Re:Why is China smashing its tech industry?
by kmeisthax on Monday August 02, 2021 @04:04PM
(#28041909)
No, because they're the same thing. We pay for inventions with rent seeking behavior. One person's justified license fees are another person's patent or copyright trolling.
The original idea with these sorts of things, at least in the US, is that we'd have administrative procedures and court adjudication to limit the harm that could come from that behavior. In practice, the administrative procedures are only a bar to the least knowledgeable plaintiffs, and the mere threat of litigation over a marginally valid claim is often enough to coerce most defendants into a settlement. Nobody wants to actually litigate whether or not a patent is obvious, or a copyright owner has been surreptitiously seeding their own works on BitTorrent.
There's also a question about whether or not your two examples are, in practice, always different cases. What if the person in the first example decides to not license their drug at all, so they can do the manufacturing themselves and control the price? That would be identical behavior to the second example... but they still made a useful invention. They're the same person.
You could legally restrict "non-practicing entities" from enforcing patent rights, but that's only a subset of all rent-seeking patent owners. Remember: the entire point of the system is to enable rent-seeking in lieu of up-front payments.
The original idea with these sorts of things, at least in the US, is that we'd have administrative procedures and court adjudication to limit the harm that could come from that behavior. In practice, the administrative procedures are only a bar to the least knowledgeable plaintiffs, and the mere threat of litigation over a marginally valid claim is often enough to coerce most defendants into a settlement. Nobody wants to actually litigate whether or not a patent is obvious, or a copyright owner has been surreptitiously seeding their own works on BitTorrent.
There's also a question about whether or not your two examples are, in practice, always different cases. What if the person in the first example decides to not license their drug at all, so they can do the manufacturing themselves and control the price? That would be identical behavior to the second example... but they still made a useful invention. They're the same person.
You could legally restrict "non-practicing entities" from enforcing patent rights, but that's only a subset of all rent-seeking patent owners. Remember: the entire point of the system is to enable rent-seeking in lieu of up-front payments.