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The History of the Patent Troll
An anonymous reader writes: Patent trolling is not a new problem, although recently it seems that the issue has captured the attention of a broader audience. Four years ago, NPR produced an episode of This American Life called "When Patents Attack!" And, four months ago, John Oliver devoted the bulk of his time on Last Week Tonight to raising awareness about patent trolls. "Most of these companies don't produce anything—they just shake down anyone who does, so calling them trolls is a little misleading—at least trolls actually do something, they control bridge access for goats and ask fun riddles," he explained. " Patent trolls just threaten to sue the living s*** out of people, and believe me, those lawsuits add up." In an article on Opensource.com, Red Hat patent litigation defender David Perry takes a look back at the history of patent trolling, as well as some possible solutions to the problem.
in our social model: that people who do nothing can earn money, yet people like me who'd gladly really do nothing for a leisure economy are seen as lazy or weird.
He find out (from the elder of a small village) that the bridge troll is actually building the bridge.
And he asks nicely just for some food.
Those who can't, sue.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Use it or lose it. Sounds a good solution to separate trolls from inventors.
If they can't make the thing work themselves, then have they really solved the problem or just wrote a document with a claimed solution that does not work in the real world? Its easy enough to look around at whats happening in a market (e.g. self driving cars) and write a bunch of paper patents around that on "stopping a self driving car on detection of a barrier", "easy mechanism for switching to manual control on a self driving car".... you might think 'apply brakes' and 'button' are not inventive, but is single click ordering button inventive?
Plus you get a physical thing, to compare against previous real existing things, no longer can you re-interpret the vague lawyer wording in a document, there is an actual thing to be examined.
An invention is an INVENTION not a description of an invention written by lawyers on paper. It's a thing not the description of the thing. The law should reflect that.
Remove the wind from their sails. Patents were designed to protect the inventor and encourage innovation. If the inventor doesn't have any stance in the market (e.g. "non-practicing entity") then that patent should go up for sale or invalidated after 5 years. If instead that patent was actually used for something, be it the holder licensing or producing products using the patent, then the patent should be kept valid.
Putting it another way: if I develop some genius thing and patent it, I'll have 5 years to get it into the industry. I may not be able to produce it myself, but I can get someone else to and license it to them. If instead I sat on the idea for over 5 years and nobody cares, then the patent should no longer belong to the inventor.
The government already does this sort of thing with small business contracts, they protect the IP for the little guy and give them a chance to get their idea out to industry... Since the government is the customer, that small business gets a big boost if they stumble on something good.
IBM does create stuff, but they also file a ton of patents on stuff they never intend to build. IBM has shaken down other tech companies over the year. Blame IBM for starting the crazy patent wars, which lead to patent trolls.
My idea is to "[unoriginal concept that has been around forever]... but, using a computer."
PATENT GRANTED.
My idea is "[vague, non-specific concept]... using a networked computer."
PATENT GRANTED.
My idea "doesn't have an implementation or actually exist nor is it something that I can actually develop, but it is new and uses a computer."
PATENT GRANTED.
My idea is "something that has been used for decades on computers. I didn't invent it or develop it, but no one patented it, so..."
PATENT GRANTED.
The problem is that of the whole concept of Intellectual Monopolies not Patent Trolls. Patents and Copyrights infringe upon the concept of property rights. The whole reason we have the concept of property rights is to determine who has the best claim over a scarce resource. It pretty much follows the pre-school rule of "I was here first". If a kid picks up a stick in the school yard nobody is using and pretends it's a wizard wand everyone knows that it's wrong to go up and take that stick from her. Now if she abandons it then it's fine for someone else to pick it up to play but there may be a conflict where she claims she just put it down for a second. She can also voluntarily give it or trade it to someone else. Other kids can also pick up unused sticks and pretend they are wands as well. Patents and copyrights are akin to the first kid going around and threatening to punch people if anyone else pretends a stick is a wand. Even if someone owned a stick before the person pretended it was a wand.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Here's what The Economist had to say last week about patents and patent reform (August 8 2015):
"Today's patent systems have created a parasitic ecology of trolls who aim to block innovation"
http://www.economist.com/news/...
"Patents are protected by governments because they are held to promote innovation. But there is plenty of evidence that they do not."
http://www.economist.com/node/...
It's a well-researched and thoughtful position.
"Libertarians" (the ones who are glossing over the fact that they are totally ok with the government stepping in to protect their inventions) love to point to the Sewing Machine Patent Combine a century ago, where three people pooled together their patents and made an organization to bill everyone making sewing machines and split the money between themselves.
That worked great when there were three people splitting a buck fifty three ways, but these days, every single patent holder thinks their patent is worth 5% or more of the gross revenue of every company, and there are hundreds of thousands of them, many of them patents on shit like "using this encryption algorithm I didn't invent, on a network I didn't invent, in software i didn't invent that was designed specifically to do this thing I'm claiming to do in the patent" like the "RC4 on the internet" patent that just got struck down.
A true software patent combine would have to convince these people that they should join their pool and go from collecting 5% of the gross revenue from everyone themselves, to 0.000001% of some fee or percentage collected by the pool. Inevitably, people have tried and failed, the bonus for defecting in this prisoner's dilemma is massive (how many millions did Rambus make until they were finally taken down?)... and those were actual practicing companies with something to lose. The "Non-Practicing Entities" have nothing to gain from joining such a combine, since it needs no protection from the other members, and consequently nothing to lose from not participating in the combine.
... and write up and file a patent:
"Operating-System Monitor for Control and Management of Processes at System Startup, During the Course of Normal Operations and in System Shutdown by Means of Automatic Dependency Detection Based on Monitoring and Interception of System Resources such as Sockets, Pipes, Shared Memory and Library Access in Conjunction with Non-Executable Configuration Files and with Embedded Facilities for Logging, Delayed Execution, System-Configuration Management, User Authentication and Authorization, Interprocess Communication, and Device-Driver Management in a Host with a Linux Kernel."
Damn, that was frightening to write. I'm not even sure I've captured the full malignancy of the system I'm describing. The irony, you know, is that the TFA was written by a Red Hat guy.
In software, more problems come from non-trolls.
* Microsoft getting royalties from hundreds of millions of smartphones that contain no Microsoft software (and we're lucky they're currently only asking for royalties - they have an equal right to simply tell others to stop developing!)
* IBM getting 1,200 patents on cloud computing
* Nokia and other companies with failing software divisions sitting on a mountain of software patents
* Video formats being covered by 1,000+ patents of telecoms, software companies, hardware companies...
* Facebook patenting social services, as if competing with their dominant position wasn't hard enough
Trolls are a real problem, but the topic is also used to draw people's attention away from the bigger problems created by software companies with big patent portfolios.
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
Someone who holds patents without producing anything for the purpose of extracting royalties is not a patent troll.
Patent trolls are bad. These are people who exaggerate their patent's originality and breadth to practice extortion-- extortion usually comes in the form or asking for money at a sufficiently small sum compared to what the company might risk losing if it pressed the case.
but holding companies that don't act like patent trolls are hugely valuable. For example, consider the company PDLI. it holds biomedical patents and it's most profitable patent is "Queen et al", which is a general method for humanizing antibodies (that is what lets you take antibodies developed outside of humans and turn them into drugs suited for humans). The people who developed the patent were lab researchers who have no ability or interest in making commerical scale drugs. That's why we have drug companies. They sell the patent to PDLI for assured income, and PDLI takes on the risk of marketing the patent. Drug companies use the patented process to make and sell comerical drugs. The researcher's are not waiting around for the drug companies to have success to get paid. Thus everyone in the food chain here is doing exactly what they are good at doing. The patents would not be in such widespread use without PDLI stepping up to arbitrage the risk and make the market for the patent work.
Arbitragers are good.
Patents are valuable to society becuase comapnies will often not invest the time and effort into refining a method of production if they can't be protected from upstarts. Thus technology and science enter the commercial arena more quickly when patent protection lets a company take the investment risk. THat is, by liscencing a patent either exclusively or one with a high price their is a strong barrier to competition from upstarts. At the right level of exclusivity or price this actually enhances the use of the technology not diminishes it by exclusion. An logically, the patent holder sets the terms where they get the most money which comes from the most valued use of the invention. SO society benefits.
Thus there's a huge difference between extortionists with bad patents wield as war clubs against companies not able to defend themselves and non-producing patent holders which are hugely beneficial to society.
using the phrase non-producing patent holder as the definition of a patent troll is wildly inaccurate and misleading
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
They keep the hot grits ready and Natalie Portman available. Without them, nobody would ever get that first post.
Financial newspaper Economist also did a large piece on patents recently. They have backed down on their original stance of abolishing patents altogether (from 200 years ago, when patent law was enacted), but they still come out pretty clearly on how patents may be stifling innovation.