That ties the duration of a patent directly to how much value it provides to the company over time, which is the rationale for having patents in the first place. A company could only afford to hold onto a patent for as long as it causes the company’s revenue to grow exponentially. Once the patented technology matures and growth plateaus, keeping the patent would become prohibitively expensive. This would completely eliminate patent trolls and patent squatting/speculative patents.
Actually I think that idea causes the opposite of what is wanted.
A high value monopoly patent will stay locked up for a long time, well after the development costs and risk have been paid off. The consumer is paying high economic rent and the product has less supply.
A low value product is where a longer patent makes sense: the patent gives the inventor time to recoup their costs which otherwise wouldn’t happen.
That said, the world runs at a much faster pace, and patent durations should be decreased.
Software patents should be discarded (because society doesn’t get any value from publishing software patents although society pays high costs for the economic monopoly, and because small startups cannot compete with software behemoths). Unlikely to happen becaus software powers have monopoly profits which can pay to influence legislation or regulators. Also the US is capturing monopoly payments from the rest of the world so the US loves software patents (ironically given some of the historic reasons for the US kicking the British in the nads for independence).
Yes, but this rewards you for inventing something high-value, which is the whole point of patents.
Patents on low-value products largely exist to generate lawsuits against productive entities.
> In accordance with the original definition of the term "patent", patents are intended to facilitate and encourage disclosure of innovations into the public domain for the common good
The idea is that to avoid companies keeping the details of inventions hidden indefinitely using trade secrets, the embargo period is set up as an incentive to disclose the idea. This is an incredibly important part of the entire social contract of patents. Maintaining a complicated legal apparatus (courts, patent offices, etc.) to defend and enforce these legal monopolies is expensive and is paid through public funds. Thus a public good is expected in return. A system that allows the most important inventions to stay locked up forever seems to go against the spirit of this entirely. Perhaps you think that this has its own merit, but it is certainly not the intended purpose of the patent system.
For example, if you increment the exponent every three years, a $20 initial fee would cost half a billion dollars annually after 20 years. That buys a lot of school supplies.
Another idea I think worth exploring is mandatory licensing at fixed rates which decline over years and/or are tied to revenue the patent holder generates with the patent. The goal really should be to increase utility of the patent for the public.
But that’s fine. If a company can rake in so much money off of one product it’s still providing an obscene amount of value.
It doesn’t matter if Google is paying or Widget firm X. Google isn’t going to keep paying if the patent isn’t sustaining itself anymore than Widget X.
Why not do that in the straightforward way of simply decreasing the patent protection duration? Or as other people have suggestion: make it contingent on the type of thing being patented.
Why do you think patents can be renewed?
Would be nice to see increasing annual maintenance fee. 1K for first year 3K for second, 10K for third and so on. After 6 years or so you either make/pay millions of give it up.
Should drastically reduce the amount of junk patents. It it's not worth at least a few million not worth applying.
That has not stopped the more creative and resourceful individuals, however:
Should have mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing. It's not just speculative.
I can think of a few that can’t be disrupted soon enough.
RAM, 2011: "A single 8GB stick of RAM is about $80 right now. In 2021, you’d be able to buy a single stick of RAM that contains 64GB for the same price."
Disks, 2011: "The price of a 1-terabyte hard drive is $80 now...
In 2013, a 2TB drive will be $80.
In 2015, a 4TB drive will be $80.
After that the doubling rate may lengthen to 3 years instead of 2 years so..
In 2018, an 8TB drive will be $80. And finally in 2021, for $80, you’d be able to buy a 16 terabyte hard drive"
Certainly for consumer hard drives, there’s a cost of getting the drive to the customer (transport, shop rent, employee salaries, etc) which is, at best, fixed.
If manufacturing costs drop to zero, price will approach that fixed cost (plus any markup sellers manage to extract, for example by marketing their drives as better/more hip/etc.)
We couldn’t imagine how anyone would ever need so much space.
On the other hand, the gain is that E Ink Corporation decided it was worth investing in developing and commercializing the technology knowing they'd have exclusive rights for 20 years, and quite possible only because of that. If they didn't have that guarantee, it might not have been worth any company developing it in the first place.
Now I'm not familiar with the history of investment in e-ink specifically. But I'm curious if there's anyone here who is: if patent protection wasn't available, would it have been worth it for any company to develop it, knowing it might be copied a year later by a competitor who would then undercut the original inventors (not having to pay for the expensive R&D)?
Not really. The "societal" purpose of patents is to promote innovation. That's really the yardstick by which most of the conversation around patents needs to be measured - does this help or hinder overall innovation.
There are also moral/philosophical arguments for or against patents, but I think the majority consider the societal impact to be the most important.
The mechanism by which patents achieve this is by giving a temporary monopoly to the inventor. It also requires the inventor to disclose, in detail, how their innovation works ; that's part of the tradeoff - the innovator gets a temporary monopoly, but society benefits by the innovator not hoarding it as a secret. This should actually encourage progress by others, in the long run.
The main problem is "temporary", as patents have a flat duration but fields innovate and turn over at different speeds - compare web software to aeronautics/NASA software. The former could potentially he outdated within months, the latter likely won't be used until it's been tested for decades.
So obviously a 30-year patent is potentially paralyzing in webdev, yet might even be too short in space tech!
The problem is there simply isn't any duration that can satisfy both fields.
Meanwhile, often patents don't benefit anyone because they're 1) more trouble than they're worth to actually enforce, and only serve to reinforce the incumbents who don't need them, and 2) are in some cases deliberately written to be meaningless and uncommunicative, which defeats the purpose of open publishing in the first place.
Every law might have upsides, but that doesn't change the fact that patents are fundamentally flawed.
Agreed, patents are flawed. But so is basically every law in the United States. However, laws can change and we have influence on that so rather than chalking the idea of patent law as “fundamentally flawed” let’s look at ways we can tweak the existing system to work better for everyone.
For example, one commenter had an interesting suggestion of increasing the patent fees exponentially over time incentivizing only orgs that are using the technology and disincentivizing trolls long term.
It that tweak perfect? of course not, but rather than viewing it as an all of or nothing game of us vs them let’s keep working together to make it “more perfect”.
[1] http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
I don't really understand how this is true. If I google, I don't see any evidence that any patent or block of patents is blocking the "tech". Could you specify which specific patent is blocking?
> tied up the tech stack in so many patents, NDA's, and exorbitant prices that no one wants to touch it.
But... you do realize there's lots of startups that enter the bistable display space? eg: ClearInk. https://www.clearinkdisplays.com/ They even use the exact same underlying principle which is electrophoresis.
If you go to any display conference you'll easily see that most of what you're saying comes across as highly inaccurate or even ridiculous.
I checked their website to see what their technology looks like. I wanted to see how their product compare to a eInk screen use in many devices (such as Kindle/Kobo/ReMarkable), as this is the kind of products that interests me. It turns out that all the pictures shows the back of what I expect to be tablets/phone prototypes (or maybe it's just stock photos), and not a single time the screen.
It's almost comical : you advertise for a screen tech, but you carefully avoid to show how such screen looks like. Definitely a red flag.
Are you an E Ink employee or something trying to badmouth clearink? Because you can just go to youtube and search clearink and find clear videos of their products from various conferences.
I've highlighted something that makes no sense. Do you expect a car manufacturer not showing one of its cars on its website ? Apple not to how its iPhone ? A SaaS company not showing screen captures of its product ? I don't. Those images should be easily available without having to browse YouTube, or do a search on google.
FWIW, I would actually welcome any concurrent to eInk and its monopoly. I totally share the point of view of the top comment, as I've seen this tech stagnate for years. Most of the supposed alternatives 10 years ago(PlasticLogic, Liquavista, Mirasol, etc.) either never produced something relevant, either failed the expectations.
I actually find your comment quite disrespectful: if you want to promote a product, you can do that without having to resort to ad hominem attacks.
Anyway, thanks for the YouTube tip: I was able to see what I wanted to see.
Edit: if some employee of ClearInk see this message, do yourself a favor and update your website with some pictures of your product, or even a embedded Youtube video. It will speak more than stock photos.
Anyone know of any major expirations in the next few years?
As such we as a society need to look hard at those laws and policies to reform them
Sadly the large corporations have a huge amounts of lobby money and are rapidly attempting to get the terrible IP laws codified into complex international treaties to ensure no nation can do any reform at all
I agree about copyright, though. Copyright has been expanded to cover software and even APIs. Copyright is a giant drag on innovation. A single company can tie up a space for life of the author plus 70 years, which is absurd. Copyright should never have applied to most forms of software, which clearly fall into the exceptions of 17 USC § 102(b). But we are where we are.
20 years is an absurdly long time in tech
On other hand, America had more fibre than any other nation, but its hyperregulated telecom industry only managed to cross 10mbps averages 10-8 years ago.
20 years ago, Nokia 3310 was released.
For consumer hardware, that's still a very very long time to hold a patent on something.
Specialized scientific/industrial hardware, maybe... consumer goods... way too long.
But that's just my personal opinion.
Nokia probably had a gajillion GSM patents that they used to make the phone, and a bunch of other companies had to pay them money for many years to build 2g/GSM phones.
Qualcomm and a few other companies have a bunch of patent for 4g tech, so even now (when we're rolling out 5G), it's practically impossible to make a modern...ish modem without giving atleast some money to one of those companies, and 4G is "old tech" already.
FRAND is not with out its own problems, but it is alot better than the situation with eINK or 3-d Printers where there is not FRAND agreement
Now that is not to say I would advocate for complete removal of the patent systems but I do think Compulsory FRAND style licensing should be a requirement of obtaining a patent
Your distinction between Copyright and Patent is also strang as the suffer from the same flaw so it seems your only justification is that you believe 20 years is "reasonable" but Life is not
I think both are unreasonable, I would personally like to see both dropped to 10 years, or some compromise where you get 2-3 years exclusive use of the creation then have some kind of compulsory license where the creator is compensated but can not with hold the creation for 20 years (with some kind of scheme that the license be fair and equitable)
Patents can be useful as an incentive, but their length need to correspond with the pace of progress in a given field. Otherwise, they end up slowing down everyone.
Once you have proven the need for an exclusivity grant, You also need to prove that 5, 10, 15 years of exclusivity via a patent would be unable provide enough incentive, that it had to be 20 years to strike the proper balance
In today's fast moving society, I think 5 years would provide more than enough incentive even for expensive technology that requires lots of capital investment though I would favor a shorter exclusivity grant, and then may be longer required licensing grant. like 2-3 years of exclusive use, and then 10 years of licensing but the patent holder is required to treat all uses of the patent in the same manner with fair and non-discriminatory pricing.