[HN Gopher] Do patents kill innovation? The US patent office is ...
___________________________________________________________________
Do patents kill innovation? The US patent office is asking
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 341 points
Date : 2021-07-09 16:14 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eenewseurope.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eenewseurope.com)
| cryptica wrote:
| I can't speak for every industry but in the software industry,
| they are 100% counterproductive and harm innovation. It's good
| that many countries do not recognize software patents.
| hota_mazi wrote:
| I see little evidence of that latest claim.
|
| China doesn't recognize software patents and it's rife with
| cheap copies and clones of existing products and produces very
| little innovation.
|
| The US recognizes patents and is the most innovative country on
| many fronts (not just software).
| cryptica wrote:
| Australia and Europe do not recognize them either. Australia
| is pretty innovative in the software industry considering its
| small population (which is less than 1/10th of the US).
| tester756 wrote:
| >The US recognizes patents and is the most innovative country
| on many fronts (not just software).
|
| how?
|
| Semiconductors are in Taiwan, South Korea and EU tooling
|
| Is there more bleeding edge tech than Semiconductors?
| anthk wrote:
| Europe doesn't have software patents neither and you have
| lots of complex teleco hardware.
| tombert wrote:
| When I worked at Apple, we used this (in my opinion terrible)
| framework called "WebObjects", which used to be publicly
| available but not open source.
|
| After digging around, I found out that the reason they didn't
| open source it was because _their own_ patent lawyers wouldn 't
| let them, something about having dot-properties for configuration
| variables... Something that nearly anyone who frequents hacker
| news could reinvent themselves in an afternoon.
| _Nat_ wrote:
| Yeah, the current patent-system is completely ridiculous.
|
| To pick out one especially bad problem: it's too inconsistent,
| relying on legal-battles to resolve inconsistencies. And then
| people are just afraid to do stuff, because they don't want to
| have to fight those battles.
| debacle wrote:
| Patents in theory or patents in practice?
|
| The patent system has been gamified, and is now optimized for the
| corporatocracy.
| hota_mazi wrote:
| I've lived through a few instances where software patents
| fostered innovation.
|
| We had implemented a certain GUI without realizing that we had
| copied an existing one. It was completely accidental, the kind of
| thing that happens without really thinking about it. We received
| notification from our competitors that we had to change our
| approach because they had a patent for it.
|
| We did. It set us back a whole month but at the end of the day,
| we ended up coming up with a solution which I think we superior
| in all the ways.
|
| So the software patent worked here: it forced us to not be lazy
| and come up with an innovative approach instead of copying an
| existing one.
| HPsquared wrote:
| When you say copy, do you mean someone saw the other one and
| copied it, or did they independently come up with it?
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Your being sarcastic, right?
|
| A system like patents needs to demonstrate a clear and very
| large benefit to offset the fact that it removes people's
| freedom to implement ideas of their own inventions, to
| implement their own thoughts. That should be a hard thing to
| take away. I don't think patents demonstrate a large enough
| benefit to justify that.
| hota_mazi wrote:
| My story is an exact contradiction to your last point.
|
| By the way, you're*.
| dangus wrote:
| Your story absolutely isn't a counterexample.
|
| It's blind luck that the situation you described led to
| innovation. Even if it did lead to innovation, it still
| wasted a month of time that could have been invested in
| more impactful innovations. You were still forced to hold
| out on shipping for a month entirely due to the patent
| system.
|
| The alternate ending to that story could have very easily
| (and more likely) been "we had to scrap the feature because
| there was no way to do it without violating the patent." Or
| the result could have been that they only alternative you
| came up with was worse. Or the result could have been that
| you needed to pay the other company a licensing fee.
|
| Essentially you just got lucky that the competitor didn't
| think of the best idea first, because if they had you'd be
| forced to ship something inferior.
|
| For example, Amazon patented buying something with one
| click. How do you propose innovating around that? You
| can't, you have to license the patent from Amazon or add
| another step to your checkout process. There's only one way
| for one click to buy something.
| oehpr wrote:
| It really does come down to the particulars here, but there is
| serious value in making UI consistent between applications.
| Every time a user comes to an application they have to figure
| out the primitives from the ground up. Where things go and why,
| in what order, what it does, and what the names for everything
| is.
|
| You copied a competitor (unintentionally), and now when someone
| comes to your application from the other side, they have to
| work out how to work things.
|
| Your UI has to not just be better, but better while accounting
| for the relearning users must do.
|
| Imagine if there were patents on the File menu, for example
| (knowing US patents, I'll bet there's a menagerie of them,
| mostly owned by FAANG in their MAD warchests). I'd prefer devs
| not get creative here, unless the gains are substantial.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| Conceptually, it should help protect innovation. In reality, it
| inhibits it. Small guy has a brilliant idea. He files a patent,
| and starts shipping. Some other guy copies the idea. Small guy
| has 3 options. 1) invest in better products and out innovate
| copycat. 2) invest in marketing to create brand appeal. 3) get
| lawyers involved.
|
| #3 is the most expensive for the return on investment. #1 or #2
| are likely the better path, but patent protection helps neither
| of these paths.
|
| On the dark side of patents is patent trolls. They only seek to
| extract value for infringers, almost always via legal system
| intimidation (see #3). Again, the system intended to help
| innovation is killing it.
| joe_91 wrote:
| When I worked at Dell they were giving out cash bonuses for
| people to submit patent ideas with different levels of rewards
| depending on how far your patent idea got in the process.
|
| The crazy thing is, some people (mostly the Indian cohort) were
| flat out coming up with idea's and submitting them to the
| internal patent committee every week/month since the amount
| offered for them would be the equlivent of 6 months/1 years
| salary.
| TomMckenny wrote:
| Rent seeking kills innovation. Patents as currently legislated,
| issued and resold are overwhelmingly just tools for rent seeking.
|
| There probably is a theoretical way to do it that encourages
| innovation but it's hard to see a society ruled by self serving
| individuals not wrecking it pretty fast.
| alok-g wrote:
| From the OP:
|
| >> The study particularly wants to find examples of where a
| patent has been denied in the US but accepted in other
| jurisdictions, which will be a key area for European electronics
| companies.
|
| The question at hand does not seem to be what the title of the OP
| indicates, but rather about patent applications denied in the US
| but approved elsewhere. Looking briefly at [1] too is hinting
| that the interest may rather be to relax the patent eligibility
| criteria so that more of patent applications in the US are
| approved. Note: IANAL.
|
| ---
|
| [1]
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/07/09/2021-14...
|
| Excerpts: "Last year, after a split panel decision concluding
| that a method for manufacturing drive shafts was patent
| ineligible, ... The questions presented in the petition are: (1)
| What is the appropriate standard for determining whether a claim
| is directed to a patent-ineligible concept under step one of the
| Alice two-step framework?; and (2) Is patent eligibility a
| question of law for the court or a question of fact for the jury?
| ... The Senators indicated a particular interest in learning how
| the current jurisprudence has adversely impacted investment and
| innovation in critical technologies like quantum computing,
| artificial intelligence,[6] precision medicine, diagnostic
| methods, and pharmaceutical treatments."
| hota_mazi wrote:
| Patents have a good intent, the real danger is non practicing
| entities (patent trolls).
|
| I think that you shouldn't be allowed to acquire a patent (via
| acquiring the patent owner) unless you are in the business of the
| patent, or you go to market with an application of that patent
| within a limited amount of time
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| > the impact of patents on areas such as quantum computing,
| artificial intelligence, precision medicine, diagnostic methods,
| software and networking
|
| Look no further than data compression:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding#History_and_...
| dqpb wrote:
| Does China or Russia sponsor any US patent troll companies? And
| if the answer is no, why not? It seems like a dead simple way to
| stifle American innovation. Use our own toxic legal system
| against us.
| taylodl wrote:
| We need to do what we did with pharmaceuticals - provide a period
| where the patent has to be licensed so that the owner can be
| remunerated for their research. Should that be 7 years, 10 years,
| 15 years or more - I don't know and that's a good discussion to
| have. Meanwhile I think we can all agree that patents should have
| an expiration. That seems to strike the balance of incentivizing
| innovation while protecting research investments.
| sschueller wrote:
| Simplest fix to me would be to reduce the time of validity. We
| aren't in the 19th century anymore and extremely complex things
| can be build within months.
| xutopia wrote:
| Matt Ridley seems to think so in his book on innovation.
| kpatrick wrote:
| My patent attorney used to tell me: "Patents are like nuclear
| weapons. I want to be on the side that has the most."
| pdimitar wrote:
| Of course patents kill innovation and the reasons are very simple
| and known to many.
|
| It doesn't matter what the law says. It doesn't matter if the
| patent is generic or very specific. It doesn't matter if it
| covers a currently trendy area.
|
| None of these things matter one bit.
|
| Only one thing _truly_ matters: how much budget for a lawyer does
| the suing side have.
|
| That's it. Only that. A talented and highly-paid (and thus
| motivated) copyright / patent lawyer is literally the most
| dangerous adversary you will ever encounter in your civilized
| life (we're not including stuff like Mexican cartel hating you,
| of course).
|
| It doesn't even matter what legislation grounds for suing you
| does the litigating side have. If they have a square inch,
| they'll use it and expand it to be as big as the USA.
|
| A lot of small businesses are well-aware of the power imbalance
| and I've heard founders give up on ideas, citing various
| copyright / patent trials from the last 10+ years.
|
| Truth is, if a big player comes after you and if the government
| doesn't help you have some semblance of a fighting chance (by
| covering your legal expenses and/or hiring a competent defender
| for you) then the 99.9% predictable result is: you'll run out of
| money and will be forced to settle _if you are lucky_ -- and in
| most other cases you 'll have to pay damages or royalties for
| years, which might very easily make a homeless person out of you.
|
| --
|
| I am glad that the US patent office is making an inquiry but at
| the same time slightly disappointed because what I just said
| above is common knowledge in _many_ circles.
| [deleted]
| FpUser wrote:
| Yes sir. Them patents certainly do.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| This link from the article explains how to submit your comments:
|
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/07/09/2021-14...
|
| The USPTO will not be reading our comments here, so if you feel
| strongly about this issue, please do consider taking the time to
| submit them formally as well. There will very likely be
| astroturfing from supporters of restrictive laws, and while
| they're good at detecting that, it still makes a difference!
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| If that were the case, china should be IP wise blooming. It does
| not.
|
| The more stiffing factor was and always has been, monopolies and
| oligopolies. Huge power concentrations murder the competition
| were they can find it. Which is why the original fractured nature
| of Europe was such a breeding reactor for innovations. Local
| leader does not like your project xyz? Just pack it in, go a few
| miles, to the next local leader in opposition who will welcome
| you with open arms.
|
| Situation wise, a fractured, heavily competitive economy, with
| some "safe havens" (academia) for involuntarily happening
| knowledge exchange is the optimum for innovation.
|
| PostScriptum: To zoom in further, on the lab level, to promote
| innovation, is quite distant from the pursuit of excellence
| everyone agreed on as the optimum today. The ability to
| learn,apply and reproduce past gathered knowledge does not make
| you a innovator, quite contrary. Mimicry while flattering, is not
| able to reproduce true geniusgenesis.
|
| One needs a gear-shifting approach, a combination of incremental
| researches (to follow a path through to the optimums it reveals
| and explore the terrain methodically) and one needs for lack of a
| better description, schizophrenia affected individuals, who even
| though their grades suck, are able to constantly recombine the
| currently existing ideas into new "conspiracies" and filter out
| the useful ones from the avalanche.
|
| Needless to say, that guiding such a lab with the constant
| conflicts and drama, is a task more fitting to a theater-
| director, then the classic academic bureaucrat.
|
| P.S.S: I'm not responsible for whatever hiring catastrophe this
| advice may produce. You may jam strange devices made from people
| into the leviathan at your own risk.
| coder543 wrote:
| Absolutely. The design of the patent system needs to be
| significantly updated. Every single new thing seems to be
| violating an assortment of patents, most of them for extremely
| obvious or common things.
|
| When Apple introduced the LiDAR sensor on iPhone, lots of people
| started building apps to map out the interior of homes to break
| the monopoly that Matterport seems to hold on that part of real
| estate technology.
|
| I started researching that stuff for a tangentially related idea
| that I have, and if you want to go from a LiDAR point cloud to a
| set of polygons representing a room, it seemed like you would
| have to violate a dozen of Matterport's patents. Truly ridiculous
| stuff. As I dug into the documentation around it, I realized that
| Apple will actually do the spatial reconstruction for you if you
| want, which is nice because that presumably means that Apple is
| the one violating the patents instead of you, right? It's hard to
| say. I wonder if even a lawyer could give you a straight answer
| to that question.
|
| Similarly, maybe I want to make a better kind of 2D barcode. QR
| Code patents supposedly won't be enforced against anyone
| implementing or using them for QR-compatible codes, if I remember
| correctly, but... a few years ago when I looked into this, I saw
| that the company that owned the QR Code patents had continued
| publishing new patents seemingly in order to extend their hold
| over QR Codes (and similar 2D barcodes) in perpetuity.
|
| So, if you make any kind of 2D barcode that is even remotely
| similar to a QR Code, talk to some lawyers or... good luck?
|
| And those are just two examples of things that I have run up
| against as an individual with ideas who would love to innovate,
| but feels restricted by the infinite number of patents that
| exist.
|
| I think some serious reform of intellectual property rights could
| spur significant new innovations and societal benefit, while
| still protecting people who are actually innovating and applying
| those innovations.
|
| (Keep in mind that I am not a lawyer.)
| jfengel wrote:
| _presumably means that Apple is the one violating the patents
| instead of you, right? It 's hard to say._
|
| Maybe Apple is even licensing the patents. It would be kinda
| nice to think that the system was actually working as intended,
| for once. Somebody invents; somebody else wants the idea; the
| license is made available at a reasonable price and they get
| paid for it.
|
| Probably not. But a guy can dream.
| coder543 wrote:
| The "system working as intended" would mean that blatantly
| obvious ideas could not be patented in the first place.
|
| There are only so many ways to do basic things. I'm sure most
| engineering students could come up with an algorithm to go
| from a point cloud to a set of polygons, and their algorithms
| would likely violate a bunch of Matterport's patents, because
| those patents are so overbroad.[0] That's not okay, in my
| opinion.
|
| It's like the infamous Mobileye patent that patented the idea
| of using a camera and a computer to read a speed limit sign
| while a vehicle was in motion, and then to react to that
| speed limit in real time. It is written so generically that
| there is literally no obvious way to avoid violating that
| patent if you want to have a self-driving vehicle (or vehicle
| with a strong ADAS) react automatically to posted speed limit
| signs. As human drivers, we are essentially violating that
| patent every time we read a speed limit sign, but somehow
| it's different when a human does it with their eyes (cameras)
| and brain (computer)?
|
| [0]: Keeping in mind that I am, of course, _not_ a lawyer.
| Maybe a lawyer would find those patents to be far more
| specific and complex than I did when I was doing some
| research, and therefore anyone can implement scene
| reconstruction without fear of judgment. If that were true,
| that would be nice.
| jjlustig wrote:
| HN loves to focus on only one of the normative goals of patents -
| to incentivize innovation. But there is another almost equally
| important goal of the patent system - to incentivize disclosure.
| While I agree that the use of vague language in patent
| publications perverts the public disclosure goal, other forms of
| public disclosure may arise from it. For example, companies can
| openly talk about inventions, whether it be with the public,
| potential business partners, or suppliers, without fear out
| misappropriation.
|
| I am not a fan of a bright line rule that prohibits software
| patents. Software is so explicitly tied with most inventions
| these days that it would be hard to tease out what qualifies for
| patent eligibility. Is a novel design of a robot arm that
| contains some software elements patentable? Instead of a bright
| line rule, I'd prefer to see a strengthening of 112 - written
| description / enablement requirements and 103 - obviousness
| requirements. Imagine if 112 required software patent holders to
| provide a hard copy of the implementation code (or at least a
| more detailed description of the invention). And as to 103, the
| policing function of obviousness needs to be ramped up. The USPTO
| should invest in better prior art searching techniques and hire
| Examiners that care about enforcement. Currently, the incentives
| of USPTO Examiner's misalign with the goals of the patent system,
| as Examiners are evaluated via a point mechanism that rewards
| churning out patents rather than tightly policing them.
|
| Also, when people on HN argue about the "patent troll" problem,
| the real issue seems not to be with patents themselves, but with
| how the U.S. litigation system can be weaponized to extract fees
| from using patents. Thus, I think the key issue is trying to
| figure out low cost and effective ways to litigate patent issues.
| IPRs have helped, but perhaps we can develop other ways for
| companies to cheaply dispose of garbage patent suits that have no
| merit.
| [deleted]
| cletus wrote:
| Patents clearly kill innovation. Like, that shouldn't even be a
| question.
|
| Fun fact: when the US entered WWI they had to buy warplanes
| because they didn't have the capacity to build them. Why? The
| original steering patent related to Orville and Wright was used
| to stifle innovation [1]. This was such a problem that a patent
| pool had to be created.
|
| Likewise, e-ink devices have largely had no innovation due to the
| patents of the e-ink corporation being used to stifle innovation.
|
| I'm relatively OK with pharmaceutical patents... within reason.
| The big problem in the US is you can't import that same drug from
| another country where the same company is making the exact same
| product. I realize they do this for price differentiation but
| this has gone way too far and is a big reason why US drugs are so
| expensive. In the very least you should be able to legally import
| such drugs from any developed nation.
|
| But look at something like a smartphone and there are literally
| thousands of patents that apply to that product. That's...
| ridiculous.
|
| Business models shouldn't be patentable. Software shouldn't be
| patentable. Obvious hardware innovations (eg applying more than
| one texture per clock cycle) shouldn't be patentable. Software
| can be protected by copyright.
|
| The US PTO and the US Federal Court of Appeals are clearly in a
| state of regulatory capture at this point (so much so that the
| Supreme Court has taken to routinely slapping down the excesses
| of the US FCoA) so I suspect any feedback on this will be used to
| justify that yes patents do protect innovation.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
| zehaeva wrote:
| > Software can be protected by copyright.
|
| You want software to be protected for the lifetime of the
| author + 70ish years? 95 years in case of corporate authorship?
|
| The Beatles catalogue, released 60 years ago, won't pass into
| the public domain until 70 years _after_ the last Beatle dies.
| Maybe my grand kids will see that day.
|
| Given that the law almost made the 8 note ostinato from Katy
| Perry's Dark Horse into a copyrightable bit of music I would
| weep if we tried to really apply copyright to software.
| robinsoh wrote:
| > Likewise, e-ink devices have largely had no innovation due to
| the patents of the e-ink corporation being used to stifle
| innovation.
|
| Uhm... I work in the display industry and have never heard
| this. They seem to be a typical display manufacturer
| progressing at what is decent or maybe even above average for
| display industry products. Could you clarify what patent you're
| referring to and what exactly you mean by no innovation?
| aeturnum wrote:
| It seems like a slightly weaker patent system where the holder
| only retains the right to share in the profits on a piece of
| technology would solve most of the problems.
|
| Like, once you publish a patent, anyone who uses it needs to
| pay you a meaningful portion of profit they derive from using
| it. The patent holder still has most of the incentive to use
| it, but R&D on the patent would be fully open and incur no fee.
| Third parties could sell improvements back to the patent holder
| or file their own patents on the improvements.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Strangely, after the patents for mechanical keyboard switches
| expired, keyboard prices seemed to have doubled or tripled,
| except for the really crappy Amazon ones that break after 6
| months (I've been through two)
| techrat wrote:
| Then stop buying the crappy ones. Like with anything else,
| you get what you pay for.
| alok-g wrote:
| >> Patents clearly kill innovation. Like, that shouldn't even
| be a question.
|
| Surely there are examples where patents have stifled
| innovation. I am unclear how this would apply in general.
|
| The idea of patents is to encourage inventors or organizations
| "invest" into research and development to create inventions and
| reap rewards for their investments. If there were no patent
| protection (and ignoring other forms of intellectual property
| for sake of simplicity), then inventors or organizations would
| either (a) not put money into any inventions that could easily
| be copied by others upon launch, or (b) have measures to keep
| the inventions hidden even upon launch. In that sense, patents
| mechanism are intended to lead higher investments towards
| developing inventions, and, are set up such that the inventions
| become publicly known and available after respective periods of
| time.
|
| Is the suggestion that the patents should be abolished? If so,
| one also needs to explain how and why would inventors and
| organizations spend money into research work leading to good
| inventions?
|
| I agree that problems do happen. There are many patents around
| which should not have been issued. However, the challenge is
| not that the law is at fault. The challenge is that execution
| is at fault wherein many obvious "inventions" get accepted for
| example.
|
| I can accept if the argument made is that good execution of the
| well-intended patent laws is guaranteed to be a challenge and
| therefore the patent law does not make any practical sense.
| However, we also need to be aware of the side effects of it as
| reduction in innovation because of reduced research and
| development investments.
|
| ---
|
| Recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent
| GloriousKoji wrote:
| Ideologically patents are suppose to promote innovation. The
| original idea and spirit of the law was that for a limited time
| monopoly you disclose all details on your invention instead of
| keeping it all a secret to yourself.
|
| Obviously this is no longer the case as the problem is (1) too
| many patents on broad things and (2) too long of a monopoly
| term for todays fast moving technology.
|
| It's been 150 years since we established the patent office and
| the only big things that were changed was moving from first to
| invent to first to file and increasing the monopoly term from
| 17 to 20 years. I think a 5-7 year monopoly term is much more
| reasonable and would maintain the original spirit of the law.
| bern4444 wrote:
| The e-ink patent is so frustrating.
|
| Another good example of a patent restricting innovation was the
| patent on 3D Printers. That's why in the past few years, 3D
| printers have become so much more prevalent and accessible (you
| can buy one for a few hundred dollars today).
|
| These definitely stifle innovation. I'd think a more reasonable
| approach could be, you have a patent for 15 years (or whatever
| arbitrary number is reasonable) or until the patent holder
| makes some multiple dollar amount from things that use whatever
| is patented.
|
| That is, if it costs a million dollars to develop e-ink
| screens, the patent is valid until the company has had revenue
| of 20 million dollars on devices that have e-ink screens. Tying
| it to revenue instead of profit is intended since profits can
| be turned into revenue easily to bypass the restriction
| otherwise.
|
| You could also add a minimum number of years (obviously less
| than the max mentioned above) so companies have some protection
| across various metrics.
| robinsoh wrote:
| > The e-ink patent is so frustrating.
|
| Hmm.. I keep seeing this on HN. I then ask which specific
| patent and I never get a satisfactory answer. But I'll keep
| trying. I work in the display industry and am not aware of
| any specific patent that is blocking progress in developing
| electrophoretic displays. Are you? If yes, please please
| point out which specific patent and how it is blocking your
| design.
| grawprog wrote:
| I just have to point out, it was really easy to find these.
| Like took me 30 seconds.
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US20080043317A1/en
|
| https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US9341917B1/en
|
| https://stks.freshpatents.com/E-Ink-Holdings-Inc-nm1.php
| criddell wrote:
| When a competitor appears, they usually sue with these two
| patents:
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US6120588A/en (expired)
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160187759A1/en
|
| That said, there are a lot of inexpensive epaper panels for
| sale on Alibaba.
| jandrese wrote:
| One of China's competitive advantages is that they don't
| give a shit about patents. This leads to extremely fast
| product cycles but also occasional stories about original
| inventors who feel they were screwed because people in
| China ripped off their design and improved it without
| their consent (or license fees).
|
| An example:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2018/01/31/meet-
| the...
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| In the EU, patents have escalating fees. They don't escalate
| very fast, but I think this would help with innovation a lot.
| IMO the first ~4 years can cost a few thousand dollars (so
| you can get your startup up and running), but the 20th year
| of a patent should escalate to several hundred thousand or
| million dollars. That way, building a long-lived "patent
| fence" becomes economically infeasible the way it is today.
| [deleted]
| rbjorklin wrote:
| Maybe combine this with a decreasing cap on royalties
| making patents less profitable over time?
| Andrex wrote:
| I like the idea but part of me thinks that would just
| benefit the companies doing well and hurt companies not
| doing well, potentially affecting competition.
| chongli wrote:
| Economically infeasible for NPEs, sure, but still a
| rounding error for Big Tech.
|
| The issue with schemes that make it difficult for NPEs is
| that they hurt the small inventor who cannot afford to
| capitalize their invention. Owners of capital may be able
| to form a monopsony to drive down the price of patent
| licenses and essentially squeeze out small inventors.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| They might be able to afford it, but money is money. The
| question would be whether the cost of keeping the patent
| outweighs its potential profits.
| visualradio wrote:
| The question should be how do we eliminate unnecessary
| transaction costs and overheads associated with license
| negotiations, legal fees, and courts costs, and ensure
| new public inventions can be immediately manufactured by
| a large number of domestic firms before they are knocked
| off by foreign manufacturers uninterested in obtaining
| licenses, while still compensating the original inventor?
|
| A possible solution is to require the patent filers to
| declare the price at which they are willing to
| permanently release the invention into the public domain
| in exchange for a one time payment. Then if someone is
| sued for IP violation the defendant can crowd-source the
| inventor's fee and pay it through the patent office to
| have the the patent destroyed immediately without hiring
| lawyers or halt production.
|
| The IP registrar could then levy a quarterly maintenance
| tax on the quit price filed by the IP holder to prevent
| the inventor's fee from being set infinitely high.
| motives wrote:
| Just as an example, IBM receives almost 10,000 patents a
| year. At $100,000-$1,000,000 per patent, that year of
| patents alone in 15-20 years time would cost $1-10
| billion. That is most definitely not a rounding error and
| would constitute as much as 10% of their annual revenue
| just to keep that single years worth of patents. I think
| this sort of escalating pricing scheme would definitely
| help reduce the barriers for startups and new innovators,
| and prevent abuse by companies worth hundreds of billions
| of dollars.
| InspiredIdiot wrote:
| Escalating fees still seems like a great way to limit the
| damage to small investors while turning the screws on
| NPEs, though. If the owners of capital can form this
| monopsony hurting small investors in the escalating fees
| case wouldn't they be able to do the same in the constant
| fee case? Is the proposition that they would be able to
| keep the monopsony together better with a bigger
| incentive (avoiding potentially high patent fees once
| they escalate)?
|
| It seems to me that yes it doesn't do much to reduce the
| use of patents by Big Tech that they are actually
| commercializing. It would be nice to solve all the
| problems but it seems like it solves some of the problems
| that almost everyone but NPEs can agree on in a neat way
| without too much collateral damage.
| chongli wrote:
| Big Tech can afford to spend billions on patent moats for
| no other reason than to suffocate any small businesses
| that cannot raise enough capital to pull their heads
| above the water. An escalating fee scheme, while not
| wholly responsible for the problem, seems like it adds to
| it. It's yet another barrier to entry that contributes to
| the enormous failure rate of startups.
| visualradio wrote:
| Well suppose the valuation mechanism for determining the
| relative value of patents that the escalating fees were
| levied upon was implemented by requiring IP holders to
| declare the price at which they were willing to
| permanently release the discovery into the public domain
| in exchange for a one-time payment.
|
| The result of such a scheme might be that is nearly
| always cheaper to pay the patent office to permanently
| destroy your competitor's patents and release the
| discovery into the public domain for everyone then it is
| to hire lawyers to go to court with your competitor in
| order to obtain a settlement and mutual licensing
| agreement.
|
| So whenever large tech companies have disputes with each
| other they might start destroying each other's patent
| arsenals rather than going to court, which would level
| the playing field for everyone else. And if a large
| number of smaller startups were being harassed by a large
| company they could crowd source the money needed to pay
| the patent office to destroy the large firm's patents
| without spending any money on lawyers or legal fees and
| without having to halt development.
| [deleted]
| korethr wrote:
| You're right that creative accounting games could be played
| to try to keep money made on the patent from being considered
| profit. While harder, I suspect creative accounting could be
| used to done to make it look like there was no revenue on
| e-ink screens despite millions of devices containing them had
| been sold.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| A exponential cost curve to hold a patent would fix that.
| Every year the cost increases, making it less interesting to
| hold "dead" patterns bringing in no revenue.
| procombo wrote:
| Bad idea for patents. The public is vastly benefitted by
| patent expiration. It's also why we can have generic drugs,
| etc.
|
| Now, exponential cost curve for _copyrights_ is
| interesting. And arguably already a thing... considering
| that Mickey Mouse is approaching 100 years old and is not
| yet in the public domain.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I could see a combo approach.
|
| Ideally, I'd like to see tech patents see a sunset of
| something like 5 years. The current 20 year hold is
| bonkers.
|
| However, if we keep the 20 year lifetime, then having an
| exponential cost of ownership would serve to ward off
| patent trolling companies. They could still exist to some
| extent but their operational expenses would be a lot
| higher than they are now. It'd put a number of them out
| of business (or at very least free up a bunch of
| patents).
|
| The trick is coming up with good numbers here. Too low
| and you might as well not add it. Too high and you might
| as well eliminate patents all together as they've lost
| their original purpose (to protect the little inventor).
| visualradio wrote:
| With the proposal for continuously increasing maintenance
| fees on ownership it is necessary to establish some
| public mechanism for determining the relative value of
| patents upon which the the maintenance fees are levied.
|
| One possible solution is to require the IP holder to
| declare the quit price at which they are willing to
| abandon their claim and permanently release the discovery
| into the public domain prior to the expiration date of
| the patent in exchange for a one time payment.
|
| This should reduce legal fees and court costs. If a firm
| is notified of patent infringement and pending
| litigation, instead of hiring a lawyer and going to court
| and halting production, they could instead crowd source
| the funds to pay the quit price to the patent office. The
| patent office would then pay the original inventor and
| place the discovery into the public domain for everyone
| so that there was no basis for continuing legal action.
|
| When large tech companies have legal disputes, they might
| find that it is always cheaper to pay the patent office
| to immediately destroy each other's patent arsenals,
| which would also release all of the discoveries into the
| public domain and level the playing field for smaller
| firms as well.
|
| If someone is willing to pay the quit price to the
| original inventor there should be no problem with
| expiring patents which have been issued for less than 1
| day. 1 business day would likely work fine as the minimum
| duration for patents.
| delecti wrote:
| That feels backwards. A patent nobody wants will be public
| domain. A patent that's actually stifling competition will
| stay protected. It'll at least cost money to stay
| protected, so it's not completely backwards, but I don't
| think this is the right approach.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Yes more on 3D printers:
|
| The first FDM 3D printers went on sale in 1995 for $50k. Ten
| years later they were $25k. Then in 2008 the patents expired.
| By 2011 a halfway decent printer was $1800. By 2018 $300 3D
| printers were available worldwide.
|
| I joined the community in 2010, bought my own printer in
| 2011, and I saw the community operating with my own two eyes.
| Thousands of people all over the world innovating without
| patents to improve the situation.
|
| The idea that patents promote innovation is absurd. The
| primary function of the patent is to stop innovation. All
| those thousands of people who wanted to improve 3D printers
| were legally prevented from innovating while the patent was
| in effect.
|
| I remember in 2012 people on the mailing list talking about
| 3D printing on to a belt that could move. Literally no one on
| the mailing list wanted to risk infringing on the Makerbot
| patent for this even though makerbot quickly stopped selling
| their belt printer and never sold a new one. To this day the
| only belt printers that are for sale is a printer with the
| carriage off angle from the belt to avoid infringing the
| makerbot patent that hasn't been used in years.
|
| The rate of innovation would be higher without patents. We're
| hurting ourselves for the benefit of those who amassed large
| patent portfolios so they can charge rent on old designs
| instead of innovating.
|
| Imagine the health and wealth that could be generated
| worldwide if we let every country copy the best MRI machines
| we have, and all our battery factories and chip designs. That
| wealth would immeasurably improve the lives of people the
| world over, and it would come back to us in the US as new
| economic trading partners with their own infrastructure.
| Along the way they'd find 100x cost savings or better and our
| medical care would be cheaper.
|
| We are truly shouting ourselves in the foot with patents.
| Aspos wrote:
| Counterargument: I get a patent for a special-purpose shell
| company MegaCorpA, license the technology to MegaCorpB for
| $1, concentrate all the profits in MegaCorpB and thus
| MegaCorpA will get a perpetual patent.
|
| Tying patents to revenues of licensees does not work too,
| because any patent licensed to Samsung will instantly become
| void.
| jorgemf wrote:
| >> Tying patents to revenues of licensees does not work
| too, because any patent licensed to Samsung will instantly
| become void.
|
| I don't see anything wrong with it. Other big companies
| will prefer to have Samsung as a partner instead as an
| enemy, and small companies will have very difficult to
| compete with samsung at scale. And if they do it is because
| they have done so many other things right, which it is
| great for consumers
| Aspos wrote:
| Yeah, but why LG would rush into paying for the license
| if the patent will become free as soon as Samsung will
| pay to license it first?
|
| Point is, the original idea of tying patents to revenues
| needs more thinking.
| jorgemf wrote:
| Because Samsung will use LG ideas too. As a company, I
| think, it is better to partner with others, so it is a
| win-win.
| visualradio wrote:
| > I'd think a more reasonable approach could be, you have a
| patent for 15 years (or whatever arbitrary number is
| reasonable) or until the patent holder makes some multiple
| dollar amount from things that use whatever is patented.
|
| The problem with patents is that they are national laws. A 15
| year patent on a fusion reactor can be ignored by
| manufacturers in other countries after waiting 1 day without
| obtaining a license. Then domestic manufacturers are saddled
| with legal fees and court costs for decades.
|
| A better reform would be to require the patent filers to
| declare the quit price at which they are willing to
| immediately release the discovery into the public domain in
| exchange for a one time payment. Then if an inventor patents
| a fusion reactor, and other countries begin manufacturing it
| immediately while ignoring the patent, domestic manufacturers
| could crowd source the money to pay the quit price to the
| inventor to have the patent office destroy the patent after 1
| day as well.
|
| > You could also add a minimum number of years (obviously
| less than the max mentioned above) so companies have some
| protection across various metrics.
|
| As long as the original inventor gets a cash reward why is a
| minimum time necessary? If the patent is destroyed one day
| after being filed the inventor still has the original copy of
| everything they built and cash reward, they just don't have a
| monopoly on the ability to make additional copies, and
| neither does anyone else.
| TheDong wrote:
| > I'd think a more reasonable approach could be, you have a
| patent for [duration] or until the patent holder makes some
| multiple dollar amount from things that use whatever is
| patented.
|
| I don't think this can work in practice. How much money has
| amazon made off the 1-click patent? If a company patents a
| new machine that lets them run a factory on half the workers,
| how much money does that make them?
|
| Even for devices, this seems sketchy.
|
| What percent of revenue counts towards the patent? Is the
| $100 kindle $100 towards the e-ink patent, or $20, or $5? If
| the device has 50 patents on various components, is the
| revenue counted 50x for them, or is the cost divided between
| them?
|
| I think that enough patents are on internal processes and
| machines that revenue won't be directly tied to, i.e. on
| things that aren't consumer goods, that this sort of strategy
| won't help.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Pharmaceutical patents, operatively, are really more about
| latter stage of drug development (human trials, regulatory
| approval, etc.) than they are about invention and discovery. A
| limited monopoly (or alternatives, such as bounties) make sense
| here, but we could drop the patent designation altogether. In
| fact, working through a patent frame can get in the way. Drugs
| that aren't patentable fall outside the framework and therefore
| have no funding mechanism for these later frameworks. Start the
| clock at approval. Drop the limitations. Prior art
|
| Business models, software & obvious/trivial inventions were
| never supposed to be patentable, and technically aren't. The
| fact that they often are in practice is an argument for reform.
| One-click remains the perfect example, as it falls into all
| three categories.
|
| Also, look at the state of the patent "industry." Patent
| trolls. Admit-nothing mutual licensing agreements. Patent
| arsenals held for defense. The Apple-Samsung war, with no
| result or benefit to either.
| DerekBickerton wrote:
| > I'm relatively OK with pharmaceutical patents
|
| I wish things like Generic Drugs could be applied to other
| items, like generic paint, generic computer peripherals, etc.
| The closest thing to generic computer equipment is the Amazon
| Basics items you can get, and also own-brand groceries which
| are usually cheaper since they don't spend much money on
| advertising and fancy packaging
| akersten wrote:
| If there were a political candidate whose sole platform was
| "dismantle the US Patent Office," I could look past almost any
| other position in my conviction to vote for them. That's how
| harmful I believe the current patent system to be. Innovators
| should not be afraid to be sued over trivial implements by non-
| practicing entities before they can even get their business off
| the ground. Patents kill innovation, 100%.
| procombo wrote:
| The U.S. had a president not too long ago who tried to shake
| things up. Ended up giving the patent office truckloads of
| cash, considered it "job creation". Goal was to improve
| efficiency, but all it did was unthrottle submissions, and
| lower quality. On paper, it looked more efficient,
| apparently.
|
| The U.S. also "harmonized" their patent laws with the rest of
| the world to reward paper-pushers who are "first to file",
| instead of those who are "first to invent." Should have been
| the other way around.
|
| That with lowering submission fees and requirements
| drastically, those efforts basically turned the office into
| an even bigger joke.
|
| Getting a patent means virtually nothing without enforcement
| and protection, and that requires litigation.
| jahnu wrote:
| First to file has some advantages that are hard to ignore.
|
| It incentivises early submission which means we all learn
| from it earlier.
|
| It disincentivises submarine patents where one party
| deliberately hides an obvious invention until another
| market player has established a business and then proves
| they invented it first.
| Sleepytime wrote:
| Most IP should be scrapped completely in the age of free and
| cheap information. I really don't have any sympathy to big corps
| making money from IP, and small entities are finding more and
| more ways to give their IP away and find revenue elsewhere
| (hardware, swag, live events, Patreon, etc).
|
| Scrapping IP would be a big step in making more, smaller, and
| more sustainable businesses instead of our current 'grow or get
| bought out' mindset.
|
| Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is all that matters. I would
| wager that most reading this website have had strangers and
| family alike approach them for help with with their huge ideas,
| which really means "you are the programmer you do it all". Most
| of which are utterly unoriginal, yet they want you to sign an NDA
| or promise to keep it secret. Patents and to some extent
| copyright/trademarks tilt the scale heavily away from innovative
| ideas toward 'derivative but licenseable'.
|
| I am running on 4 hours of sleep, hopefully my word salad makes
| sense.
| porknubbins wrote:
| Ideas being cheap and execution being everything applies mostly
| to businesses that laypeople people can think up and start.
| Because they are not usually in a position to do new research,
| but great execution is always scarce. In pharma (which I've
| worked in) and I guess other industries like semiconductors,
| materials etc good ideas are everything and competitors could
| copy the invention that took years to decades for just single
| or double digit millions so patents arguably drive a lot of
| research there.
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| In the software domain, I feel like patents have mostly become a
| corporate pre-emptive defense mechanism, i.e. "don't sue us for
| your patents we're infringing on, and in return we won't sue you
| for our patents you're infringing on".
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It can be even more defensive than that. "We're patenting the
| things we're doing, so that nobody else can patent those things
| and then sue us for them."
|
| That's, um, _not_ "promoting the progress of science and useful
| arts". It's at least not trying to exploit others, but it's
| sheer waste, having to protect yourself from being exploited.
| glennvtx wrote:
| Patents kill innovation, certainly, and at an ever increasing
| rate. The government acts as the enforcers for monopolies, as it
| always has been. It is based on an appeal to violence, like
| everything government does. It is, and has always been the
| principal enabler of every genocide, war, and mass abuse of human
| rights in history: educating people to recognize the claims of
| government authority as logically invalid (appeals to the
| populace, appeals to violence, etc. etc ) is needed.
| magila wrote:
| I think firearms related patents are an instructive example. It
| has long been standard practice to patent new firearm designs.
| For the most part it works well, the patents prevent companies
| from immediately churning out cheap clones of successful designs.
|
| However, every once-in-a-while a patent becomes problematic, like
| the infamous Rollin White revolver patent. White patented a
| revolver design using then new metallic cartridges. The design
| itself was not commercially successful, but the patent was
| construed to cover any revolver design where the chambers were
| bored completely through the cylinder. It turns out this is the
| only reasonable way to make a revolver using metallic cartridges
| so it lead to many years of legal battles and bizarre designs
| attempting to avoid the patent.
|
| I'm not sure how to reliably identify Rollin White type patents,
| but there certainly seems to be a distinction to be made between
| beneficial and detrimental patents.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I agree that it's nuanced. I think the question should be
| rephrased to " _When_ do patents kill innovation ". And the
| answer is that it happens when a new field opens up and the
| long hanging fruit is locked away for longer than the
| innovation merits. The reward should be, if not in perfect
| proportion, at least in rough proportion to the r&d work done.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Questions like this will always founder if you equate software
| patents with real inventions. As Joel Spolsky said, there are
| maybe two ideas in software per year that are really worth
| patenting (actually, he didn't say "per year" so I was being
| generous).
|
| I wrote an article [1] about this seven years ago! It was cited
| in an amicus brief to SCOTUS in the CLS Bank case. Nothing has
| changed since then.
|
| We should realize that our companies' top management and the
| professional societies are not on our side on this. Engineers
| themselves will have to get it done.
|
| [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580
| hosteur wrote:
| Yes. Duh.
| ElViajero wrote:
| For an example take the "Loading Screen Game" patent
| (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/loading-screen-game-pa...)
|
| > According to the law, a person isn't entitled to a patent if
| the claimed invention already existed when the application was
| filed or would have been obvious to someone skilled in the
| relevant technology area.
|
| This usually is completely overlook in patents. So, patents are
| ridiculous, they overlap and create a legal minefield for any
| small developer. Patent trolls exist because the patent system is
| so easily exploitable.
|
| I am not against the concept of patents, I see the value of
| allowing some corporation to regain invested money. But, it needs
| to be for real inventions that took time and effort to develop
| thru costly processes. Meanwhile things like "one-click buying,
| is the technique of allowing customers to make purchases with the
| payment information needed to complete the purchase having been
| entered by the user previously" are accepted. Patents are a
| useless joke, at least in the software industry. And its only
| goal is to increase the power of already monopolistic
| corporations.
| bee_rider wrote:
| A bounty system for patent invalidation might be nice. An idea
| could be:
|
| * When you get a patent, you put up a bond.
|
| * If someone invalidates your patent, they get the bond.
|
| * Otherwise, you get it back when your patent expires
|
| An extra, funny, probably impractical idea is that when filing
| for the patent, you decide on the value of the bond. But, the
| value of the bond is the maximum payout you can be awarded for
| a given instance of infringement. So, you have to essentially
| 'price' the value of your patent yourself.
| Tostino wrote:
| Ah, an even more pay to win system? Sounds like it'll work
| perfectly and no one will ever abuse their capital to
| unethically tie up patents.
|
| /s
| bee_rider wrote:
| If they are throwing money at patenting actually novel
| ideas, then they are using the patent system as intended.
|
| If they are throwing money at the sort of ridiculous
| obvious patents that people here are complaining about,
| they are essentially funding an army of private
| investigators to go out and invalidate bad patents.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > But, it needs to be for real inventions that took time and
| effort to develop thru costly processes
|
| Be careful with this. I have a friend who has a patent (might
| be expired by now) that basically came to be because I asked
| him a question about a battery charging design he wanted me to
| write some code for. It didn't make sense to me but in the
| process of explaining it, a lightbulb went off in his head and
| that was the basis of the idea. It's actually funny remembering
| the sudden excitement crossing his face as he realized he was
| on to something no one had thought of before (he had years of
| experience in the field).
|
| At the time I was already an experienced EE and I can assure
| you that the idea was definitely "not obvious to a skilled
| practitioner in the field" but yet it didn't take much
| development (we had it working about a week later).
|
| Found the patent here:
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US5894212A/en
|
| [edit] looks like it's been cited by quite a few other patents
| since then! I never asked him how much he sold it for.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Bounties would be much better than parents, across the board.
|
| In a world with too much consumption and work for no good reason,
| where new products fight for limitted demand, parents in theory
| even are solving the wrong problem.
|
| Bounties mean the goals are defined up front, and the reward for
| putting a round peg in a round whole is you don't even need a
| business plan, equity-based investment, or any of that other
| crap.
|
| Take some funding to hit the bounty, everyone cashes out, move on
| to the next thing. All the benefits of "aquisition culture"
| without the problem of concentrated ownership. (The bounty giver
| should ideally be the state and not own the thing.)
| 8note wrote:
| Patents last too long.
|
| The time it takes to scale up an operation has gone way down, and
| the patent length should correspondingly shrink
| sbpayne wrote:
| For AI/ML related patents, I'm not sure innovation is stifled
| insofar as people mostly don't pay attention to them.
|
| Most of the techniques that _every_ company is using are
| patented, but no one seems to notice.
|
| Admittedly I'm sure there are cases where it did stifle
| innovation in this space, but I think on average perhaps not.
|
| It's interesting to see the comments on eink patents -- I was
| never aware of how much it stifled innovation in that space!
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| Puget Systems popularized the concept of the submerged water
| computer/aquarium computer.
|
| They released a video showing a proof of concept, but it had an
| obvious design flaw.
|
| Shortly after they released that video, a patent firm patented
| the same thing, but with the design flaw fixed.
|
| Some time later puget sound announced version 1 of their fish
| tank computer, obvious design flaw fixed, only to get forced into
| discontinuing it because of said patent.
|
| So i'd say yes.
| michaelbrave wrote:
| Yes and no. There are countless innovations that have been lost
| over time (I.E. Ancient Roman's had stainless steel but it was
| lost), some were rediscovered some weren't, patents hope to
| prevent that by giving some incentive. This hasn't always worked
| though, for example Philo Farnsworth basically invented the
| modern TV but the large companies just waited for his patent to
| expire before moving on thus making it so he never really got
| paid anything but to contrast that the expiration on patents for
| 3D printers is what's causing so much innovation in that space
| today.
|
| The main problem is when stupid ones (like the same thing as
| before but now with software) are granted it drags everything
| down, and the very concept of patent trolls is a destructive
| force not contributing to humanity at all.
|
| Combine that with how most patents are forced through by
| submitting it until it sticks and it's a pretty broken system
| tbh.
| [deleted]
| a-r-t wrote:
| I can't think of a single patent in software that actually had a
| positive impact on the industry. Copyright provides enough
| protection for any actual investment in software.
|
| Other industries where R&D cost is high and the end result can be
| very compact (a chemical formula, a new material, etc.) can
| benefit from patents, but that R&D cost needs to be verifiable
| and substantial.
| Iv wrote:
| Funny how they ask it now that China took the lead in patents.
|
| Why does US only recognize a bad idea when they end up on the
| receiving end?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I don't think China has anything to do with it. People have
| been complaining about patents (and especially abuse of
| patents) for years/decades.
| Animats wrote:
| The weakening of patents has led to a rise in extreme trade
| secrets. Now, we have no idea how anything recent works. Nobody
| publishes much on self-driving. Nobody outside Tesla really knows
| how Tesla cars work. Progress relies on reverse engineering and
| teardowns.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > Progress relies on reverse engineering and teardowns.
|
| Progress has _always_ relied on reverse engineering and
| teardowns. (Or independent reinvention.) You don 't learn how
| anything really works be reading the patents, which tend to be
| deliberately obfuscated if not outright misleading. Anyone
| working in the industry will be instructed not to read patents
| anyway for fear of a willful infringement claim and trebled
| damages. Only in very rare cases can anything of notable value
| be maintained as a closely-held trade secret for longer than
| the duration of a patent.
| zubspace wrote:
| Just watched this video [1] by someone who got sued because his
| "android app uses a license server".
|
| Those patent troll shell companies sue one victim after another
| and forward the incoming money to other companies. So there's no
| use in going after them directly. The victim can negotiate better
| terms if he signs a non-disclosure agreement. The patent trolls
| are protected by politicians, judges and lawyers.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/sG9UMMq2dz4
| jokoon wrote:
| Not for medicine though.
|
| Once a molecule is researched and found to work, it should be
| patented.
|
| Although not if it receives public funding.
| SaltyBackendGuy wrote:
| I wonder if we removed the ability for companies to patent, only
| individuals (or groups of individuals) would help. Limit the
| patent protection for lifetime of said individuals. I feel like
| that would remove the patent troll economy.
| exabrial wrote:
| Yes. But it's an easy fix:
|
| * Anything that is copyrightable cannot be patentable. That
| should be obvious. "inventors" must be forced to choose one
| protection
|
| * Software should not be patentable in every circumstance: It's
| well established that math cannot be patented. It's well
| established that business processes cannot be patented.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| * Anything that is copyrightable cannot be patentable. That
| should be obvious. "inventors" must be forced to choose one
| protection
|
| That's the case today. Algorithms can be patented. Computer
| code can be copyrighted. These are different things.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well... I'm in embedded systems. There, software can be part of
| the machine, performing concrete, physical actions. Would the
| same thing be patentable if you implemented it as an FPGA? How
| about as discrete logic? If so, then it should be patentable if
| you implement it as software.
|
| But this is very far from a software-only patent, or a "doing
| X, but with a computer" patent. I guess the difference might be
| that, if it's part of the functioning of an embedded system,
| then it's not math (or at least not _just_ math) in the same
| sense that a mechanical machine is not just physics.
| exabrial wrote:
| No.
|
| If you invest a machine to dispense a weighted amount of ice
| cream using a microcontroller and software, that should not
| be patentable for the reasons listed above. This may be tough
| to hear, but there is nothing novel, inventive, or unique
| about using a general purpose device (a microcontroller) to
| accomplish a specific task.
|
| Now, inventing a new breed of general purpose embeddable
| device, that might be a bit different.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Take anti-lock brakes, for instance. Was that patentable?
| Yes, it was, and rightly so. But it used some software. Did
| that make it not patentable?
|
| Or take your ice cream dispenser. Let's say that I invent
| an ice cream dispenser with a camera. It's going to
| estimate the user's BMI, and based on that, it's going to
| decide whether to dispense regular or fat-free ice cream.
| (Sorry, it's a horrible example, it's the only one I could
| come up with for an ice cream dispenser.) Well, you know
| there's going to have to be a CPU in there running some
| algorithm to try to derive the BMI from the image from the
| camera. Does that make it unpatentable? (Yeah, I know, it
| should be unpatentable because of the overall insanity of
| the idea. That's not the point.)
|
| As our physical devices become smarter, more and more of
| the new behaviors are implemented in software. Does that
| make them unpatentable? As I asked before, if I implemented
| the same logic in an FPGA, would that make it patentable?
| If so, why?
| exabrial wrote:
| There are plenty of parts of anti-lock brakes that are
| novel mechanical devices, like fast acting solenoids or
| pumps. The software running on a general purpose device
| is not novel or unique. Patenting "anti-lock brakes" is a
| great example of an overreaching patent, as you can't lay
| claim to every implementation of "anti lock brakes".
| Patenting individual parts that are novel and unique is
| applicable.
|
| This practice didn't even come into play until the mid-
| late 1990s when lawyers realized they could put "may use
| cd-rom" or "electronic" in their patents to cover a wide
| swath of things they didn't invent.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > As I asked before, if I implemented the same logic in
| an FPGA, would that make it patentable?
|
| No. Like software, anything which you can implement in an
| FPGA is pretty obviously _math_. It 's literally a
| mathematical (boolean logic) equation. Possibly a
| recurrent one when you consider registers and state
| machines, but still 100% math. An FPGA is no different
| from a general-purpose computer in this regard. And FWIW,
| the same would be true of logic implemented as an ASIC or
| discrete logic circuits.
|
| What is not just software is the overall process,
| particularly the physical sensors and actuators and the
| relationships between them. The ice cream dispenser
| example is getting a bit ridiculous, so let's talk anti-
| lock brakes instead. The individual components to sense
| the car's motion, braking force, and the rotation of the
| tires are obviously not software. The same goes for the
| actuators which interface with the braking system and
| create the pulsing effect to un-lock the tires. The
| software itself which describes how these parts are
| related ought not be patentable, and an equivalent
| implementation _outside_ the context of an actual ABS
| system (in a simulator, for example) ought not infringe
| on any patent even if the code is functionally identical
| to the code in the ABS unit. The ABS system as a whole,
| in the context of a vehicle, is not merely software, so a
| patent on a system which detects certain conditions via
| physical sensors in a vehicle and brings it to a safe
| stop by physically interfacing with the brake controls
| would not be a software patent, even if some software is
| used to _implement_ the claims. Accomplishing the same
| effect with an FPGA or discrete logic, or even mechanical
| linkages, would be covered by the same patent, since the
| software is not part of the claims. (On the flip side,
| merely replacing discrete logic, ASICs, or FPGAs with
| software having the same effect--or vice-versa--would not
| qualify for a _new_ patent for exactly the same reason.)
|
| Going back to the ice cream example... IMHO that would be
| a really hard sell, mostly because all the "value" (using
| the term loosely) comes from the ML. It's not really much
| of an improvement over connecting the fluid switch to a
| mechanical scale, which could easily be accomplished
| without any software. You didn't invent the camera or the
| switch or even the ML system (ignoring for a moment the
| fact that the ML system on its own is pure math). _Maybe_
| you could claim something about how all these weighted
| inputs from the pixels in the camera combine to control
| the actuation of the switch. That seems like a really
| complicated patent application due to the input of
| inputs, and since it 's ML-based and self-trained you can
| only explain _how_ it works, not _why_. I 'd be inclined
| to reject it simply based on the fact that such a
| disclosure really wouldn't benefit the public at all, if
| by some miracle patent clerks were allowed to represent
| the interests of the public in that manner. But assuming
| the patent were granted, it would only cover the use of
| this logic in the context of an ice cream dispenser.
| Applying the same ML system to classify images according
| to BMI in another context would not infringe on the
| patent, since it was not the ML system (the math or its
| evaluation in software) which was the subject of the
| patent, but rather its application in controlling the
| dispenser.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yeah, I pretty much agree with all of that.
|
| After _State Street_ (which if I understand correctly
| only held that you couldn 't reject a patent simply
| because it contained some software), there were a flood
| of patents that were "X, but on a computer". Here's
| hoping we don't get a flood of "X, but using ML". (Uh,
| that is, if we haven't already had that flood...)
| Veedrac wrote:
| The virtue of the patent is that it rewards invention, and its
| productization, in cases where either the invention itself or its
| productization would not have otherwise been profitable, either
| because of the difficulty of inventing it, or because it isn't
| affordable to be the first to develop it.
|
| This suggests a very natural rule of thumb for patent
| admissibility: would the patented idea reasonably have been
| independently invented or productized prior to the date that the
| patent expires? Invention and productization are very different
| roles here, so perhaps an invention patent could last up to, say,
| 15 years, whereas a productization patent would only last half
| that.
|
| So a "one click shopping" invention patent would have to argue
| that within 15 years nobody else will have the idea, and a "one
| click shopping" productization patent would have to argue that
| within 8 years of the idea being public but not acted on, nobody
| would have been willing to front the cost to productize it.
|
| This allows precisely those patents which one would expect
| provide value, and not the rest.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > This allows precisely those patents which one would expect
| provide value, and not the rest.
|
| That's only true if we assume you have a handy oracle available
| to determine what actually would happen if the invention were
| neither published nor productized by the original applicant or
| their licensee. Otherwise the patent office is merely
| speculating without any evidence on which to base their
| decision. Once the invention is out in the wild there is no
| objective way to determine whether it "would have been"
| independently invented or productized by someone else, so you
| can't even get feedback (15+ years delayed) on how accurate
| your speculation has been.
| Veedrac wrote:
| For sure the actual award would be a matter of judgement, as
| would any challenge in court. But right now patents are
| judged on whether they were "obvious to the person skilled in
| the art, at the time the application was filed", which is
| both no less a matter of judgement, and a bar much easier and
| fuzzier to cross.
|
| This is what fundamentally results in patent races, where any
| ideas that can claim to take any nominal amount of
| intellectual effort to think of must be rushed to the patent
| office before the competitor discovers it themselves. Because
| it doesn't matter for elligibility if three people all
| thought on a problem simultaneously and all stumbled on the
| same answer, as long as that answer took at least a little
| time to discover in each case.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > But right now patents are judged on whether they were
| "obvious to the person skilled in the art, at the time the
| application was filed", which is both no less a matter of
| judgement, and a bar much easier and fuzzier to cross.
|
| Yes, and right now about the only way to fail the "novel
| and non-obvious" requirements at the time of application is
| to try to patent something which already exists. (And even
| those cases sometimes slip through the system.) A patent
| might be invalidated as obvious later if someone else comes
| up with the same thing and can demonstrate that they had
| absolutely no knowledge of the patent or anything covered
| by it, but that's both unlikely (for products generally
| available to, and discussed by, the public) and an
| extremely hard thing to prove even if true.
|
| In the absence of any possibility of hard evidence to the
| contrary, the default assumption is going to be that the
| invention would not be independently invented or
| productized by someone else. This is basically how things
| stand _now_ with the assumption that the invention is non-
| obvious. Getting this overturned would be at least as hard
| as getting a previously issued and productized patent
| invalidated for reasons of obviousness following
| "independent" reinvention.
| bitwize wrote:
| The people: yes
|
| Corporations with billion-dollar gold-plated megaphones: NO, THE
| PATENT SYSTEM PROTECTS INNOVATION, NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MATTER OF
| FACT WHY DON'T YOU MAKE IT STRONGER SO WE CAN BE MORE INNOVATIVE
| streetcat1 wrote:
| The key to the patent system are the patent lawyers, not the
| innovation per se. As long as the patent lawyers revolve with the
| USPTO, the system will not change.
|
| Please do not be naive.
| peter_retief wrote:
| We definitely need patents to protect intellectual property.
|
| There is a lot of hard work and resources needed to actualize
| products that can be easily copied without any effort. I have
| attempted a few patents in my time but it was too expensive and
| the process itself was daunting.
|
| Now I use secrecy to hide critical methods and open source
| everything else.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Patents mean that you basically need venture money to being
| anything to market. If you're a whiz-kid programmer who makes a
| new OS by the time you're 16, you're just going to get buried by
| patent lawsuits unless you can get YCombinator money to fight it.
| lettergram wrote:
| Having spent a significant amount of time developing and
| patenting new technology -- I think patents are both necessary,
| BUT need an overhaul.
|
| Particularly, I think design patents are likely positive, but I
| think utility patents need a different mechanism. For instance, I
| think the patent should work for X% of revenue of a given item is
| provided to the patent holder, provided they don't reach an
| agreement. This would ensure anyone can use patents and the
| revenue would be defined. I also think a patent should be limited
| to 3 years without it being put to use. "Use" should have a lower
| bar, but effectively made or reduced revenue in some manner.
|
| In reality, you can build what you and ignore patents. Patents
| don't matter until you are in business and make money. At which
| point, if someone uses you; you're already successful and they'll
| want a slice of that success. This is the advice I've always been
| given (from investors and attorneys, off record).
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| You guys can't be discussing this! The idea that parents kill
| innovation is patented! And we can prove you're trying to make
| profit via our method of using this idea! ;)
| csours wrote:
| Once phonorecords of a musical work have been publicly
| distributed in the United States with the copyright owner's
| consent, anyone else may, under certain circumstances and subject
| to limited conditions, obtain a "compulsory license" to make and
| distribute phonorecords of the work without express permission
| from the copyright owner.
|
| U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 73 - Compulsory License for
| Making and Distributing Phonorecords
|
| ---
|
| Maybe something like this, but for patents?
| kabdib wrote:
| Patents were supposed to provide enough information so that
| someone else could build a widget, in exchange for a limited time
| monopoly on that widget. "You teach the world, we'll let you eat
| for a while on that."
|
| What we got: A convoluted, arcane and rent-protected process
| which is gamed by the big players, and in fact _diminishes_
| advances by sowing fear, expense and uncertainty.
|
| I'm a software engineer, but a while back I got a chance to read
| hundreds of patents (with expert help from some compan lawyers)
| in an attempt to carve out an "IP space" in an already crowded
| and contested space. Pretty eye-opening. In a couple of cases the
| parties we were looking at were trying to patent stuff you could
| have lifted from a textbook. The screening process for "is this a
| patentable idea?" seemed utterly broken.
|
| To this day I can't keep a straight face when a lawyer says, "...
| and here, the '843 patent teaches that....".
|
| /Teaches/, yeah right.
| korethr wrote:
| Some ideas, based on some of the ideas kicked around in this
| thread: What about something like compulsory licensing?
|
| Copyright has something like this[1]. One can acquire a license
| to distribute a copyrighted song in some circumstances if you pay
| the mandatory fee.
|
| So how would this work with patents? First, let's cover the non-
| practicing entity, or NPE. Patent trolls are the most well known
| and hated NPEs but they're not only ones. You can have a small
| time inventor who's successfully invented a thing, designed and
| built a prototype, but hit a wall when it comes to the capital-
| intensive requirements of moving on to actual production. As much
| as I might want to stick it to patent trolls, I don't want to
| catch original inventors in the blast radius. So it can't be
| something that just punishes all NPEs, but just the parasitic
| subsets.
|
| So Bob discovers novel and efficient way to frobnicate foobars,
| and gets a patent on it. But he never takes it to production.
| Let's say materials science isn't quite at the point necessary
| that the materials needed for the frobnicating foobar can be
| readily had cost-effectively at scale. So he sits on it.
|
| Some years later, after some improvements in materials science,
| it's now feasible to build frobnicating foobars at scale. And
| Bazcorp, a company that's in the foobar business learns of Bob's
| patent, gets a compulsory license to manufacture it, and starts
| building and selling frobnicating foobars. Bob gets money for the
| frobnicating foobars now on the market, Bazcorp gets to sell
| frobnicating foobars, and people get to buy frobnicating foobars.
| Sounds win-win to me.
|
| Now, how keep patent trolls from perverting this? Make it so the
| fee schedule for a compulsory license is lower if the entity
| holding the patent gets more than, say...10% of their annual
| revenue from license fees. Make it so the liscencing fee schedule
| goes lower the older the patent is. You could combine this with
| annual fees to renew the patent, escalating each renewal period
| that the invention in the patent is not being produced, making it
| more and more expensive to hold a patent on a thing and not be
| building the invention covered. Then add a multiplier upon the
| renewal schedule if the patent holder gets more than 10% of their
| revenue on patent licensing.
|
| So Troll, Goblin & Associates, LLP, seeing the hot market for
| frobnicating foobars, does some research and discovers building
| them is covered by a patent they hold on the quux process. Said
| patent is 10 years old now, and has cost some coin to hold on to,
| so it will require quite a lot of money to turn a profit on it.
| So, TG&A goes to Bazcorp and demands one million dollars per
| unit. Bazcorp calls TG&A's bluff and files for the compulsory
| license of $0.10 per unit. Now, with the volume of frobnicating
| foobars that Bazcorp is moving, TG&A still gets a not-
| insignificant sum of money, but not enough to break even on the
| purchase of the patent and fees to renew it. Too bad, so sad,
| such is the risk of TG&A's non-creating, parasitic business
| model.
|
| Another idea: What about something like jury duty as assistant
| patent examiners? The patent office could reach out and compel
| persons skilled in the relevant sciences to assist with patent
| review and be remunerated for said assistance. Then, you might
| actually get some qualified eyes upon patent applications that
| could spot prior art or obvious things and reject said bogus
| applications.
|
| 1. https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ73.pdf
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| Patents foster innovation.
|
| Without patents people who are technically skilled but socially
| inadequate would not ever try to build stuff.
|
| Same goes for those who can promote themselves but just love the
| technical challenge much more and want to focus on that.
|
| These are among the most productive demographics and without
| patents they'd be sitting idle because they would be too scared
| of working thousands of hours in vain, just setting the stage for
| the socially competent people to rip them off and cut them out of
| the enjoyment of the monetary and social rewards for the thing
| they have built.
|
| At least with patents there is some sort of protection or I
| should say an illusion.
|
| Say you have an idea and then one of the big guys with deep
| pockets and a huge marketing and PR department steals it from you
| or executes in a way which becomes world class, with a patent you
| have grounds to sue and you can also go to lawyers and convince
| them to work pro-bono because they'll get so much media exposure.
|
| You can also go to a bank and ask for loans to promote your story
| and you can get a favorable interest rate due to the fact that
| you have the optionality to settle for cash.
|
| A patent gives you options. It's also a concept which unlike so
| many corporate jargon terms is easily understood by the general
| population, and that is an advantage when you are a small startup
| or individual inventor going up against a behemoth...it enables
| you to convey social hatred against the giant company
|
| A much more complicated instrument such as NDA/NCA gave the
| Winklevoss bros the ability to sue Zuck and to put themselves on
| the map with the movie "The Social Network", a patent as I said
| is much more clear and easy to understand, both for the courts
| and the court of public opinion
| 8note wrote:
| Patents also mean that the big co that copied your idea can sue
| you out of business for violating one of their myriad of
| patents, and that your patent is actually a derivative of one
| of theirs.
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| You want to drag the big company in front of the court of
| public opinion.
|
| If your patent is perfectly nailed, then your version of the
| story will win.
|
| In short you gotta have something to show to the journalists
| and lawyers who are your allies because they want to be the
| guys bringing down the behemoth and win the Pulitzer/lawyer
| of the year award.
|
| If you don't have anything they won't write your story and
| they won't defend you.
|
| Once the story is out there the entire public opinion will be
| on your side and you are looking at the very least at a hefty
| settlement which the behemoth would pay you in order to make
| the story go away.
|
| A patent is a checkpoint for an individual inventor or a
| small startup
| moron4hire wrote:
| I think the bigger question is, will this be more than an
| exercise in confirmation bias, and even if it makes a valid
| determination, will it actually lead to policy change?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Mandatory licensing. Rather than grant a monopoly, a patent could
| give you the right to a certain percentage of all sales. That
| would allow competitors to serve markets that the patent holder
| refuses to address (ie cheap 3d printers.)
| beefield wrote:
| Tax patents. Progressively. Start from say $USD 1000 per year and
| double each year until the patent holder decides to not pay and
| gives the patent to the public domain. Feel free to add a couple
| of free years in the beginning or tweak some other parameters to
| suit needs of different industries.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Taxing a companies patent portfolio with a minimum tax per
| patent would be salutary.
| underseacables wrote:
| That is an exceptional idea!!
| FemmeAndroid wrote:
| This is how it works. The prices are different in different
| countries. Most countries have renewals due every year. Many
| countries have increasing costs each year, and costs vary
| between tens of dollars and thousands of dollars. Costs are
| also categorized between "Micro", "Small", and "Large"
| entities. Different countries use different numbers of these
| categories. The US uses all three.
|
| Some countries have fees per claim in the patents.
|
| In the US, the renewals are only due 3 times, every 3.5 years
| after the grant of the patent. The renewals cost $1,600 for the
| first renewal, $3,600 for the second, and $7,400 for the third.
| Those are for large entities. Small entities are half the cost,
| and micro are 1/4th the cost.
|
| Renewal fees, world wide, are a non-negligible part of a legal
| department's fees, and abandonments do happen before they
| otherwise would because of the cost to keep non-useful patents
| around.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I think a similar approach would work with copyright, too. Only
| with a grace period.
|
| Say, your original copyright lasts for 20 years since creation
| of your work. If you want to prolong it, you can, but you must
| register your work and pay a yearly fee that starts somewhere
| around USD 5, but grows exponentially to reach millions after
| 50 years and billions after 100 years.
| beefield wrote:
| Not sure how such copyright tax would be interpreted in Berne
| Convention context. (Would happily support that as well,
| though)
| bluGill wrote:
| Just renegotiate that. I'm convinced that copyrights > 25
| years are not a limited time via the constitution, and thus
| the treaty isn't constitutional in the first place. Of
| course I'm not in a position to do anything about this.
| FemmeAndroid wrote:
| The Copyright Act of 1790, just a few years after the
| constitution was signed, enabled a 28 year copyright
| grant (14 years with a 14 year extension.) So unless you
| think the copyright laws haven't been legal since their
| inception, you probably want to bump your number up at
| least five years.
|
| Edit: Also, if you're interested in this argument, and
| IIRC the most recent Supreme Court opinion on it is
| Eldred v Ashcroft (2003).
| bluGill wrote:
| The exact time is subject to debate.
| jedberg wrote:
| I used to think this too, until I thought about it more. The
| biggest issue with taxing copyright is eventually only the
| biggest companies can afford it. Imagine if Disney could
| simply wait until Lucas couldn't afford the Star Wars
| copyright anymore, and then just acquire the copyright. So
| now Lucas gets nothing and the government gets billions.
| Everyone loses in that situation.
|
| I think copyrights should be taxed like income. File a
| special return showing the income that copyright got you, and
| pay a percent. Audit it like the IRS audits taxes. Make it a
| tax on top of income tax. So for example Disney would pay
| their normal taxes, and then additional tax for income earned
| from Mickey, Donald, Darth Vader, etc. Maybe allow them to
| group copyrights for simplicity.
|
| Then do patents the same way. Pay a tax based on how much you
| make from a patent.
|
| And then once you do that you can get fancy. Allow anyone to
| use a patent and pay the tax, but have their tax get split
| with the original patent holder, or increase the tax and have
| to extra go to the original holder. Then invocation isn't
| stifled anymore. If you can make an e-ink reader and make it
| profitable enough to cover the tax, then great, everyone
| wins!
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Expiration of copyright would have to mean instant and
| irreversible transition to public domain. In that case,
| Disney would have to pay reasonable money to Lucas, so that
| he does not let his copyright expire out of spite.
|
| Also, 20-30 years of automatic or very cheap copyright mean
| that the original creator has a _lot_ of time to make some
| money off it. Although there are works that only became
| "hits" after decades, this is a fairly rare situation.
| t-writescode wrote:
| For copyrights, why is this a problem? Consider the early
| copyright lengths of like 20 years + 20 years after the
| author's death. We're now at far, far, faaar beyond that.
|
| What if we did 20 + 20 and then every year after it, we
| charge $X and then geometrically or exponentially increase
| the price.
|
| Yes, it would be a tax to Disney; but, if Disney is willing
| to spend $2B in 2010 to keep Steam Boat Willie and then
| $2.5B in 2011, I think that's a fine tax for them to get to
| keep it.
|
| I don't think most people had _any_ problem with the 20 +
| 20 or similar patterns. They have issues with the, what is
| it now, 120 years?
| alok-g wrote:
| As a commentor noted, there are already fees to maintain a
| patent.
|
| The problem with the approach is that the fees are often
| trivial for big companies, who may not think twice about
| maintaining a patent "just in case" even when they are not
| using the patent.
| FemmeAndroid wrote:
| Yeah. Two potential options to fix sitting on unused patents
| are to increase annuity fees until they hurt, or to enact a
| compulsory licensing scheme.
|
| I'm pretty ambivalent either way. I do think that compulsory
| licensing schemes are hard to manage but if done right would
| be extremely valuable. Compulsory licensing of patented
| pharmaceuticals saves lives.
| beefield wrote:
| Doubling the tax each year _will_ make the tax non-trivial
| for even the largest corporations in reasonably short
| timeframe. You may want to check what e.g. my initial
| proposal (1000 bucks first year, double that annually) would
| yield in say 30 years.
| alok-g wrote:
| Makes sense. Sorry for my miss the first time. :-)
|
| So what this means is that the small players would give up
| before the big players even though the invention otherwise
| took the same amount of investments or has the same
| potential for reward back.
| beefield wrote:
| The shape of the exponential curve makes the time
| difference between small and big players giving up
| relatively small (if that difference exists in the first
| place.) Both have reasonably long time with reasonably
| low patent tax to develop the commercials before the tax
| starts really kicking in. The tax with my initial numbers
| breaks one million USD p.a in 10 years and 10 millions in
| 14 years.
| alok-g wrote:
| Yes, the math is already understood. :-)
|
| Your proposal does seem to carry some weight. While I see
| some non-idealities in it, but then I don't have a better
| solution that's practical.
|
| I'll think some more about your idea; I just need to
| consider various scenarios with it.
|
| Thanks.
| zepearl wrote:
| General question by throwing ZFS into this discussion: I never
| exactly understood what's the problem related to ZFS' adoption in
| Linux (problem related mainly to the ARC algorithm?).
|
| I read e.g. here ( https://www.legalmatch.com/law-
| library/article/what-cant-be-... ):
|
| > _You cannot patent a formula. However, you can patent an
| application of that formula._
|
| So... with "application" does that mean that Oracle/Sun patented
| some piece of ZFS (e.g. the ARC mentioned above) in the context
| of "IT data caching technology" and that therefore anybody that
| wants to use it in IT (even by writing the logic from scratch) in
| any area (programs, databases, filesystems, etc...) cannot
| without paying fees, but if I use/implement that ARC logic to
| e.g. handle my inventory of "shoes to rent" (dummy, but let's say
| that I have such a shop which has multiple rooms used to store
| shoes and I keep in the main one the shoes that have been most
| frequently & recently rented, in the other rooms other stuff
| split by the same ARC-logic) then I'm OK because the
| "application" is different than what is mentioned in the patent?
|
| Thx :)
| cesarb wrote:
| > I never exactly understood what's the problem related to ZFS'
| adoption in Linux (problem related mainly to the ARC
| algorithm?).
|
| The problem with ZFS adoption in Linux is copyright, not
| patents. The license used by the ZFS code and the license used
| by the Linux kernel are incompatible, so one cannot distribute
| the combination of both without violating one of the licenses.
| This means that the ZFS code cannot be incorporated in the
| Linux kernel, so it's doomed to forever stay out-of-tree.
|
| This could in theory be worked around by a clean-room
| reimplementation of the ZFS code, keeping the same filesystem
| format, but I suppose most people who could do that work either
| are already working with the ZFS code, or find it more
| interesting to create their own filesystem. It would also be a
| lot of work, and take a long time until the reimplementation
| would be considered stable.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| No they don't. But the process and cost is not working for
| smaller inventors.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Isn't that kinda the point of a patent?
| [deleted]
| mips_avatar wrote:
| Bragging rights plays a bigger role in patent filings than most
| people recognize. Yes there's some business value to
| Microsoft/Google/etc. having patents, but if you look at why a
| given team patents something it usually comes down to bragging
| rights.
| underseacables wrote:
| I think its too easy to get a patent, and that leads to a great
| proliferation of patents that serve little purpose but to slow
| innovation.
|
| I worked at a patent law firm about 15 years ago in my wild
| youth. I'll never forget hearing an attorney explain that getting
| a patent is basically bullying the examiner, and if that doesn't
| work, appealing repeatedly until it's eventually accepted.
|
| Are there statistics of the number of patent applications
| rejected? Even better, I would love to see the number of patent
| applications filed by the Apple computer corporation, and how
| many were accepted, and how many were rejected.
|
| Edit: Autocorrect error.
| laurent92 wrote:
| > too easy to get a patent
|
| If you make it harder, startups will have difficulties
| obtaining them.
|
| Patents are a way for private companies to benefit from the
| public enforcement. Like anything provided by the state, it can
| and will be taken out of its goals and used by the largest
| corporations to reinforce their dominance.
|
| Removing the tool would make the playing field more fair.
| war1025 wrote:
| > I think its too easy to get a patent
|
| I'd modify that to say it's too easy for a large corporation to
| get a patent. I've heard quite a few acquaintances who work for
| large companies mention offhand that they just were awarded a
| patent for something or other.
|
| Meanwhile, at my tiny company, we have I think one patent and
| another that got hung up with the examiner due to completely
| unrelated things. I think we finally stopped protesting it.
|
| Patents are pay to play.
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| I think patent applications should have a "challenge period",
| where anybody can come up with the same or a better solution
| which would invalidate the patent (and perhaps the original
| applicant has to pay a fee to the other party).
| walkedaway wrote:
| I worked in patents about 15-20 years ago. What I remember in
| this golden era of patent proliferation was that the US patent
| office, if in doubt or just by default, just issued the patent
| and waited for people with prior art to object.
|
| Not sure of the numbers, but I remember IBM would file by the
| thousands every year for every little thing. Including one for
| the work that the company I worked for actually did that they
| caught wind of and decided to beat us to the punch and file. We
| eventually were granted it, but it was a high legal cost to
| show we had the idea first.
| psyc wrote:
| I once worked at a company that paid $1K to employees who got
| patents. Most employees (that I knew) never bothered, or only
| when they actually invented something. But this one manager
| and one of his reports formed a 2-person patent brainstorming
| club. They'd book a conference room regularly and spend the
| meeting thinking up worthless patents. As an example, one
| that I remember was something like "spellcheck in a context
| that usually doesn't have spellcheck." Others were nothing
| other than descriptions of products we were working on, such
| as "A web based interface for communicating such information
| from such a person to another type of person."
|
| If you looked in the meeting room, you would see these two
| giggling like kids, slapping the table, falling out of their
| chairs. They each had stacks of patent awards in their
| offices. Most of us had none. I am happy that they had so
| much fun, but that is what patents are in practice.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| This is the root of the problem. The examiners have to meet a
| throughput quota and that creates a perverse incentive to
| approve garbage. The USPTO is also dependent on filing fees
| which adds another perverse incentive to help the trolls with
| their patent spam.
| harikb wrote:
| Trolls usually don't file patents. They usually acquire
| them, usually from a company close to going bankrupt. Then
| they sue other "medium-size" company in a jurisdiction with
| a friendly and corrupt judge.
|
| Even if we stopped issuing new patents today, trolls have
| enough fodder to survive for the next 100 years.
| NortySpock wrote:
| I thought patents expired 20 years from the file date? So
| you could only troll for ~20 years + anything
| manufactured using an infringing process. (so "you owe me
| royalties on the widget you made 10 years ago" is valid.)
| cptaj wrote:
| Yeah, the question "do they kill innovation?" is too
| simplistic.
|
| They exist for a valid reason and they also have negative side
| effects.
|
| The current implementation has a lot of systemic problems. The
| ones you mention, patent trolling and length of patents might
| be tuned in order to optimize innovation.
|
| I worry about our political system's ability to perform this
| tuning operation though. Political discourse seems incapable of
| tackling complex issues like this where there is no good/evil
| dichotomy, simply a productive balance to be found.
| strawhatguy wrote:
| Well, there's plenty of evidence of how patents have delayed
| innovation until after said patent lapsed, like steam
| engines, e-ink displays mentioned elsewhere here.
|
| I would like to see _any_ evidence of patents actually
| helping innovation increase. It should be plainly obvious
| that the negative side effects ARE actually the main effect.
|
| It's one of the few things I think the US constitution
| completely whiffed on, by mentioning patents at all.
| robinsoh wrote:
| > e-ink displays mentioned elsewhere here.
|
| where? not this one (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779 ) I hope
| because I questioned it and I'm pretty sure it is false and
| written by someone who isn't actually even involved in the
| display industry. That particular post got cited by Boing
| Boing and multiple blogs and then subsequent HN posts
| started citing those blogs and Boing Boing. Basically a
| self-referential citation infinite loop. Please see my
| comment history. I work in the display industry and I'm not
| aware of what patent is blocking anything in developing
| electrophoretic displays.
| [deleted]
| strawhatguy wrote:
| Okay, my mistake. if there's no patent there, there's no
| problem there. Kinda proves my point that the absence of
| patents allows innovation to grow, I have not seen any
| evidence to the contrary; it's usually the "but what
| about the little guy" defense, not mentioning any "little
| guy" who was helped
| mjevans wrote:
| In addition to the DURATION and 'USE' (in an actively
| produced or utilized real world example): (PS: these should
| also apply to copyright)
|
| A maximum license fee and/or scheme. Lesser values might be
| negotiable. A fixed rate always paid to the government per
| licensee.
|
| Short initial duration, renewal requires exponentially higher
| fees.
| dantheman wrote:
| I think the case needs to be made that they're valid - If you
| look at the steam engine, progress only took off after the
| patents expired.
| seoaeu wrote:
| That isn't evidence that patents are bad. You also have to
| know the counterfactual of whether the steam engine would
| have been invented then if the creator wasn't going to be
| able to patent it
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| And further, even if it had been invented five times
| over, would it have been known about by the right people
| had the patent not forced a public documentation of the
| design?
| neltnerb wrote:
| This is a good question to which we can never know the
| answer. Every time this discussion happens I can't help
| but think that the solution is to make patents much
| harder to get and/or last for a shorter time.
|
| Theoretically, without them a big company can just copy
| or reverse engineer your design and sell it for cheaper
| than you can make it. In practice, big companies just
| patent a bunch of vague stuff so that no matter how
| innovative what you come up with is it will somehow end
| up covered. I've seen this happen over and over.
|
| That makes it seem like we're far, far over some
| threshold where patents switch from protecting inventors
| to preventing inventors from doing much of anything.
| staticassertion wrote:
| The idea is pretty straightforward. "Little guy" invents
| something truly novel, investing major time into generating
| that invention. "Big guy" sees this after the fact, uses
| existing resources to steamroll little guy.
|
| Patents exist to prevent that.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Okay that's the idea, but do they do that today? It seems
| that today the more common story is: "big guy" patents
| everything under the sun before the fact and locks it
| away in a drawer, while "little guy" actually builds the
| thing and tries to sell it but gets crushed in the
| process. Or at least that's the one I hear told more
| often, maybe it really is the case that patents are
| promoting innovation. But we can't just assume it's
| working out like we thought it would.
| kbenson wrote:
| That's the story we hear often with software patents, but
| those are relatively new. There's a long history of
| patents for physical things which may be less obviously
| detrimental.
|
| FWIW, if I remember correctly, the reason we can even
| have software patents is because a hedge fund ended up
| trying to patent their process for categorizing or rating
| investments, and in their drive to patent a _process_ as
| opposed to a mechanism, new law was decided. I 'm being
| vague because I don't remember the details enough to be
| authoritative and don't have the time to look them up,
| but someone else might be prompted to.
|
| To me, I can see a benefit to physical and software
| patents both, but I think they have very different
| effects and should be handled differently. If software
| patents were genuinely harder to get because they had to
| actually be complex and novel, and also only lasted 5-10
| years, I don't think we'd really have much of a problem.
| I don't know how to raise the bar on their complexity in
| a good way though.
| dantheman wrote:
| That's the theory, but it doesn't play out in reality and
| never really has.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| That's the wrong metric to look at to asses the
| effectiveness of the patenting system. The justification
| for patents is that they facilitate innovation by granting
| a state-enforced monopoly for a limited window of time at
| the cost of publicly disclosing your innovation. Thereby
| creating incentive to pour R&D money into new ideas, and to
| share those ideas with the public. Under that mission, your
| example is proof of the effectiveness of patents, not the
| ineffectiveness. Innovation stagnating on steam engines,
| and then exploding after the patent expires is an example
| of this system working as intended.
| fanf2 wrote:
| Steam engines are only an example of patents working as
| intended if there was any value in publishing the ideas -
| that is, if the knowledge would have remained secret
| without the patent.
| dantheman wrote:
| I'm saying that justification needs strong evidence and
| it's not there.
|
| Exploding after a patent expires is because the state has
| granted a monopoly to one person. The steam engine would
| have been invented without the patent protection.
|
| Look at innovation in software - it's not because of
| patents. Patents hamper innovation.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| I understand the point you are trying to make, I'm just
| pointing out that the example that you were using is
| actually one in favour of patents not against. I'm
| positive that the steam engine would have been invented
| with or without patents, but it's certainly possible that
| it's invention was accelerated by strong intellectual
| property protections. The vast majority of inventions are
| the product of profit-seeking endeavors, and patents help
| justify the immense capital required to invent. The idea
| of the lone inventor building something creating
| something purely for the joy of it is a romantic image,
| but not really how invention works (certainly not at
| scale).
|
| Also, the technological explosion of the steam engine was
| partly due to public disclosure of the invention's
| function as required to obtain a patent. No patenting
| system, no disclosure. And maybe it takes society longer
| to figure out how the machine actually works, thus
| delaying innovation. If the patenting process did not
| exist, perhaps the inventors go to measures to secure
| their intellectual property themselves by intentionally
| making the product's inner workings obscured. A world
| with no intellectual property protection is a world where
| everyone attempts to hide and obfuscate their innovations
| from the rest of society. This is not an environment
| where innovation thrives either.
|
| I'm certainly not trying to make the argument here that
| the patenting system is flawless or even good. Only that
| intellectual property protections of some kind or another
| are, and we shouldn't throw that baby out with the
| bathwater.
| dantheman wrote:
| From my understanding, it's wildly considered that
| patents slowed steam engine innovation significantly.
| http://www.dklevine.com/papers/ip.ch.1.m1004.pdf
| zepearl wrote:
| > _The ones you mention, patent trolling and length of
| patents might be tuned in order to optimize innovation._
|
| Maybe there should be at least a differentiation between tech
| sectors for which the patent is applied (e.g. IT vs.
| agriculture vs. materials vs. <all the rest>) in relation to
| how long the patent would be valid?
|
| Having a patent in IT valid for XX years is in my opinion a
| lot more counterproductive than the same for other sectors.
|
| I could have tonight a great idea about software and
| implement&test&prove it within days but to do the same with
| new materials/crops/engines/whatever can take a lot more
| time/effort/resources => maybe IT patents should always have
| a shorter max life than the rest? At least the ones purely
| related to software.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > Yeah, the question "do they kill innovation?" is too
| simplistic... They exist for a valid reason
|
| But isn't that entire reason explicitly to "promote the
| Progress of Science and useful Arts" aka innovation?
| Shouldn't we ask whether or not patents are doing the thing
| we want them to do?
| bluGill wrote:
| Having a patent ensures that I have all the data I need to
| later improve or implement it. I've read books where the
| steam engine were encased in explosives so that it couldn't
| be reversed engineered thus ensuring the inventor had a
| monopoly on them (the book had a lot of other things to
| ensure the monopoly as well).
|
| A lawyer told me years ago never read patents: if you
| infringe and claim ignorance that is better than infringing
| and knowing. If we want to make patents useful, then we
| need to change this to ??? which ensures engineers keep up
| on the relevant patents in their field. I have ideas on
| what to change, but every one has serious flaws so I'm not
| going to state any - maybe you can do better.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > I've read books where the steam engine were encased in
| explosives so that it couldn't be reversed engineered
|
| Stop! You'll give the HW companies ideas.
| bluGill wrote:
| If they try they will run into attempted murder issues.
| paxys wrote:
| Too easy from the technical side, too difficult/expensive from
| the legal side. Solo inventors and startups working on
| genuinely new and interesting technology do not have the
| funding to hire fancy law firms, while companies like Microsoft
| and IBM file a dozen patents a day (not an exaggeration). It's
| the exact opposite of how a patent process should work.
| deelowe wrote:
| And a perfect example of how regulatory capture works. I
| don't have a solution, but I am convinced that over time this
| is the end result of ANY regulation. It doesn't matter what
| the original intent is/was.
| wpietri wrote:
| I look it as an evolutionary system, an arms race. Capture
| will happen if the regulators don't keep up.
|
| But it's possible to keep up. US financial markets have a
| lot of internal regulation for traders, so they're
| wrangling some of the most aggressive do-anything-for-a-
| buck people on the planet. Nonetheless, the traders are
| generally kept in check. I used to do tech for derivatives
| traders and we knew to never, ever fuck around with a
| market.
|
| That didn't always stop our traders, of course. We had some
| based in Frankfurt who hated living there. They decided
| they wanted to live in London, and so quietly shifted their
| trading terminals to our London office. This was strictly
| forbidden; at least at the time, the mid-90s, trading on
| the Deutche Terminborse was to take place on German soil
| and nowhere else.
|
| Eventually the regulators got suspicious and so they were
| standing outside ringing the bell while watching our
| trading activity. So one of my technical colleagues had to
| rent a van, load everything up, drive it 10 hours back to
| Frankfurt, and have it all working by the next morning.
| Which we did, and so avoided formal sanction, but it was
| close. That probably kept those traders from doing
| something foolish for at least another year.
| pksebben wrote:
| So, the traders did something explicitly forbidden and
| didn't get penalized for it; that doesn't sound like
| being "kept in check" to me.
|
| Never mind those manipulations that make it through the
| regulatory filter, a la mortgage securitization circa
| 2008.
| wpietri wrote:
| It was them getting kept in check, because they quickly
| corrected the behavior. And as far as I know, never
| repeated it. Explicit punishment is not the only way
| policing happens. Indeed, I think the most important
| parts happen well before that.
| laurent92 wrote:
| > standing outside ringing the bell while watching our
| trading activity
|
| Do you mean ringing manually the bell of the end-of-the-
| day of the stock exchange? When they rang it the first
| time, didn't they catch them not going out of the
| building?
| wpietri wrote:
| I mean they rang the doorbell. They could see that the
| traders were active, meaning that they were supposedly in
| the office. But the door was locked and nobody answered
| it.
| CalChris wrote:
| That isn't what regulatory capture means. Regulatory
| capture has to do with industry vs public rather than big
| co vs little co. Regulatory capture is an
| economic theory that regulatory agencies may come to be
| dominated by the interests they regulate and not by the
| public interest. The result is that the agency instead acts
| in ways that benefit the interests it is supposed to be
| regulating.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp
| deelowe wrote:
| As another commenter suggested, let's look at the data
| from the USPTO and see what the submission/approval ratio
| looks like for large cap, small cap, and independents
| before jumping to conclusions...
| jlawson wrote:
| In this case, the small-co or independent inventor acts
| as a member of the public.
|
| It's really about _established players_ being able to
| invest in controlling the regulators that are specific to
| them, while new players considering entering obviously
| don 't have this advantage. Structurally it's similar to
| NIMBYism.
| specialist wrote:
| Ya, like a bureaucratic DDoS attack.
|
| > _regulatory capture ... is the end result of ANY
| regulation._
|
| All evidence to date supports this conclusion.
|
| Can we do better?
|
| Regulations are two-party, can be distilled down to us vs
| them.
|
| How do we make them three party? Transmute them into
| trilemmas? (Tripods are more stable that bipods.)
|
| Maybe grant a seat to the parties on the receiving end, the
| natural antagonists to the parties being regulated. And
| empower them appropriately.
| dantheman wrote:
| The answer is to not grant patents.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yup. A friend worked for a now-extinct tech company that
| strongly encouraged employees to patent as much as possible.
| On his desk, he had one of those drinking bird toys. [1] When
| the head got sufficiently wet, water would drip onto his
| desk. He made a little celluloid collar for the bird so that
| excess water would get dumped back into the cup the bird was
| drinking from.
|
| On a lark, he wrote it up as patentable innovation. His boss
| thought it was funny and approved it. So did the lawyers. He
| ended up with one of the little plaques they gave employees
| for patents. And maybe a cash bonus? It was long enough ago
| that I forget. But apparently that's what IBM does:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17835839
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_bird
| duxup wrote:
| I worked at a place where they had patent plaques on a big
| wall. Guy showed me his one day...
|
| It was just a design for a computer network, using run of
| the mill off the shelf equipment doing things I'm pretty
| sure is done / drawn out in tons of network design books
| and etc. But apparently it was a 'system' or some term like
| that he used.
|
| I smiled and just moved on....
| CalChris wrote:
| I think that's because IBM has a massive portfolio and just
| treats it statistically in IP cross-licensing negotiations.
| I had a boss at a company who said they added up theirs and
| IBM added up theirs, then his company wrote a check to IBM
| every year.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| Every big corp makes such list, and measures against
| others, no matter what patents there are.
|
| Nearly 20 years ago, in initial bootcamp in big-corp,
| there was half a day course by a patent guy, and one of
| the warnings he gave was "be careful where you search for
| your new idea" - the most wellknown patent search web
| site then, was owned by.. IBM.
| gyc wrote:
| IBM also plays tricks to artificially boosts the number
| of patents it gets. For example, for a computer-
| implemented invention, a patent application will
| generally have a set of claims for the method that a
| computer performs to implement the invention and a set of
| claims for the computing device itself configured to
| perform the invention. What IBM likes to do is to split
| those two sets of claim into separate patent
| applications, so one application just claims the method
| and another application claims the computing device. So
| when most other companies would only get a single patent
| for a computer-implemented invention, IBM would get two
| patents. So this helps IBM maximize licensing revenue in
| the example where they're just adding up the number of
| patents.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| Patents aren't all that expensive. Defending your rights in
| court, however...
| DethNinja wrote:
| That is just for the USA, patents are extremely expensive
| in EU, they got a great feudal system going on there where
| you cannot get a patent without spending at least 40k EUR,
| whereas in USA a single inventor can get it as low as 500
| USD.
| WkndTriathlete wrote:
| Sure, the USPTO might charge $500, but the patent lawyers
| that will file the application for you will charge $40k -
| $200k.
| CalChris wrote:
| Consequently writing a PTAB review resistant patent is
| expensive because you really can't defend a poor drafted
| vanity patent after the fact.
| thekyle wrote:
| I wonder if a system where keeping a patent active requires
| paying an exponentially increasing annual fee would help. So
| anyone could file a patent for say $1,000 in the first year, but
| then it would cost $2,000, $4,000, $8,000, etc. to keep it active
| in subsequent years.
|
| That way, it would be financially infeasible for even the largest
| companies to hoard patents for years, but an individual inventor
| could start small and pay the fees as their business grows.
| throwawaycities wrote:
| Can you find examples of patents killing innovation? Sure. But
| the idea of a patent is to give the inventor time to bring the
| invention to market, and it would be impossible for any inventor
| to have the chance without the protections offered by patents.
| Show me an inventor that hasn't obtained a patent that
| successfully out competed an established competitor that freely
| copied the inventor's invention.
|
| The USPTO doesn't care about innovation, and it is not their job
| to care about that...so why the question and why now? Lobbying
| and special interests of the big companies.
|
| If anything get rid of patent protections for big businesses,
| it's not like a big tech or big pharma patent is what's keeping
| the small guy from competing with them, but if the small guy can
| not protect their IP from being copied by big businesses then
| they will never be able to compete.
| luckydata wrote:
| There should be some kind of "patent reset". Let's say next year,
| all patents granted until now are null and void, and new more
| stringent criteria are applied to new ones. I would be real
| curious to see the results of an experiment like this - which to
| be clear, will never happen.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Not in principle; but the current practice of accepting highly
| dubious patents with little or no scrutiny is only serving the
| least innovative companies.
|
| The fix would be to make it more expensive to defend a patent and
| cheaper to challenge one instead of the current practice of
| flooding the system with dubious patents knowing full well that
| challenging them is prohibitively expensive and the scrutiny from
| patent offices is minimal. When companies exists whose sole
| purpose is accumulating and exploiting such patents for profit
| with absolutely 0$ budget for R&D, something is deeply wrong.
|
| The fact that some judges seem to be unwilling to actually lift a
| finger to do anything about such companies is not helping either.
| E.g. Texas seems to be a preferred venue for patent extortion
| where patent trolls and judges pretty much openly work together.
| Some call this justice, I call it institutionalized corruption.
| Plain and simple. Maybe no money changes hands but it seems
| corporations are actively putting their fingers on the scales
| when it comes to electing judges into very lucrative jobs and
| everybody understands there's a quid pro quo. Just putting a stop
| to that would be helpful. Something is deeply wrong when shady
| companies can just buy "justice" like that.
|
| This would incentivize companies to file better patents and only
| file those patents that they are actually willing to defend as
| opposed to filing numerous patents opportunistically in the hope
| that smaller competitors will settle out of court and pay a
| license fee rather than risking bankruptcy through the courts.
| This also would free up patent offices to actually do their job
| properly as opposed to dealing with a never ending flood of
| largely BS patents. Rejection rates ought to be much higher than
| they currently are.
| nybble41 wrote:
| Set a cap on the number of patents issued each year. Like 500,
| max, across all industries. Or set a limit of 10,000 active
| patents, with new ones only accepted as old ones expire. If you
| want a chance at a patent you file with the PTO (under NDA, in
| case the patent isn't granted) for a nominal processing fee and
| at the end of the year the best 500 are selected from the
| perspective of "most useful disclosure of information", "least
| likely to be reverse-engineered or independently reinvented",
| and "lowest cost to the public in being restricted from freely
| implementing the patented invention for the next 20 years".
|
| Variations: Let the filer pick the duration of the patent, with
| a shorter duration improving the odds of being selected (lower
| cost to the public). Or replace the monopoly with a one-time
| cash payout to make the invention freely available for the
| public to implement immediately.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Related: There's also a Copyright Modernization Committee at the
| Library of Congress, and Brewster Kahle is joining it! They also
| have virtual public meetings, including one on July 22.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27732887
| not2b wrote:
| Part of the problem has been that, the way the system is
| currently set up, after an inventor invents something genuinely
| novel but with a narrow focus, their company's patent lawyers
| massage the claims language to make the patent much broader,
| sometimes effectively claiming any possible way to solve the
| problem instead of just claiming the specific invention. These
| ridiculously overbroad patents are the ones that are most
| valuable to trolls, and it is only the claims that matter.
| kazinator wrote:
| Patents encourage innovation because without them, the moment an
| inventor's idea gets out, it will be copied and monetized by some
| corporation with the resources to bring it to market, without
| compensating the inventor in any way.
|
| Now idiotically evaluated and granted patents (in particular
| software patents, but not necessarily just software patents)
| stifle innovation.
|
| Crowd-sourcing this kind of question just seems like ploy for the
| USPTO to make even less of an effort.
|
| Suppose that the answer from the crowd is "yes": patents in those
| areas kill innovation. What can the USPTO do with the
| information, other than just not hand out patents in that area?
| Summarily tossing a patent application takes even less effort
| than slightly thinking about its merit.
| visualradio wrote:
| > What can the USPTO do with the information, other than just
| not hand out patents in that area?
|
| They could require the IP holder to declare the price at which
| they were willing to permanently release the discovery into the
| public domain in exchange for a one-time payment, and levy an
| increasing maintenance fee on a % of that price due at the end
| of each financial quarter.
|
| This may eliminate unnecessary court costs and legal fees and
| supply chain interruptions resulting from legal disputes, while
| still ensuring that the original inventors are compensated and
| that there is an incentive for disclosure.
|
| Suppose a defendant is notified of patent infringement and
| pending legal action. Instead of hiring a lawyer or halting
| production they could crowd-source the money to pay the
| inventor's fee through the patent office. The patent office
| then forwards the payment to the original inventor, the patent
| is destroyed, and there is no basis for further legal action.
|
| Large companies may find that it is always cheaper to pay the
| patent office to permanently destroy each other's patents than
| it is to go to court, which would also level the playing field
| for smaller firms and startups as the discoveries would be
| placed in the public domain.
| kazinator wrote:
| Why not just do that for all patents from now on? It seems
| like a good idea.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Why aren't patents just "use it or lose it" like trademarks? That
| would seem to eliminate most of the abuse in a targeted way.
| Unless I'm missing something...
| bluGill wrote:
| Because sometimes you need a lot of money to setup
| manufacturing. The covid vaccines are easy to make in a lab at
| a rate of 10/week. To make them useful though you need the
| money to setup manufacture them at scale, and one easy way to
| get that is to sell a patent. Use it or lose it means anyone
| who might buy the patent is incentivized to wait until you lose
| it and then use it for free.
| keonix wrote:
| Patents also preserve knowledge in publicly accessible and well
| documented form. Without patents the only option to recoup
| investment in R&D would be to make innovations a trade secrets.
| This will lead to frequent reinvention of the wheel and lost
| knowledge.
|
| The system is broken, but abolishing it is even worse
| stickyricky wrote:
| In my opinion, yes. It's not obvious to me that our intellectual
| property system encourages invention. After all, every great
| invention in history was "patented" (given state license to
| monopolize) and immediately copied _just_ outside of its
| jurisdiction (and many times within the jurisdiction in complete
| disregard of the legality).
|
| No company on earth would accept a state license to monopolize if
| it meant they were subject to price controls. Especially given
| how useless these licenses are at preventing global mega-corps
| from using them.
|
| ---
|
| Intel and AMD famously rip each others intellectual property off
| but don't do anything about it because they're both guilty as
| sin. How does that protect innovation? How does these two
| companies ripping each other off inhibit innovation?
|
| Basically every smart phone is identical. These companies
| occasionally fight but not meaningfully. But if I were to create
| a new smartphone I would be sued into oblivion. How does that
| protect innovation?
|
| ---
|
| China has an incredibly agile and innovative economy. Are they
| the strictest IP protectors of all?
|
| ---
|
| Intellectual property exists for the big guys to keep the little
| guys down. Not the opposite. Happy to be proven wrong. Every
| argument above was made with 0 evidence just personal
| observation.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The name for this is cross-licensing. If you have some patents
| which could affect someone else's business, and they have the
| same to you, you can cross-license each others' patents. Anyone
| not party to the agreement is fair game.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-licensing
| fouric wrote:
| I wonder if the USPO is asking about whether the _idea_ of
| patents kills innovation, or the _implementation_ does (e.g. how
| easily patents are granted, which things are eligible for patents
| (I know many people who think that patents are a good idea in
| general but generics and software shouldn 't be patentable)).
|
| Also, if patents were removed _entirely_ , wouldn't that just
| benefit the largest companies? That is, whenever someone has a
| new idea, their idea would just be taken and most efficiently
| built by the largest companies, because those would be the ones
| with the most engineering, manufacturing, and marketing
| resources. What's to prevent that from happening?
| ssivark wrote:
| _"The study particularly wants to find examples of where a patent
| has been denied in the US but accepted in other jurisdictions,
| which will be a key area for European electronics companies.
| [...] The study is looking at patent prosecution strategy and
| portfolio management as well as research and development,
| employment, procurement and marketing. It is also interested in
| the impact on the ability to obtain financing from investors or
| financial institutions and investment strategy as well as the
| impact on product development, innovation and competition."_
|
| Sounds like they might think it's _too hard_ to get patents in
| the US?
| armoredkitten wrote:
| I have to believe that there's been research on this in the
| economics literature...right?? Like, maybe research on "patent
| trolls" specifically hasn't been studied (or perhaps it has), but
| there has to be research on the economic impacts of patents, and
| the dynamics both within and between countries. I'd be astonished
| if economists haven't looked at this.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Patents don't _kill_ innovation but they do next to nothing to
| promote it.
|
| Only a very small percentage of patents are ever successfully
| licensed to anyone. Around 3% recoup the cost of filing the
| patent. Half of all patents expire prematurely when the owner
| declines to pay the required maintenance fees.
| errantspark wrote:
| These are all features and should be accelerated. There
| shouldn't be a possibility to renew.
| alok-g wrote:
| That 97% of the patents don't go recoup the cost is a statistic
| known to companies and patent lawyers. This should only serve
| to make them more careful about filing patents. In other words,
| inventions less likely to be effective would be passed upon by
| them themselves.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| For those who read the comments first / only: The article is
| really short with no fluff or filler.
| ypcx wrote:
| Imagine being on your death bed with your only contribution to
| this world having been vaguely worded abstract patents which
| didn't translate to any real products. Especially knowing that
| had you not helped to stifle medical/tech innovation, maybe you
| would still have a few extra centuries to live. Yep, that must
| feel like being a cockroach and a failure in one.
|
| Also, the article has a wrong title. A patent office would never
| undermine their _raison d 'etre_. In this case they're only
| asking to be compared to other countries so that they don't issue
| _fewer_ patents than them.
|
| The patent system is so bad that, at this point, the only way to
| fix it is to completely abolish it. Do you still believe that the
| patents are here to protect you, a garage inventor, against the
| mega-corps with unlimited free-money bank funding?
|
| The real philosophical question here is _where do your thoughts
| come from_ - did you really create them, are you really so
| special that given enough time nobody else would come up with
| that idea? Are you aware of the concept of _multiple discovery_?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries
| liuliu wrote:
| Combining transferrability and making patent dirt-cheap to
| acquire means that most patents will end up with companies that
| won't put it in productive use (most recent example, see Lecun's
| account for convnet patent:
| https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1412549942229487620). The
| hoarding behavior is killing innovation.
|
| Two ways to solve this: 1). limit transferrability, for example:
| patents can only be owned by natural persons and cannot be
| transferred to other persons or legal entities; 2). making it
| very expensive to keep the patents.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Two ways to solve this: 1). limit transferrability, for
| example: patents can only be owned by natural persons and
| cannot be transferred to other persons or legal entities; 2).
| making it very expensive to keep the patents.
|
| Or require active productive use after a certain time period to
| maintain the patent, at least for certain classes of owners
| [1].
|
| [1] ...because small-time inventors will probably have more
| trouble putting their inventions to productive use, and you
| don't want to disadvantage them w.r.t. some big corporation
| (e.g. if all patents expire in five years without use, the corp
| may just decide to wait instead of paying). This probably could
| be phrased as an exception to a general rule for entities that
| only control a small number of patents.
| morcheeba wrote:
| Sixteen years ago, I had the idea for headlights aimed by GPS and
| started to make some prototypes. Then I read a patent that was
| basically "a plurality of inputs + processor -> headlight aiming"
| that covered everything imaginable. I knew the patent wouldn't
| hold up in court, but I wouldn't have the money to fight it.
|
| More recently, I've been working on a self-driving wheelchair.
| It's a fairly obvious straight line from self-driving car to
| self-driving wheelchair, but someone's gone out and patented it.
| I still don't have the money to fight it.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Then I read a patent
|
| If you're reading (non-expired) patents, you're doing it wrong.
| For one thing, that opens you to claims of intentional
| infringement and 3x damages. For another, there being a patent
| only matters if your thing works as you hope and the patent
| holder is litigious and there's actually a market for your
| thing and you can't find a bigger fish to buy your thing and
| make the litigious patent holder go away.
|
| In the mean time, all the work to make your thing probably
| gives you lots of insights into other things to do if that one
| doesn't work out; and patents to file, if you're so interested.
|
| Disclosure: I'm the named inventor on a patent (seems
| relevant).
| stagger87 wrote:
| You know something is wrong with patents when the suggestions
| are
|
| - Don't read patents.
|
| - Hope whoever 'invented' it first isn't litigious to sue.
|
| - Do it anyway and maybe you will find more things to patent
| along the way.
| ModernMech wrote:
| In the robotics community we've been working on self driving
| wheelchairs for decades. You're definitely not the first one to
| think of it, so no loss there:
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=autonomous+whee...
| kbenson wrote:
| I think the issue is not that he would have made the
| best/only chair and now isn't, but that it stifled any
| innovation that he might have provided by putting a high
| legal/monetary bar on any commercial endeavor. That is a
| loss, but we'll never know if it was vanishingly small or
| extremely large.
| pdonis wrote:
| This problem would be a lot easier to deal with if independent
| invention was a defense (as it is supposed to be, but in
| practice basically never is) against a patent infringement
| claim--particularly if the owner of the patent has done nothing
| to actually implement it.
| HPsquared wrote:
| That's kind of similar to how copyright works - it's about
| whether something is "derivative work". A similar principle
| could apply for patents perhaps?
| morcheeba wrote:
| Yep, that would help. From what I can tell, the wheelchair
| patent is aspirational and they haven't actually implemented
| the majority of standard autonomous vehicle practices.
| bluGill wrote:
| The patent office should start demanding working models for
| everything. You shouldn't patent something unless it
| actually works.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| one issue is that you might not want to start prototyping
| something (for cost reasons) until you have a defensible
| moat.
| jandrese wrote:
| Maybe demand a working model for the patent, but also
| reject a patent if anybody else has something similar in
| development?
|
| So you have a brilliant idea like "lets put email on a
| cell phone", but the infrastructure isn't in place to
| support it yet. A few years later you finally get it
| working, but now you can't patent because there are 5
| other companies who started the process at basically the
| same time--once the prerequisite technology was in place.
|
| This would reduce the number of patents on "the most
| obvious way to solve this obvious problem that only
| appears because the technology has advanced enough" that
| patent trolls love.
|
| So many of the "do X, but now on a computer" patents
| wouldn't be a thing.
|
| Requiring a working prototype would also make it hard to
| issue vaguely worded and extremely broad patents, so
| someone can't claim ownership over the entire concept of
| sending push notifications for example.
| rhino369 wrote:
| >independent invention was a defense (as it is supposed to
| be, but in practice basically never is)
|
| It's actually not a defense at all and isn't supposed to be.
| Its sort of like a prize for inventing it first.
|
| It's only a defense if you publicly disclosed it before
| patentee did. Secret use was a defense if you invented it
| first (and didn't abandon or hide your invention when it was
| ready), but that was changed with the America Invents Act.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> It 's actually not a defense at all_
|
| Yes, looking at some law references I see you are correct.
| I also see plenty of law review articles arguing that it
| should be (with which I agree).
| bdowling wrote:
| > I knew the patent wouldn't hold up in court, but I wouldn't
| have the money to fight it.
|
| You're not really going to be sued unless you have money to pay
| a judgment or settlement. If you have money, then you can pay
| to fight to invalidate the patent, or to pay a settlement.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Patents were created to encourage inventors to explain how their
| inventions worked. Instead of hiding their secrets, inventors
| simply published how their inventions worked and gained a
| monopoly to sell their use for a few years. A very noble intent.
|
| Now, we're in the 21st century. We are no longer in the years of
| inventors like Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi,
| Nikola Tesla... Inventions today are discovered by large groups
| of researches who get their money from many sources private and
| public. These researchers, the real inventors, often get just a
| small part of the profit gained from their inventions. The
| largest parts ends up with companies which get giant profits and
| benefits from the lack of competition.
|
| While patents were invented to guarantee that small individual
| inventors could be protected from giant companies attacks and
| encourage information sharing, patents these days do exactly the
| opposite of that. Apple being able to patent the "genie dock
| effect" is a clear example that the "patent system" is broken.
| pksebben wrote:
| I was under the impression that Edison was actually more how
| you describe a 21st century shop, and was more of a CEO type,
| but I admit that this isn't based on deep knowledge.
|
| I often wonder how many of our rosy perceptions of the past are
| due to a lack of granular information. we kind of know that
| those exploitative structures exist now because we have access
| to perspectives at all levels; an inventor or other employee
| can tweet about this stuff, but if I had created something for
| Edison and he stole it, he has access to newspaper publishers
| and I don't.
| nartz wrote:
| Patents should only be enforceable for:
|
| - companies that have a history of utilizing/operating with the
| patents subject (e.g. no patent troll legal firms would be able
| to meet this requirements)
|
| - only be enforceable against competitor companies that are
| larger than a certain size, e.g. more than 10 million ARR, so
| smaller companies can still be formed and get off the ground
|
| - be different based off of the domain - e.g. it should be very
| hard to get a patent for software or related items
| punnerud wrote:
| I see that companies get lower taxes revenue linked to patents.
| Isn't they then incentivized to fight for the patents and
| "protect" every part of the company for tax reasons? So the real
| fight is against tax attorneys, because if the patent is not
| valid the governmental tax attorney can argue that you should pay
| more tax?
|
| So it's basically noting to do with protection against
| competition
| salawat wrote:
| I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the actual purpose
| originally intended for patents was to get people to describe and
| record innovative discoveries, and eventually add them to the
| public domain for others to build off of.
|
| I think transferability, renewability, and gaming of the
| definition of "novel" and "non-obvious", is actually what kills
| innovation.
|
| The transferability is even more of a sticking point in my mind,
| because of it's endemic exploitation in the "automatic assignment
| of patent to employer" sense for disenfranchising creators of
| unrelated or only tangentially related work off the company
| clock. Then again, I can't offer a more elegant system to replace
| it, so I kind of have to take a Chesterton's fence-pill on that
| one. And besides which, having worked with engineering
| management, it does kind of degenerate down to "inform legal, and
| have them draft a waiver for an exec to sign stating the company
| waives interest", which is a functional, but less than ideal
| compromise.
| tomrod wrote:
| Make a patent and copyright expire after 3 to 5 years. This gives
| the holder enough time to go to market if they choose.
| mikeabraham wrote:
| Yes.
| RocketSyntax wrote:
| innovators ship
| procombo wrote:
| and innovative entrepreneurs don't let their competitors see
| them as competition
| motohagiography wrote:
| Wondering if it be viable to train a classifier on a set of
| patents that are known to be vague, abused, and pernicious and
| see what else it digs up.
|
| This works for malware, and simple things like being owned by
| known patent trolls, who have selected them for their crappiness
| are easy indicators of what a bad one looks like, a history of
| litigation, clusters of ones with similarities, etc.
|
| Surely this is somebody's ML driven patent troll startup right
| now?
| neverminder wrote:
| They should start by making patent trolls illegal. Also shorten
| the patent expiry to 5 years instead of 20. If the patent holder
| is actively using it, it should be enough time for them to recoup
| their R&D costs and make profit.
|
| Of course that's never gonna happen because too many people stand
| to lose - too many vested interests, bought out politicians,
| armies of lawyers, etc.
| FemmeAndroid wrote:
| I'm assuming in this 20 -> 5 transition that would be 5 years
| after the patent is granted rather than the current 20 years
| after filing? Part of the issue is that a patent can take 5+
| years form filing to grant, and frequently take 3+ years.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-07-09 23:02 UTC)