"Hey everyone, I thought of this and wrote it down, none of you wrote it down before so now it's my idea for the next 30 years"
Is just ridiculous.
Monopolies are bad, and competition is good. Everyone is already incentivized to come up with and implement ideas faster than their competitors. Giving one person a monopoly just restricts others from creating competing products and only gives the user a worse and more expensive product.
That's how technology worked before the patent systems, and the outcome was manufacturer secrecy - which generally sucked more than the patent system.
A perfect counter-example to patents is FDM printers, which were incredibly expensive and inaccessible to the average hobbyist until the Stratasys patents started to expire. Now while it’s true there’s a lot of Chinese printers on the market, that hasn’t killed western companies - Pruša might be 2x-3x pricier than a Creality, but the 3D printing farms I know still went with the former, due to higher reliability and the fact that they need less fiddling to produce high quality outputs.
Meanwhile Stratasys is still selling $100k machines, and I highly doubt any of their customers would rather buy a cheap Chinese 3D printer instead.
Branding is completely irrelevant to the issue, you could well come up with say explosion-safe proportional valve design that is sold OEM worldwide and that an average consumer might not even know exists as a category.
This is proven false by the amount of top-selling products that Amazon has ripped off, produced for less (sometimes by striking a deal with the original factory), and then labeled “Amazon Basics”
Look at how Raspberry Pi still manages to maintain a huge market presence despite the prevalence of cheap Chinese clones - even if the latter occasionally have superior specs on-paper, in practice I have yet to find one that isn't vastly inferior in terms of ecosystem and software.
The point of the patent system is that you share your invention in the world, in exchange for monopolizing it for a few years. The problem is that most software patents share absolutely nothing of value with the world.
I think another misconception is the entire purpose of the USPTO. The USPTO wants EVERYTHING in the entire universe to be in the public domain. To achieve this, you give them your idea and in exchange they give you a monopoly for 20 years minus prosecution time. Even worse, anything you publish anywhere on earth after one year automatically gets in the public domain.
Anyways, enough ranting, but the system is very expensive and is actually not incentivizing the "inventor" anymore.
They said it's the purpose of the patent system, not the real-world effect. It's very important to remind people of this purpose. Because people (especially lawyers) keep pushing this concept that ownership on a patented idea is some kind of natural right being protected by law. Which is completely opposite to reality, and part of what leads to the system being warped in the way you complain about.
Have a look at the original Gore membrane patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4194041A/en
It's very clear, detailed and reproducible.
And since we are on HN, here a bit on the software side: IBM original arithmetic coding patent.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US4905297A/en
Perhaps it something that should not have been patented, but it's fully disclosed and reproducible.
Though I do agree lawyers and govts have basically colluded to create a system to suck money out of business in return for being allowed to function.
So, not much different then?
The calculus also doesn't seem all that clear to me. A alternative calculus: Build something new on top of someone else's idea (stand on the shoulders of giants) or spend all your time and money reinventing a perfectly good wheel so that you can do it in a slightly different manner purely for legal reasons.
If we assume free licensing then you might as well cut out the middle man and abolish patents.
A case in point is China. It used to just produce low-value-added manufactured products, and it had little IP protection to speak of. But as China has moved up the value chain, it has passed IP laws and built out a court system to enforce them. It has rapidly become one of the most active venues for IP litigation in the world. But if there were no Chinese R&D to protect, there would be little reason for China to build out this system.
You’re also ignoring what the patent is actually awarded for. The temporary monopoly is awarded in return for publicly disclosing your invention. Without patents you’d expect almost all commercial innovation to center around ideas that can be kept a trade secret, and to have a lot more budget devoted to protecting trade secrets. It would essentially be the exact opposite of what I expect you’d want to happen.
> The temporary monopoly is awarded in return for publicly disclosing your invention.
We could do just fine WITHOUT the patent system. Maybe if instead of fretting about diligent Chinese copycats, the USA and its corporations actually built stuff instead of outsourcing everything, we would not need to worry so much about patent infringement.
I suppose they could read expired patents, though.
Your suggestion that the global economy could shift towards an isolationist model is frankly enough to dismiss your idea without much further scrutiny.
Not at all. There's "global isolationism" and then there's outsourcing everything to the point where all that's left is the C-suite and a few supply-chain jockeys.
It doesn't have to be one extreme or the other.
"A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc., as has been said, and not upon the idea or suggestion of the new machine. A complete description of the actual machine or other subject matter for which a patent is sought is required."
Patents/IP/etc only have 'scarcity' because the government agrees to grant a monopoly to a person or corporation. It doesn't have any basis in natural law.
Without it, you would resort to greater degrees of secrecy.
First-movers already have an advantage in the market, this seems to be a natural incentive for R&D. And then also consider that many innovators and inventors do what they do for reasons outside of gaining monetary compensation.
Any consequences of greater secrecy would be largely overshadowed by the advantage of having an actually competitive market in film, tech, healthcare, and etc. Imagine if any manufacturer could produce insulin, or if any film student could shoot their own Star Wars movie.
In this case you are right, it stiffles progress instead of helping it.
But what about the case where "Hey, it took us 20 manyears of research to discover this, and when we release it, it's up for grabs for anyone"
In that case, you want to have a patent system so the research can have a ROI.
But the latter case never happens in software, and so I'm very happy Europe doesn't have any software patents.
... I guess it’s not really necessary to have patents in order to sell licenses, and I guess in most cases for software, patents are used as a moat for a business rather than getting a direct ROI on research.
If you are not from an industry where IP is unfortunately the foundation for doing business e.g. Pharma, Bio Tech; You are better off not pursuing IP at all, at least if you cannot afford the best IP attorney in your jurisdiction and assuming you have a competent patent authority.
Patents were designed as a way of allowing people to share their ideas, while retaining the ability to profit from their ideas for a limited period.
Without them, billionaires could just monitor the market and essentially just steal the business because they have the capital to leverage economies of scale. How do you prevent this without patents? What is your better idea?
You can always monopolize an unknown idea. Don't share it.
The alternative is "only I can produce this thing commercially, and you have no idea how I made it anyway".
I am very firmly in the second camp, too. But it still leaves the question: how do inventors get money?
In the long run, I hope for more consciousness on a broader base - so people and organisation just directly support inventors with money, they think are worth supporting. Than we could skip all this waste of time and energy.
And as far as I know, this is happening already today. Donated cancer research for example. Also lots (if not most) of academic research is state funded and when you define the state not as a stealing feudal opressive system, but as the self-organisation of people - you can say, that people are choosing today to give lots of their money into research.
But for common tech? On a broader scale as of today? I am sceptical on how to make that transition.
I guess people could do try to get crowdfunding campaigns for their new revolutionizing research - but the common inventor is not a PR and social media expert - and you need to be, if you want to have common peoples attention.
I was part of litigation in the 1990s where some guy had a patent on an “electronic offertory box” for use in churches. It had been granted in the 1980s. The claims made no mention of computer networking let alone “The Internet”. Yet in 1996 he successfully sued my employer and related groups that had developed a "disaster relief" web site because it offered the ability to make electronic donations (i.e. GoFundme, but to the specific non–profit). He "won" because the parties involved found it was going to be too expensive to defend.
Now, I didn't know about the patent.
I had no way of knowing about the patent.
There literally was no way for me to have found the patent, reviewed it, and decided "yeah, an electronic offertory box is absolutely the inspiration for accepting a credit card payment online directed to a charity, and I'm going to steal that sucker". Patents were abstract things that got filed away in a basement in Washington, they were not available online, only in Lexis/Nexis sorts of electronic services that peons were not granted access to.
At my company, people like me were advised NEVER to review patents ourselves due to the jeopardy we could place ourselves in if we implemented something that might be found to infringe a patent, intentions being irrelevant.
In the end the guy got paid off, and the disaster relief site got shut down less than a year later because once he got his pay off other "innovators" started filing cases and the non–profit we were working with decided it wasn't worth the effort if they were simply diverting charitable funds to anyone who could file a patent infringement claim.
Software patents are completely useless to me as an implementor. The processes described are so vague as to be useless to solve the problems I encounter, and the claims are so broad as to cover anything related to the field of the invention. And the ever expanding pool of people who can be targeted for infringement (oh, I see you use a laser printer in your office? You're infringing these 11,000 patents. Please pay up) just means the whole enterprise is a scam.
If it is patented, there is a way to find it. It certainly isn't a useful way of spreading information, but it exists, and its existence makes your claim sound hyperbolic.
How, precisely, would you have determined that an online donation to a charity usinga web site in 1995 would violate a patent for an electronic offertory box written and granted before the web existed? Remember, you can only use Lexis/Nexis or the U.s. PTO offices, the patent corpus is not available to the public on the web.
There are, in fact, four alternatives here and not two:
1. Producing company, legitimate patents; 2. Producing company, illegitimate patents; 3. Non-producing company, legitimate patents; 4. Non-producing company, illegitimate patents.
What I think grinds most people's gears are #4 suing #1 (or #3, though I don't think _this_ is common.)
So your attempt at making this out to be a (false) choice between #1+2 on the one hand and #3+4 on the other is disingenuous.
1. How do you distinguish legitimate and illegitimate patents. I guess you have to agree on some arbiter, like courts of law. So that's how we are in the current situation
2. Notwithstanding the issue around deciding between them, most larger patent holders have a huge portfolio of "clearly" legitimate and illegitimate patents, and they are using both (you don't need to sue to use the patent, just threats are enough)
3. If you ever spoken to a patent lawyer, the whole process is about making the patent as broad as possible without disclosing how to actually do it (at least if you are using the technology yourself). So one might argue it's about making the patent as illegitimate as possible, because then the patents are actually useful (otherwise they are just to easily worked around) .
Of course there's no easy way to distinguish _all_ patent (applications) this way but that one would not be accepted.
The issues you raise are certainly valid and reasonable but notwithstanding not the point of contention here. The trolling part is the one that comes from what is perceived as illegitimate claims/ patents.
[citation needed]
Specifically, Oracle notwithstanding, big tech companies have used patent portfolios defensively. Take Google as one example. When has Google filed a patent infringement lawsuit against any company (other than as a countersuit after getting sued eg Sonos)?
But Apple? The only patent suit I'm aware of that they initiated was against Samsung and this is a little more complicated.
First, it was primarily a design patent suit. I'm a little more sympathetic to design patents than software patents (which I'm 100% against). And, let's face it, Samsung did pretty much just rip off the iPhone. There were some non-design patents thrown in there too, that's true.
But the commenter I replied to suggested these tech companies were using patents to squash smaller competitors. And for most companies that isn't true. Even if you choose to include Apple in a list of companies that use patents offensively rather than defensively, Samsung isn't really a small competitor, so the point stands.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/appeals-court-re...
At one point when Microsoft was still in the phone business, I recall an article pointing out that Microsoft made more money off android in a single year (unspecified patents in a patent deal with google[1]) than they made out of their own mobile OS in its entire lifespan.
[1] My memory may be inaccurate, but I seem to recall that they did the patent shakedown without ever specifying exactly which patents android were infringing. There was a lot of speculation that it was the FAT patents, butu I don't recall ever seeing it being disclosed.
Bell labs (who is doing a lot of telecom R&D) for example is owned by Nokia now (it's called Nokia Bell labs)
That's a sophism, it's not either theses possibilities.
For me patents protect someone building something innovative, to later on profit from what he builds. It's not to reward innovation, it's to protect your capacity to build that innovation and sell it. It's not how patent troll use it, thus I disagree with their use.
> but it is not ok for smaller inventors to sell their patents to some of these "trolls" who then sue the big companies for violating the patents?
Why would it be? How is that beneficial to innovation?
Nobody here said either that it was right to use the patent system to keep out any competitors or newcomers either... it's right to keep competitors out while you build it/sell it at first, but it's not right to use it purely to keep competitors out.
It's not bogus. It's actually the only thing that justifies the mere existence of patents. If it doesn't enable better products for us then what's the point? Deviations from this social contract should not be tolerared, especially net-negative activity such as rent seeking by trolling companies and individuals.
I'd like to see: -- All software patents expire after 5 years -- All software patents must be actively used in a revenue producing product (yearly), if not the patent expires -- All software patents are NON-transferable only licensable -- All software patents must make their licensing rates public per patent with no special deals
Live by the patent, die by the patent.
Patents stop other people from creating useful stuff. I think it's reasonable that you should have to fill the gap in order to retain the right to stop them. Although enforcing that is difficult.
They fall in a different subsection of patent law than the way to implement something.
Don't get me wrong, many of the patents are absolutely bogus, but that's not exclusive to patent troll patents. In fact bogus patents help established companies even more, because the trolls at least have to defend those patents in court at times, a small new player who is threatened by a large established one over some bogus patent can't afford to defend themselves.
The whole notion that patents are only legitimate if you build something is completely bogus. Either the patent system is about encouraging and rewarding innovation and then it should apply to anyone equally, or it is not and we should abolish it. I'm firmly in the second camp, but it seems the big players want to have their cake and eat it too.