If the patent is protecting some business's hockey-stick growth, it's worth the fee, so it fulfills the original purpose of patents, that is, avoiding trade secrets while protecting cash-cow inventions for a limited time.
But sitting on a patent becomes prohibitively expensive soon enough even for a large company.
Wasn't the original purpose of patents not to protect big business's hockey-stick grown, but to allow small inventors to capitalize on their inventions (and not have them shamelessly ripped off by some big business). I think the other original purpose was to make sure inventions would eventually become publicized and exploitable by all.
That exponential patents idea seems like it would render patent protection prohibitively expensive for all except maybe the rich or inventors unusually well-position to quickly capitalize on their invention. The little guy who takes ten years to get his business off the ground is out of luck.
A ton of patented stuff is regularly reinvented by people. In many fields, key ideas are so well-understood by practitioners that who patents them first is mostly a game of chance.
There's no point to allow someone (usually a company that does nothing but sits on patents) to do nothing while blocking everyone else from independently reinventing and implementing it. It is especially spearheaded against companies which buy and then bury an idea to preserve their incumbent status for 25 years more.
A monopoly is a bad thing. Sometimes it's a lesser evil, but most often it's not.
However, I think the balance generally works in the other direction. 20 years feels excessive, but it’s arguably fast enough that taking something from a lab to mass production often eats up 1/2 the time. Further, many patents that are obvious like asteroid mining are going to expire long before their practical. On the other hand simply waiting out the clock to manufacture something means being really behind, thus pushing licensing.
That's only true for the public.
A company may not with to license patent use under truly fair conditions, because it would compete with their products using a different technology, they may not with to license to potential competitors, and/or small businesses (fairly).
Alternatively, holder may be using the patent, but choose that their current cash-cow is good-enough so why support competition and innovation, when they can just bump it up slightly every 10 years or so.
Defensive and overly broad patents are definitely a thing, but the intent is to give a monopoly for a limited time. Locking down alternatives not currently in production that are obvious workarounds is kind of a requirement for most patents to be meaningful. The issue is when a company in effect owns an industry and then keeps submitting obvious patents. But, here the problem is with obvious patents being granted.
That said, I think patents could be given out less often when the operation of the device is clear or can easily be discovered by the public without a patent.
E-Ink screens released without a patent kept under 'trade secret' wouldn't have mattered, the idea would have been implemented elsewhere.
I suppose you could argue that without exclusive rights the original inventor wouldn't have bothered to create it at all - in that case there's probably a better middle ground of something less than 20yrs. 5yrs? 2yrs? First $1million in profit?
That's why with the current system we are left with the worst of both worlds.
Is there any evidence that the introduction of patents actually encouraged innovation?
If trade secrets cause knowledge to be held from the public and then ultimately lost that would be worse.
Whether that’s still relevant today I don’t know. In cases with massive research R&D like drug discovery they still seem really important.
In that case a trade secret wouldn’t be enough to justify up front investment if the drug can be copied and sold as a generic for cheap along side it.
Even with a patent system, if your innovation is not easily reverse-engineered then you have no reason to patent it. If you invention is easily reverse-engineered, then the knowledge becomes public effectively as soon as you release your innovation, and that is when a patent is most useful.
You make it sounds like trade secrets don't exist anymore.
If someone else figures out how to build or reverse engineer your invention they can do so. If an employee leaks the secret you can go after them, but can’t stop others from using it.
And don't companies keep various details about how to produce something secret.
It seems to me, that many companies in effect have it both ways.
Most patents don't describe in full how the sausage is done. That's been well known for decades now, in various disciplines.
In order to turn a patent in to a literal recipe for a competing product all you have to do is step out of a registered jurisdiction.
So people who actually come up with something meaningful have the financial burden of registering in numerous major jurisdictions at a minimum.
However, each comes with its own quirks, costs, and processes, some of which can be slower (eg. Japan) or qualitatively different (actual novelty checks performed vs. only cursory inspection) and thus vary from verging on legally dubious (more like "option to expend lawyers on creating problems for competitors in the future" than actual patent) to total lockdown.
It's a mess. Mostly it only keeps patent lawyers in business. We need to get rid of it.
When you have a registered patent in the USA and the EU, there is no real alternative market for competition except India and China - because both the US and EU will reject any import of a patent-violating product.
then you talk about each jurisdiction having very unique flavors & characters to them.
the favt that the uspto governs such a vast share of products-sold carries a lot of weight. I tend to think increasing the cost of patents is a silly idea, because right now they cost nearly nothing if you file & do the reject/re-apply dance yourself (and know how to). unless we the people are going to start charging billions for good ideas being monopolized, I tend towards a fair reasonable & non-discriminatory access model for all ideas, with a depreciating over time scale. i'd rather open the closed system than try to find the right price for it. but either way, I think the uspto & Congress has a lot of power to fix this practically free hand out that ongoingly locks down this world & obstructs progress time & time again.
To improve the predictive capability of the USPTO, they could host a bidding process in which other companies can participate.
Rather than trying to estimate the value of the idea we could drastically reduce the time for patent protection. Shortening protection period to 2-5 years should still encourage inventions, but would discourage early carpet-bombing filings (which scare many inventors away) as well as move successful inventions into public domain while they are still relevant. My 2c.
Estimating the value seems pretty much impossible, but estimating a length seems more reasonable. Clever software trick, quick to invent, easy to capitalise -> 2 years. Ground breaking new drug/material with slow market deployment -> 20 years.
There's still some subjectivity involved (but that's already the case with the current patent system), but you could try to base it on some objective metrics.
It would be easy to discriminate between 20 years for drugs vs. 5 for anything software, but I guess it's tricky to decide whether something like e-paper should count as fast-moving consumer-facing tech or hard-won physics/chemistry knowledge.
No method is perfect, but I think that in most cases a 5-year protection is enough to encourage invention.
In general, it is a business decision on whether to patent a technology that it is not ready for the production: the risk of not making a product in 5 years vs the risk of competitor getting there first. It is not perfect, but I would prefer that inventions that the owner wants to own (and suppress competition for) but cannot commercialize in 5 years enter public domain. My 2c.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/the-thousands-of-secret...
perhaps a fair value assessment might include some % of revenue or profit, to self adjust?
H. L. Mencken
Would not be very effective for companies like Amazon or Apple which have billions to play with. Rather a 5 years maximum duration would be more effective across the board instead of the ridiculous 20 years we have to live with.
On the contrary, such companies tend to have tons of patents. Apple for example has over 70,000 patents for the 2009-18 period alone. Exponential fees would quickly add up to a substantial amount of money on such a massive portfolio.
For example, imagine you get 100% rebate of auction proceeds untill year 5, then it drops 1% per year:
- at year 5 it's nearly impossible to do a hostile accquisition because you have a 100x advantage and only lose 1% of highest or second highest if it's a blind auctio.
- by year 25 you have to pony up up to 20% FMV per year just to retain monopoly. And only have a 5x advantage vs a competing bidder.
- the remaining fraction if paid back to consumers as basic income, can be thought of as a
- losing an auction doesn't hurt your buisness operation if you wrote yourself a perpetual contract
- auction loser is compensated less every year the contract ages and therefore has strong incentive to sublicense
- government and trade groups can buy out key patents at fair prices
- defensive patent pools still work, trolling is riskier
In the case where the profit (from owning the patent) is less than the cost of the patent it will be equivalent to the absence of patents. In the case where the profit is higher than the patent cost it’s still a company bribing the government for monopoly rights.
Unless the profits made by the government from patents is used to put a discount on the retail price of the product for which the patent is held. But even this is probably worse than free competition.
I don't see how this is an obvious fact. I don't even see how this is a valid example.
> every comment in this thread is looking forward to finally seeing some innovation in this space "once the patents expire
It is telling, very telling that when asked, none of those comments are even able to describe which patent it is that is blocking "innovation in this space".
Here's the facts.
The physics of bistable displays is complex. Many have tried with very different technologies. Electrowetting. Interferometric. Other types of electrophoretic. Electrochemical.
The investors in all of these realized it was too expensive to get it to the finish line. Even Amazon decided to trash Liquavista.
The truth is that investors would rather invest in some new consumer internet service, or AI/ML, which is a simpler problem that will give a quicker return on their money rather than try to create a bistable display solution.
If you go to SID, you'll see that there's tonnes of startups that try to solve the "fast" or "color" bistable display chalenge, and they all fail due to fundamental physics problems and burn out their funding. That's also probably why E Ink isn't able to get past their limitations.
I genuinely hope this helps people understand that this is not "patent system stifles innovation".
That's because there are over 700 of them:
https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation
None of what you said about the physics of low power displays is wrong, but you're giving E Ink Corporation a pass when they really don't deserve one. They've been unreasonably hostile to basically everybody that has wanted to work with them over the years. No volume price breaks, no prototype-quantity orders (at any price), no partnering with other manufacturers, no shared development projects, absolutely no sharing of the proprietary driving waveforms to groups that want to use a different controller, etc.
Many, many embedded, tablet, even IoT projects that started out wanting to use an eInk display for power reasons had to settle for other technologies because the company just wasn't interested in exploring new leads that weren't one of their existing eBook partners. I can understand having priorities, but you're not supposed to be able to sit on a patent hoard this large while behaving this badly (FRAND requirements, etc.).
I could buy the part on the grey market from China, but the documentation was literally non-existent (as in, there was zero, none. At least from the seller I wanted it from).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX
Does anyone have any suggestions for a screen that would fit this sort of use-case? The UI/UX I planned on being a straight Linux TTY1 to begin with.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694
It's a "memory LCD", which has very low no power drain when idle, but has an LCD's refresh speed (i.e., fast enough to display video).
You can also get some decently-documented eInk boards from Waveshare in 1" to 13" sizes, though the costs are definitely too high for anything but one-off Maker projects:
https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper.htm
You may also find the PaperTTY project interesting for your TUI:
And... what's wrong with that specifically please? Tonnes of companies have hundreds and even thousands of patents. The original claim that innovation is being blocked needs a clear example to support it.
> No volume price breaks, no prototype-quantity orders (at any price), no partnering with other manufacturers, no shared development projects
None of this sounds like blocking innovation. Sounds more like a difference in perception about costs. It would be like me expecting to get preferential treatment from one of the LCD vendors to develop something.
> but you're not supposed to be able to sit on a patent hoard this large while behaving this badly
I see a lot of superlatives but googling doesn't give me any hint of what you're referring to as their bad behaviour.
In very large and complicated fields, you'll often have a minefield of conflicting patent claims, much of which are minor improvement patents. These often coalesce into patent pools, assuming all participants in the pool are interested in playing ball. (Looking at you, H.265.) You don't see certain players looking to invalidate patents on the basis of not having been paid for the right to improve their invention, because such a right doesn't really exist.
It's generally not good for your business plan to include the ability for your direct competitors to shut you down if you become too competitive.
I don't follow your thesis. Are you claiming there's someone out there who is being blocked by the eink manufacturer with a threat of a patent?
The comparison earlier to FDM 3D printing is spot on. The entire industry stagnated for over a decade under Stratiasys, who had no interest in pursuing the consumer market. It was only after the patents expired that the explosion of affordable printers and innovation in filaments happened.
Also, the fact they ported basically every software feature from the Note3 which came out weeks after I got my Note2 made me amazingly happy, their after sales support has been surprisingly good, the new firmware has removed literally all latency when using the Wacom stylus for note taking, and I recently bought the Staedtler “pencil” Wacom compatible stylus and now I’ve literally ditched pen and paper for good.
It’s that excellent, for me.
...or more than 16 levels (4-bit) of grayscale, something that a hobbyist has already shown is possible:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284
We could also have mass-produced electrophoretic sheet (basically the display without the electrodes), that you can "draw" on with any suitable voltage source; you can see someone playing with one in this video and showing how the technology works (and is fundamentally quite simple):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXxSOR1PHpE
...and someone else, coincidentally also Russian, making his own eink display(!):
Based on what principle? It strikes me as most of the comments here lack a basic understanding of the physics behind electrophoresis. It is an inherently slow process.
> ...or more than 16 levels (4-bit) of grayscale, something that a hobbyist has already shown is possible:
a simple google search showed me that you're quite badly mistaken. 5-bit grayscale or 32 levels is widely used. Just google nxp 6sololite 5-bit eink and you'll find "Up to 5-bit pixel grayscale representation" and has been for 5 or 6 years.
The problem is patents have come closer to patenting the overarching concept rather than an implementation.
A patent application should be required to come with [an] implementation[s] to show that every claim being made exists and has actually been developed.
That said, I wonder why there hasn't been a competing tech e.g. like LED vs LCD; Are the fundamental physics behind E-Ink so perfect for the low-power display that no other alternative is possible (or) is it just the absurd patent which stifles even exploring this direction.
[1]https://needgap.com/problems/43-affordable-e-ink-large-exter... (Disclaimer: It's a problem validation platform, I created).
This fusion reactor could be affordable. It just needs to be invented first:
It has never been properly funded.
This is not broad-strokes true. Within the realm of tech? Maybe. Within the realm of XYZ? Maybe.
Innovation requires investment and time. The classic example for the positive merits of the patent system is the pharmaceutical industry. No pharma company is going to spend 5 - 20 years and millions or billions developing new medicine if someone can immediately copy it and make a generic brand pricing it cheaper (they don't need to make back those costs). The issue of drugs costing an arm and a leg here is not really relevant either as that's moreso an American phenomenon, here in Australia or the UK they are reasonably priced.
Anyway the point here is that the patent system's happy-path design is to give the inventor of X time to make their money back and some profit before competition drives the price down. Is that abused? Absolutely whole-heartedly yes. Is the solution to the abuse the absolute removal of the patent system? Absolutely not.
It absolutely is, though. Innovation is inherently hampered when someone owns the right to the use of a technology.
Patents do little to nothing in this regard.
When I'm looking to spend money to solve a problem, I search for a product or service to buy.
I never, ever, ever search for a patent to license, because that's stepping into a legal minefield.
Show me a field where people looking to spend money to solve a problem search the patent database for solutions, and I'll believe there's a field where patents are a good thing.
Patents protect inventors and encourage innovation. There's no better way to encourage invention than to protect those who came up with the idea.
I don't like it when they're applied to software but that's another story.
Practically, patents only protect large-scale holders with time and finance to enforce them.
"For a claim that could be worth less than a $1 million, median legal costs are $650,000. "
https://www.cnet.com/news/how-much-is-that-patent-lawsuit-go...
I've seen this first hand, a friend obtained a patent on an invention and offered it to various companies. They feigned disinterest and then simply developed their own versions of it. He couldn't afford to sue, so did nothing.
They still do protect individual inventors. And, this isn't justification that patents discourage innovation, as a parent comment alleged.
Patents protect individuals who may be acquired and compensated by larger entities. There's nothing dubious about this.
- If I invent something and patent it, I can assure that I am the only one that can benefit from it for a period of time; to recoup the costs involved.
- If I invent something based on someone else's patent, they can deny me the right to use their patent if they think it would negatively impact them (for example, if my version is better and nobody would buy their version once mine was available). In many cases, it's just not worth bothering to even try innovating in an area because of this (and similar reasons).
Patents have both good and bad points. Presenting just the good or just the bad, and pretending it's the only valid view, is disingenuous at best.
The thing is, for a lot of industries, that's a dated pipedream. It's not 1804 and you're not Richard Trevithick. You're not going to challenge TSMC with a semiconductor fab built in the backyard shed. Even if you had huge amounts of startup capital and a laser-focused market vision, there's also a lot of innovation that's time-sensitive: for example, if you're building a better petrol engine or coal-burning generator, will you be able to scale before the product is obsolete?
Beyond that, I suspect there are also a fair number of patent holders who just take potshots at the market-- wildly mis-guessing their target market or (attempting to get orders or raise funds) based on promising undeliverables, because they don't have the full knowledge of getting a product to market. After their business fails, they'll just spend the rest of the patent term as legal unexploded ordnance-- useless by themselves but waiting to blow the leg off of some poor sod who happened to step in the wrong place.
Reducing the term from 20 years to 10 or even 5 would tend to prioritize partnership development rather than the "one man in a garage" mentality: with the clock ticking that fast, your best chance is to license broadly, hoping that someone will get product to market before the patent expires.
An A4 or slightly larger eReader should have existed (and not cost ridiculous money) years ago.
An iPad pro that is the same size is only £100 more for me, but then thats not what I am after.
As ePaper and eInk has been around for a while now, I would expect that much like TVs the price per inch drops over time but it seems fixed at that 7" mark then the price rockets.
I get that a larger format eReader is a smaller market than the standard book, but I don't get how I can get 10 kindles (or similar) for the same price as that Sony one just because of size. If someone can enlighten me why I'd be grateful, if after a certain point the screens get harder to manufacture maybe?
Even if you don’t like that pure theory point, litigation is expensive and takes a long time. If some small little patent holder is really being stubborn and you’ve got something valuable, it’s not that hard to grind them into dust while you get big. Litigation financing makes this a little harder than it used to be but still.
In practice, they are not.
That is quite the leap.
Some inventions we know and love would have never seen the light of day if the patent protection window was lesser.
One company developed a small, expensive, newspaper-quality electrophoretic display with a refresh rate so terrible it was only suitable for books, decided that that was good enough, and 15 years later every comment in this thread is looking forward to finally seeing some innovation in this space "once the patents expire."
That is some first class bullshit. We could have had large form, glossy brochure quality displays with video refresh rates by now, but nobody outside of China wanted to get anywhere near this patent minefield.