The spying-security arms race would be won by the spies in a matter of minutes.
If you void patients then companies will stop sharing their innovations with people ...
What do people have to do with it ?
That seems like it would be interesting. Each company would pay more for research independently, so STEM gets a boost in pay and numbers. The small guy would likely be able to buy common-tech parts from some Chinese without worry about how they are made, just what they can do.
The problem at this point in time is that technology gets out paced before the patent's ink is even dry. The patent clerk's office gave up trying to find prior art and is letting the burden fall on the courts. No one wants to claim that they broke patent law, so they settle, dragging this out further and further. The general solution given here, is to reduce what can be patented, so the system can play catch-up.
Instead of that, we likely need more employees with varied specialties and a better database system for better / automatic lookups. Hell. Get Watson to best guess similar patents and have a human double check. There are many possible solutions, but the only real solution is to put some more money towards sorting this all out or remove parts. Going back to the first to make instead of first to file would be an improvement for those that make the technology.
If you could keep it a secret, you'd be a moron to get a patent. Also, outside of a few industries, you get LESS useful information from most patents than having someone with at least moderately related knowledge on the subject looking at it for five minutes.
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You lack imagination and a grasp of history.
You forget that prior to patents that is precisely how companies operated.
Would they have to change the way they make products and release them? Obviously.
or did you not realize that was an unavoidable component of that point?
Take the push for cloud computing which is itself partially seen a solution to piracy. Consider that invalidating patents and piracy are similar qualities and the means by which you fight one works well against the other. In effect you might see many products never enter your hands behind various mechanisms that make it impossible to reverse engineer it.
Furthermore, for the sake of argument I grant you that they can't stop you from stealing their IP... they will invest less in developing new IP because the profit margin for doing so will be less.
That means less new stuff... and the rate of technological development will come to a near halt.
This is in large part why patents were invented in the first place. To incentivize innovation.
If you hate the modern world. If you hate innovation. If you hate technology... then undermine the patient.
If you like all the modern new shiny stuff... then don't mess with the patients.
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The problem is not with the companies doing real research that don't have the money or intent to produce the products themselfes. Its more with the patent system being used to enforce DRM, shooting small competition into the knee with patent claims, patent trolls, or too long terms in certain industries.
I think that the current price for smartphone patents seems fair, even if there are some unfair patents like "swipe to unlock".
Patents shouldn't be issued for obvious stuff, and be required to be written in clear and common language.
There are other areas for smartphones to change regulations for. One would be to allow open source carrier chips. I don't think there would be any harm when anyone could legally hack that chip, and if there is, then its because of exploitable BTS or BSC software, which should be fixed either way.
that's not true
each new gen has new stuff and patents but it still uses inventions from prior generations of that product
Very eloquently said...
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Secrets weren't kept all that well even by guilds, and getting rid of patents would only serve to accelerate the growth, because innovation happens when ideas have sex and reproduce, and patents are a form of birth control.
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With the speed at wihch technology progresses increasing as drastically as it has been, we need to rethink the we we grant patents. Software patents need to pass the CS201 stink test (if a CS201 student can figure it out, it ain't novel), and important hardware patents should have a shorter lifespan.
Part of the problem is the complexity of the product being built, which naturally increases the number of technologies, and therefore the number of patents being included in the product.
Invent a plow today and you need... 1 patent. Its a sheet of metal for cutting the earth. Throw on a yoke and use a new alloy and may be a couple more for hooks and leather straps and you're still around 5 patents. Granted I'm not a plow engineer so I really don't know everything that goes into one, but how complicated can one plow really be... when compared to a modern smart phone?
We're no longer standing on the shoulders of giants, we're standing on the shoulders of giants who are standing on the shoulders of giants who are standing on the shoulders of giants... and every single one of them wants to get paid for holding us up. (Atlas shrugged cause he wasn't getting paid).
I'm having trouble linking royalty costs to "stifling innovation" though. Getting paid via royalty payments is a pretty good reason to innovate: invent something, get paid. Increases in the amount people are paying in royalties just increases the incentive to invent something and get paid. In fact, it is doing exactly that. Companies invent stuff, or buy inventions, just to use those inventions as collateral to get access to other inventions. That $120-$150 estimate they put on there is not cash payments, it is $120-$150 of something... such as their own inventions.
I don't particularly recall that many "Cant afford royalty payments so our product is cancelled" stories. I do see Apple's $160 billion bank balance though, which to me says there is no problem with royalties or lawsuits over royalties or profit margins. In fact that tells me the royalties have saved Apple quite a bit of money in R&D costs.
And yet if they did reinvent the wheel, they'd get sued into oblivion by these companies non[e]theless.
Maybe they shouldn't be using wheels, then. Perhaps a bearing caster would be better, or a nylon pad, or a small armature. If this "wheel" thing is patented, then it's because it's a particular solution for a particular problem. Avoid that solution and solve your problem differently.
Software patents need to pass the CS201 stink test (if a CS201 student can figure it out, it ain't novel)
Here's the catch: They aren't allowed to know the patented solution before they figure it out. If they're the standard for "reasonably skilled in the art", then a bad patent must be "obvious" to them before the state of the art has been advanced by the patented solution.
Having actually taught CS201 students, I expect this will be hilarious.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
No, the profit margin for innovating would be lower and the risks for innovating would increase... thus there would be less innovation.
if anything, the majority of effort would be put into protecting what IP could be kept secret.
Why are people so ignorant of the history on this? You do realize there was a time before patents, right? Do you know what innovation looked like at that time? Patients reward innovation. If you hate people that innovate, then by all means... cut off their livelihood. If you like innovation, don't take bread out of their children's mouths.
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This is the market in operation. Stopping patents will not slow or stop innovation, it will spur some as companies need to invent to differentiate from the rest. Then when they are copied, it continues. In this sense, necessity is the mother of new invention. The necessity of being unique and valuable Ina sea of clones.
Silence is a state of mime.
As to patent trolls, those people are fraudsters.
Just because there are criminal elements in the patient system does not mean you should get rid of the patient system entirely.
That would be like saying that because some people defraud people out of down payments they put on houses that we should not buy homes anymore.
Just as we have an escrow system that protects home buyers and sellers the patient system probably needs some sort of infrastructure to stop fraudulent patient claims from interfering with people.
If the patient however is valid... that is someone actually did invent something, and patient it... then they're owed compensation for that. Pay the man.
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Unless the phone is a randomly shaped blob with razor sharp spikes and a morse code only interface that doesn't actually connect to anything, someone will have their hand out for royalties anyway.
To be fair, we-we is about the only thing not patented.
...patents are a form of birth control.
Yeah, by abortion.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
MPEG is (theoretically) a non-profit, open to all international standards body. The separate entity MPEG-LA is the MPEG License Authority. It's the business end. The technical committees are front organizations for the license authority, which generates a lot of cash.
The entire setup is a sham. The big players send so many representatives to the technical committees that they dominate by sheer numbers. Sometimes meetings extend for hours late into the night. The faction that wants to get their proposal excepted keeps their people in the meeting, and then when they count a majority they hold a vote and get what they want.
It's not about technology or quality or making things faster/better/cheaper. It's about decades long revenue streams protected by international standards and laws like the DCMA. Even though it looks like technology is driving to lower costs, the reality is that patent royalties are effective a huge tax on users.
The return is completely disproportionate to the initial investment. How much do you think it cost to come up with the standard for the HDMI cable? How much do you think is being made worldwide if even $1.00 US is going for license fees?
No capitalism here. Nothing to see. Move along.
Why is Snark Required?
Tell you what, why don't you ask inventors and companies that spend real R&D money what they think of your little theory?
They'll tell you what I just told you. If you won't listen to the inventors then that's like ignoring the farmers when they try to tell you what will happen to the harvest.
That's just willful ignorance... it is worthy of neither respect nor tolerance. Its just stupid.
I say this assuming that you won't listen to them... am I wrong?
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Patents were intended to promote competition and a viable public domain
[citation needed]. Per the Constitution:
The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts
and from the USPTO, "To foster innovation and competitiveness...", saying nothing about the public domain. In fact, I'd argue that a state-of-the-art public domain is actually bad for innovation, because there is little incentive to advance beyond the good-enough level of what's public.
From the perspective of competition, what exactly is the prize for competing? With weak patents, a company that does its own research and actually innovates has nothing to gain except a few months' lead to market, but a large investment being risked for it. Is that any better for the beloved "little guys", who can't afford to lose that investment to a bigger company with a better marketing department?
When rent seeking companies succeed, they are taking away from the public. I think that gets forgotten sometimes. :(
Along with the actual definition of "rent-seeking". Rent-seeking is when one spends wealth on lobbying to increase their share of some limited resource, without creating anything of value in return. The closest the term comes to patents is when a patent troll buys patents to increase its chances of winning a lawsuit, but even that's a stretch, because the purchase isn't lobbying. Patents do create value by incentivizing R&D, so they are economically different.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
If the patient however is valid... that is someone actually did invent something, and patient it... then they're owed compensation for that. Pay the man.
Agree.
Software patents need to pass the CS201 stink test (if a CS201 student can figure it out, it ain't novel)
The law already says that (and I think you mean obvious btw, not novel). The problem is how the law is applied/enforced. And frankly, somebody "skilled in the art" ought to mean somebody with a CS degree and several years of experience, not just a CS201 student, so you're setting the bar too low.
Novel = Has the problem been solved this way before?
Obvious = Is the same solution obvious to somebody skilled in the arts when presented with the problem it's trying to solve?
So then the issue is: who decides whether it's non-obvious and novel? The answer is the courts, and the winner is usually the side with the biggest legal budget (with the real winner being the lawyers). That's the part that needs to be fixed. I've heard lots of solutions that are less bad than the existing system, but nothing that really solves the problem. And even if there was a solution that solves the problem, how do you get lawmakers (who are usually lawyers and thus see lawyering as a decent solution) to adopt it?
In this case, there are probably some patents that somebody put a lot of time and expense for R&D into and came up with a non-obvious and novel solution, and they deserve to get paid. There are probably even more that are obvious or not novel, but it's cheaper and/or faster just to pay their licensing fee (extortion fee) than to fight a long expensive legal battle.
All manufacturers have to pay these costs, so they don't lose competitiveness. It just makes the handsets a bit more expensive than they would otherwise be - and as a result it's the consumer that suffers. They have to pay more for their phone.
There won't be a single manufacturer that can't compete due to these costs. They're the same for everyone. Just like the physical components, this is just a part of the bill of parts of a phone. And if a phone manufacturer doesn't pay for those patents, they can't sell their phone in a market where those patents are valid.
Not at all. Keeping it secret often means literally keeping it secret... as in telling no one and doing nothing with it that would reveal the secret.
That keeps it secret but you don't make much money on it.
Savvy? This is how companies kept secrets. They would use the technology in house or with trusted customers... but the general public would get no access to it.
Again, this was at one point standard. I'm not debating this with you... you're arguing against historical fact.
Don't waste my time arguing against reality. It merely annoys people that know better.
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In practice that doesn't happen because people don't invest the time to invent new things if they know their ideas will be stolen from them and used by their competitors against them.
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Just make an open source phone... No royalty to pay there.
Fuckwit.
... the Fraunhofer Society didn't invent mp3 alone.
No, but they led the way to making it needlessly complex! Seriously, the MP3 bitstream format is seriously screwed up.
Granted I'm not a plow engineer so I really don't know everything that goes into one, but how complicated can one plow really be...
Complicated enough...
Following an initial trial, Richard, then in business with Clarence at Kalkabury (Arthurton) on Yorke Peninsula, exhibited two prize-winning versions of a stone- and stump-jumping plough at the agricultural show at Moonta in November 1876. The Farmers' Weekly Messenger accurately forecast that Smith's invention had the potential to 'cause a complete revolution in tilling uncleared land'. The mechanism allowed the shares to glide over stumps which otherwise required grubbing, a laborious and costly process. He failed, however, adequately to secure his rights under the Patents Act of 1877 and prosperity eluded him.
http://adb.anu.edu.au/biograph...
Of course, if he invented it today, he and his descendants would have prosperity guaranteed for as long as they could buy lawmakers...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
We should cut their heads and use royalty free phones
> if it was simple enough to copy quickly, then your > invention wasn't so revolutionary anyway.
I canmake a copy of the declaration of independence in about two seconds . The document was obviously revolutionary. :)
More seriously, though, it is not too uncommon to try a thousand different things before finding what works. Once you know what works, reproducing it is trivial. For example, the lightbulb. Thousands of different materials and approaches were attempted. Once you find the right design and materials, making another copy is trivial. The payoff for spending all that time and money trying different things in the HOPE of finding something that works is you get to temporarily profit by being the only seller for a while. Without that, it would be silly to spend years trying different designs and materials (or paying your employees to do so) - you'd be better off letting the guy down the street do all of the hard work, then just rip off his design.
Dyson literally built over a THOUSAND prototypes trying to come up with a better vacuum. It was probable that he was wasting his time and money - that he'd never perfect an effective, affordable, reliable design. The reward for taking that risk and putting in the work is a temporary patent, so he can sell his invention rather than having the pre-existing vacuum companies sell his design thorough their network of established retailers without him getting any reward for his work.
Of course two key components of the system are that it is supposed to be a TEMPORARY protection for a NEW INVENTION. The appropriate definition of "temporary" has changed in our fast-paced world. Also half a dozen patent trolls have been trying to assert patents on a lot ofthings that aren't new inventions, and trying to assert them against people who have not actually infringed the appropriately narrow scope that the patent should cover. So we do need to deal with these patent trolls. Fortunately, there are very few of them and a whole lot of us.
What does religion have to do with it?
'State of the art' public domain is not the same as 'viable' public domain.
One of the points of patents is to keep the public domain relatively current - New/current ideas are patented, but ideas a generation or so old are public domain. This is verses the previous system, where either it was open (anyone who could figure out how you did something did) or it was closed forever (anything you couldn't figure out from looking at it) - and occasionally lost.
In a good, healthy patent system the patent is a reward for innovation, and rent-seeking on those patents is difficult or impossible. The debate is about how healthy our current patent system is: There are a a lot of patents that are arguably not innovative, and there is a fair amount of rent-seeking using patents. It's probably impossible to have a system without any of that, but it's also probably possible to have a system with less than we currently have.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Your claim is impossible to prove.
to the contrary, yours is impossible to prove. I base my case on historical record which is a matter of fact. Your argument is that this time it will be different and that what happened last time won't happen again.
You can't prove that.
So... now that your own silly rebuttal has been blown back in your face, will you accept the consequences and admit you have no case? Or are you allowed to have no case while everyone else is expected to have one?
I do have one by the way... history, remember... so where is yours?
*taps foot impatiently*
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Every /. thread needs a crazy homeless guy, spouting irrelevant and incomprehensible one-liners...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You think progress is slow now? See what happens when companies actively hide how they do things rather then relying on patients to protect their IP.
Yeah, imagine all these iPhone owners with rounded corners they can't even see because Apple had to hide them.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Even if you have perfect secrecy, it does nothing if someone else independently invents the same thing in a similar timeframe. That is actually the norm, even for something as complicated as calculus, and that was in a world far less than flat than ours today. Most patents are for things where it took more effort to write up the patent than to actually invent the subject matter. So, not only is there no chance of keeping it secret in most cases, it's not even worth the effort of attempting to do so.
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No, it can be proven. People invented things when there were no patents and when trade secrets were not able to be effectively given. Your claim is that people don't invest time in new things if they know it will be used against them. There are countless examples, and one of the best ones is the polio vaccine. It was one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity, and those behind it purposefully didn't patent it because they found it unethical to do so.
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When we talk about phones and licenses, we also need to include trademarks. What is the shape of the plow. What color did you make the plow. What type of handles. What is the shape of the handles.
And obviously there is a difference between a human driven and an animal driven plow.
Oh and obviously if the plow is made after 1492, you can add 'for the potato' to each patent and copyright.
If the plow was invented today by a company, the patent, copyright and trademark lawers would have a field day and come up with way more then just the 5 you think are logical.
Oh and obviously you can not just go to the townsmith and ask for a plow or make parts yourself. That would be equal pirating.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
IANAPE (I am not a plow engineer)
Paragraphs containing more than one or two sentences are not patented. Use of the comma is not patented. Feel free to write more than 2 sentences per paragraph and use commas. Slashdot will thank you!
Judging obviousness is difficult, because most solutions are obvious if someone explains the problem well enough. One of my favourite papers describes a series of spinlock implementations, and by the time you get about half way through you've worked out what their good solution will be, but most people will not come up with that design if you tell them to design a spinlock. Even if you tell them to design a spinlock to minimise cache-coherency bus traffic, their final design isn't quite obvious, but by the time they've finished defining exactly what the requirements and limitations of the physical hardware are, then it starts to be. There are lots of similar examples, where the difficulty is not in solving the problem so much as identifying exactly what the problem that needs to be solved is. This is also a problem in a number of tech companies' hiring processes (Google is the most obvious example), where they focus so heavily on finding problem solvers that they end up with a shortage of people who are good at working out which problems are the ones that need solving.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Along with the actual definition of "rent-seeking [wikipedia.org]". Rent-seeking is when one spends wealth on lobbying to increase their share of some limited resource, without creating anything of value in return.
That's a terrible definition.....even later in the same Wikipedia article it's redefined as 'an attempt to obtain economic rent', linking to the entry on economic rent itself, which has a section on monopoly rent which specifically mentions patents.
Economic rent is pretty much everywhere in some degree, because monopoly power is everywhere to some degree (nothing is perfectly competitive). And I think it would be wrong to just assume that it always causes a welfare loss just because it's become a (justifiable) mainstream-ish term of abuse, a correctly designed patent and copyright system being an obvious counterexample. Maybe in a perfect first-theorem-of-welfare-economics economy, but not in a real one.
I'm having trouble linking royalty costs to "stifling innovation" though. Getting paid via royalty payments is a pretty good reason to innovate: invent something, get paid. Increases in the amount people are paying in royalties just increases the incentive to invent something and get paid. In fact, it is doing exactly that. Companies invent stuff, or buy inventions, just to use those inventions as collateral to get access to other inventions. That $120-$150 estimate they put on there is not cash payments, it is $120-$150 of something... such as their own inventions.
Innovation and improved technology isn't just about invention. An improvement in technology is an improvement in the techniques people use to do stuff. A marvellous new thing used by hardly anyone is only a very small innovation. So, if a law limits access to new inventions then the improvement in technology is also limited.
I don't particularly recall that many "Cant afford royalty payments so our product is cancelled" stories.
I suspect that 'new product not developed because its expensive' doesn't attract readers well enough. Besides, just think of how many more people would be using better technology if they could buy a better phone with the same money. Abolish all patents today and there'd be a jump in the technology people use - in the short term.
It all comes back to the core dilemma of intellectual property: the cost of reduced adoption of a new invention vs the cost of it not being financially worthwhile to invent.
Who is speaking? The smaller guys... artists, indie game crews, new egg.. they are fighting. The only ones espousing a point similar to yours are those who are gigantic, worth billions, and only wish to hold onto and amass more billions. Oh and those that troll using the laws to skim off the top.
Silence is a state of mime.
For the thousandth time...
Patent law is an attack on capitalism, not a benefit to it. It is only a benefit to "crony capitalism", which is really corporatism in disguise.
True capitalism requires the absence of coercion in the market; patent law requires the presence of it. They are incompatible concepts, and work against each other, no matter what the patent lobby tells you. The more patent law (and coercion in general), the less capitalism, and vice versa.
Secondly, we are talking about the most expensive, most powerful, most far-reaching government in world history. Since capitalism requires the absence of coercion, not the presence of it, the idea that the US is a shining example of capitalism is laughable. The US has roots in capitalism, but the law has changed drastically over 200 years, to the point where the only realistic description of what we have now is corporatism -- which is just as opposite to capitalism as communism.
Patents are there to protected the companies that grew big by copying from others from other companies that want to do the same.
It all comes back to the core dilemma of intellectual property: the cost of reduced adoption of a new invention vs the cost of it not being financially worthwhile to invent.
It's never been scientifically tested though. "To promote the progress of science and the useful arts." but nobody has ever demonstrated that patents and copyright do indeed promote the progress of science and the useful arts. The old system before it was not free publication and invention, but censorship and guilded trades.
It's hard to argue that patents are worse than guilded trades, or that copyright is worse than censorship. There's plenty of economic theory that posits open invention would be more beneficial than patents and plenty that posits that the current state of affairs is optimal, but open invention hasn't been tested for more than one thousand years, so we really don't know how much better or worse it would work.
Judging obviousness is difficult, because most solutions are obvious if someone explains the problem well enough.
Then I don't see why we need most patents. Why give someone a monopoly on a solution when anyone with that problem can solve it themselves?
If you void patients then companies will stop sharing their innovations with people and instead rely on trade secrets to protect their intellectual property.
You think progress is slow now? See what happens when companies actively hide how they do things rather then relying on patients to protect their IP.
So you do realize that the Computer Software Industry was flourishing quite well when it was under Trade Secret Law - one of the biggest reasons why Software has such as hard time with Patent Law, the majority of its origins are still hidden by the time it was under Trade Secret Law and many of those companies have since been bought or gone out of business due to market demands, not "intellectual" property protection issues. This is also one of the reasons why the original UNIX code base developed by AT&T and at recent dispute between Novell and The SCO Group was under the contract that it was - with a very high confidentiallity agreement that protected the trade secrets in the code.
Software then moved to being under Copyright Law (1980's era) and exploded (1990's era). It has only been since people have been trying to extensively put it under Patent Law (late 1990's to present) that the industry has started having lots of problems with law suits, etc. (That's not to say there were not law suits prior, there were - but it was not the issue it is today; no where near the same scale or breadth of the industry).
Trade Secret law as served many industries quite well. Copyright Law does too. Patent Law serves a few industries well and many industries poorly - there doesn't seem to be much in-between.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
When we talk about phones and licenses, we also need to include trademarks. What is the shape of the plow. What color did you make the plow. What type of handles. What is the shape of the handles. And obviously there is a difference between a human driven and an animal driven plow.
Oh and obviously if the plow is made after 1492, you can add 'for the potato' to each patent and copyright.
If the plow was invented today by a company, the patent, copyright and trademark lawers would have a field day and come up with way more then just the 5 you think are logical.
Oh and obviously you can not just go to the townsmith and ask for a plow or make parts yourself. That would be equal pirating.
That's it? So you agree.
You are assuming that the only patients are fraudulent ones.
Consider if someone came up with something that wasn't just a bullshit patent.
That is what I'm talking about... not the stupid patients that shouldn't have been accepted in the first place but the real ones.
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No, I'm assuming that independent invention is the norm, most patented inventions are incremental changes from the prior art, and the only exceptions are almost universally accidents that there is no way to incentivize.
Mark Lemly covered this quite well: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
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People need to be compensated for work.
This notion of everyone works for free and there are no negative consequences is unforgivably naive.
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I'm not saying that everyone works for free. Not having patents doesn't mean that everyone works for free, just that everyone is free to work.
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if I invent things and you don't pay me but instead take my work and use it without compensating me at all then you expect me to work for free.
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If you do work without negotiating a contract for compensation, that's your fault. Nobody is forcing you to work, and if you don't want to invent in a society without patents, you are welcome to sit on your useless ass while the rest of us actually get things done.
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Along with the actual definition of "rent-seeking". Rent-seeking is when one spends wealth on lobbying to increase their share of some limited resource, without creating anything of value in return. The closest the term comes to patents is when a patent troll buys patents to increase its chances of winning a lawsuit, but even that's a stretch, because the purchase isn't lobbying. ....
Despite the poorly written lead-in sentence to that Wikipedia article, "rent seeking" is not limited to political lobbying, that is merely a common example of rent-seeking. Regulatory capture, in which regulators expect to be rewarded by industry after they leave their regulatory role is rent-seeking via quid-pro-quo, not lobbying, for example. It is the act of obtaining wealth by gaining control of a limited resource, not through productive activity, is rent-seeking, no matter how it is carried out, so yes, patent troll portfolios are rent-seeking without being any king of stretch.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
You need to limit patents, narrow the scope so someone can't patent the wheel for their cart and stop anyone from making inline skates (because it uses wheels!). You need to check for prior art before you issue a patent. There are far too many examples of patents on things that were in common usage before the patent was filed. I suggest mandatory licensing of all patents on a fair and reasonable rate. That would still allow the inventor to make money but not stop all progress in that field while everyone waits for the patent to expire because some company wants to milk the patent.
The patients are a contract between the inventor and society. A contract that is agreed to individually when you use the invention in return for that access.
If as an inventor you choose not to patient something you can do that. We have many forms of licensing that give people free use of inventions without compensation so long as they cite the inventor's name if the invention is used in a larger work. We also have patients that give people free use of the invention so long as it is not used in any commercial pursuit but does have a fee if a company wishes to make use of it. etc etc etc.
If as an inventor you choose to patient something then society agrees to abide by that patient for a specified number of years in exchange for gaining access to that invention.
If you support contractual law, then you support patients.
End of argument?
Will you now contradict yourself or accept the patient system at least in principle?
I am not defending the currently incarnation of the patient system. We all know it has problems and those problems should be fixed if only to avoid further insurrections against the system.
However, inventors have a right to be compensated for their work. Patients give them that compensation.
Your notion that people will work without being paid is again... unforgivably naive.
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Most of what you're talking about relates to the US patent office being run badly... not to the idea of patents themselves.
Will I agree that a US federal bureau is being run by halfwits?
Yes. That would hardly be the only portion of the US government run by incompetents.
However, incompetent government officials does not mean that we should make murder legal or negate property rights or negate the first amendment or otherwise radically alter US law simply because the current people put in charge of given services are not doing their job properly.
Now I don't know why they're having such a hard time. They'll likely say they need more money and to hire more people. I think that's probably valid... however, at the same time I question whether the current people there should remain employed by that department or any other at this point. Certainly there are a lot of them that I wouldn't trust in anything but the most literal job... and anything that literal could be automated by literal robots.
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Not at all. Patents are coercive, not consensual. If you had contracted with me, I would owe you something, but you contracted with my government.
No they don't, not even in the patent system. If you invent something that's useless, you will receive no money. Furthermore, it is not compensation, as it the money you make has no connection to the amount of work you did, and there is no actual per use cost of using an idea. Compensation requires that I give up something. If I work an 8 hour day, I lose 8 hours of my life and a certain amount of energy. If I sell my car, I no longer have that car. Furthermore, you are making an enormous philosophical error. The patent system does not exist for the purpose of inventors, but rather, the public good. I hold that said deal cannot be worthwhile because it is based upon faulty, archaic economic principles So, even if the patent system is a boon to inventors (although I hold that it is not in the general case), it has no justification without a public benefit.
Can you please stop putting words in my mouth. That I don't hold that a coercive medieval economic tool that was slightly converted for a nominally benevolent purpose is justified doesn't mean that I expect people to work without being paid on any regular basis. The free as in freedom market gets better results, and even if it didn't, direct subsidies are a more efficient tool.
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Wrong.
Its the same as a copyright in most cases. If I write a book or a song or paint a picture... and you wish to read it, listen to it, view it... then you must abide by my terms.
The patient is supposed to work in much the same way.
Here you'll tell me what about someone that came up with the same invention independently and now their work is rendered meaningless simply because some guy got to the patient office 2 seconds earlier.
That is an issue... and I'd be open to discussing resolutions to that. However, if you came up with the same invention a year later or two years later then its much more likely for me to conclude that you just copied his work and are now fraudulently claiming to have come up with it yourself.
In any case... inventors must be paid. You seem to think you have a right to steal or believe that the system will still work if people don't get paid. This is obviously moronic.
Do you want to defend a moronic position or do you want to clarify it so it isn't so painfully dumb?
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I am also opposed to copyright for similar reasons.
No, as the article I cited mentions, in most cases, the invention is re-invented independently.
No, I just think that patents are based upon fundamentally flawed reasoning. I am not advocating that we force people to work without getting paid. I am just asking that they find means of doing so other than legal monopolies, just like everyone else.
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The "can't afford royalty payments so our product was never created in the first place" stories are harder to count. That's doubly true in the case where the product would be open-source, making the only per-distribution-unit licensing price that can be paid a flat $0.
You're saying you have a right to steal what other people produce and you think that people will keep producing things even if everything they produce is stolen.
This is pretty much why third world countries stay third world countries.
One of the bigger problems in desperately poor countries is that they're almost all hopelessly corrupt. You apparently would be surprised to know that the poverty is actually a consequence of the corruption... not the other way around.
You see, when there is really no rule of law and no real property rights, there is a disincentive to improve things or produce things because they'll be stolen.
lets say you have a small farm. And lets say there are a lot of rocks in the field. If you go around and pull all the rocks out of the field, the farm will be more productive and more valuable. Obviously you should do that right? Well, what if you do that and then someone says "hey, nice farm... it's mine now." Well, then it doesn't make sense to take the rocks out of the field. In fact, not only should not you take the rocks out of the field but you should go out of your way to produce no more then you absolutely need to survive. Any sign of wealth or success will draw in predators that will steal what you have.
And this is why bread basket countries in africa that could feed the entire continent of africa starve. You see it happening all the time. Literally a guy improves his farm... man comes from the city... says "nice farm"... and then says if the farmer doesn't "sell the farm for "nothing" men will come with guns and kill his family.
Everyone in the area hears this story. And the lesson is learned.
You want to steal everything someone makes? Fine. Then the people that make things can't make a living making things for you. Which means they won't. Which means you'll get a tiny fraction of what you're getting now.
Long story short... People need to be paid for their work. Saying that people don't need to be paid is idiotic.
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Property IS important because of the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons does not apply to the abstract, therefore the rationales for property do not apply to patents or copyright. I am strong advocate of property, which is why I oppose copyright and patents, as they undermine actual property rights. Patents are especially troublesome because provably independent work is not a defense against infringement.
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So in your opinion, inventors do not deserve to be compensated for their contributions to society.
This means you're either immoral... believing in theft... or stupid thinking you're not advocating stealing.
Its one of the two.
Flip a coin.
We're done here.
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Because... of the reasons outlined in the rest of my post. Solving the problem may not be hard, but identifying the problem (as opposed to the very broad area) is.
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No, Mr. Strawman. I believe that inventors should look to means other than legal monopolies if they wish to get paid for work they've done.
I'm not advocating stealing. Patent infringement is not theft, never has been, and never will be. The mens rea of theft is intent for deprivation, but information is non-rival, sometimes even anti-rival, so ideas cannot be stolen, and it is not immoral to use that information. If there is any act that is immoral, it's forcing others to not be allowed to apply their knowledge.
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So you think that if an inventor invents something you have a right to steal their invention and use it at will because they have no right to own things they create?
I'm sorry but this isn't a strawman. You are asserting ownership over things other people created.
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You are apparently adopting a natural rights philosophy towards patents, that merely because someone invents something, they naturally have a right to control it like it was their physical property. Such a philosophy is incompatible with the US Constitution, under which patents are only justified as a means to an end for technological progress. I hold that this means does not actually further that end, and thus patents are not justified.
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That's fine. I understand your position. You believe you have a right to steal.
Understood.
I disagree. I don't think stealing is permissible and that property rights are important for a healthy society and economy.
You again will disagree with that... and think various things like people that don't get paid somehow keep making things for people that don't pay them.
And that's fine. Its unforgivably stupid... but you have a right to believe unforgivably stupid things.
You do not however have a right to not be judged for that... And I've obviously judged you to be a moron.
You doubtless have your own judgments of me... but since I've judged you a moron, I don't much care what those are obviously.
Good day, sir.
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