Supreme Court Backs Award of Overseas Patent Damages (reuters.com)

schwit1 quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Friday that companies can recover profits lost because of the unauthorized use of their patented technology abroad in a victory for Schlumberger NV, the world's largest oilfield services provider. The decision expands the ability of patent owners to recover foreign-based damages, increasing the threat posed by certain infringement lawsuits in the United States.

Internet-based companies and others had expressed concern that extending patent damages beyond national borders would expose U.S. high-technology firms to greater patent-related risks abroad. U.S. patent law generally applies only domestically, but Schlumberger said that since the law protects against infringement that occurs when components of a patented invention are supplied from the U.S. for assembly abroad, it should be fully compensated for the infringement, including any lost foreign sales. The high court agreed.

Comments

Globalization is great

[rsilvergun]

if you're a player on the global stage. Not so sure about us regular chaps though. I mean, I'm unlikely to ever have the resources to run an international lawsuit to enforce patent law but I could see getting sued by a mega corp who does. It'd be a great way to keep any upstart competitors from popping up. Let's not forget how Hollywood was founded.

Re:Globalization is great

[alvinrod]

The problem with removing them entirely is that it's going to be quite hard for any inventor to function independently. Without any protection by law, someone's ability to sell an invention for profit lasts only until some big player can take it apart and build it for far less due to their existing manufacturing capability and the scale of their operations.

This isn't entirely bad as it means that costs for existing goods and products will drop as there's nothing to stop anyone who thinks they can manufacture something for less from attempting to do so. However, these manufacturers don't have a lot of incentive to spend resources on new inventions since they only have a very short window to recoup that investment before a competitor starts producing it as well and they may figure that they can just wait for the competition to invent some new thing. Investment in reducing the cost of manufacturing is where money would be directed since it makes a company more competitive, and improvements in manufacturing techniques or tools can naturally be hidden from competitors.

The same goes for other fields as well. Creating a medicine becomes essentially worthless since it can be easily replicated once the chemical composition is discovered, but a surgical technique or procedure may be less difficult to emulate as the knowledge of precisely how it works is not disseminated so easily merely by the acquisition of it. Goods of all kinds become less valuable compared to services. You're probably only likely to see new types of goods, medicines, etc. arise as a result of crowd funding of some form or perhaps someone extremely wealthy wishing to cure themselves of some affliction. There will probably always be some people who will invent for the hell of it, simply because it excites them, but these people are rare.

I don't know if one of these worlds is better than another, but a lack of patents does suggest a certain tendency to hoard knowledge. Patents reward those individuals or companies that can create something new and novel (that in reality we fall short of this quite often is another matter) and there's less value in hoarding the knowledge since a lack of one means the competition can make your product should they figure out how. If it's really successful, they might even find different methods of achieving a similar outcome. Regardless, the patent eventually expires and anyone can produce the invention.

I'd be somewhat remiss to throw out the entire idea because the implementation has become horribly broken. Especially considering that there are several practical (and rather simple) steps that could be taken to fix a great deal of the problem with the patent system. I wouldn't necessary shed a tear to see it go either, but that would introduce massive amounts of change into a system that's grown up around a certain set of laws. Maybe you could argue that the longterm benefits outweigh the short term chaos, but that's not a pool I'd like to jump into without sticking a few toes in first in order to test the water.