But see, this is the valuable part! This is what we should be rewarding! The idea is worthless without execution. The concept that someone who simply had a relatively trivial idea should be able to extract rent from someone else who had the same idea but actually spent years executing on it and building a real business that benefits actual customers, taking on significant risk to do so, is repugnant.
Of course this is an idea resulting in an actual physical piece. If you mean that patents not resulting in such shouldn't be allowed ... then yes, I might agree.
The other choice is to get a patent granted and license it to everyone for free with a do-no-evil-or-revoke clause.
About the only thing you could even hope for is that the original inventor will have more of a conscience about how the patent is being licensed than the troll entity. But if that happens on a regular basis then then the troll entity will just start putting liquidated damages clauses in their license finding contracts with inventors that penalizes the inventor for pulling out after the troll entity has done work to find a license victim.
I think your uncle is the kind of guy who would be working on this stuff regardless of what reward is on the other side, and my experience is that most inventors are like that. Open source software has shown that all inventors really need to work hours and hours on developing new things, is their own drive and maybe some recognition. So I don't think patents are at all necessary for encouragement.
But we all agree he deserves reward. What you're assuming is that patents is the only way that could happen. I don't believe that's the case. I believe patents is locking us into thinking about patents as the only method of reward. If we abolish it then other, more productive methods will become prevalent. I'm talking about research grants, competitions, award prizes, investments, or employment. People will demand it when patents are absent, and politics will shift to encourage it.
I think the only way patents can be redeemed, is if they're non-transferrable and the inventor is forced to license it for a fair price within a year of registering. There also needs to be more legal aid to help small scale inventors enforce their patents. There are so many things that need to be fixed about patents.. but the thing is they're just fundamentally flawed because they're based on the idea of a monopoly on ideas. Monopolies are always a bad idea unless they're controlled by a democratic entity.
If the inventor can't transfer the patent but can still license it then there will immediately be lawyers offering to "find" patent licensees in exchange for a share of the license fee and we'll be right back where we started. You're also doing nothing to solve the nearly intractable problem of what a "fair price" for a patent is.
The fundamental issue is that in practice patents aren't actually used by small inventors on any sort of meaningful scale. They're too expensive to get and way too expensive to enforce for that. But you can always find that one anecdote to trot out in favor of a policy that in reality primarily benefits the likes of IBM.
But let's show the counterpoint with some counter-anecdotes. Think of any famous rags to riches (or middle class to riches) tech star. Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, anybody. Even the ostensibly pro-patent ones like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison. Now how many of them made most of their fortunes inventing things and then licensing the patents and how many did it by inventing things and then making and selling them to the public? Exactly.
Because patents are used to steamroll over the little guy, not help him. They're a thing that can only be wielded by lawyers and large companies with lawyers, which means they always put the little guy at a distinct disadvantage regardless of whether the little guy is the inventor or the implementor or both.
As someone who's spent a ton of time in research labs and has gone halfway through the patent process a couple times - no, no it isn't. A lot of people think this and fail to recognize how hard it is to come up with something legitimately new and verify that it works. Ideation and prototyping are fundamentally different skills than formalization and "execution" and demanding t the same person does both is wasting multiple separate talents.
The vast majority of process and software patents seem to not actually be new though, and the patent system explicitly doesn't reward 'new' in the general sense, it rewards 'new to the patent system' (aka first to file)
> and verify that it works.
In most patent troll litigation, the holder of the patent hasn't verified or actually built anything.
In my opinion, research labs should be rewarded for their work finding genuinely 'new' things. That includes benefiting from another entity building or developing what they found. It doesn't include sitting on the patent waiting for someone else to 'discover' or simply do the same thing, wait for them to profit for a few years, then sue.
"Worthless" is an exaggeration. The fair point is that implementing the idea (and all of the supporting infrastructure necessary to do it) is generally much more work than coming up with it to begin with.
So you spend 250 hours to come up with an invention and somebody else spends the same 250 hours to come up with the same invention but also spends 5000 more hours to implement it and then the patent system says you can go to them and say "that's mine" and claim all the profits.
That result is clearly an injustice.
> So you spend 250 hours to come up with an invention and somebody else spends the same 250 hours to come up with the same invention but also spends 5000 more hours to implement it and then the patent system says you can go to them and say "that's mine" and claim all the profits.
The problem here is the "all the profits" part, because that's just as extreme in the opposite direction. How about a solution where the 250-hour inventor gets a portion of the profits proportional to the time and effort put into it by each party, say a perfectly linear 250/(250+5000)? Then the inventor doesn't get much profit out of it, but because he spent less time on it he can theoretically do this repeatedly and make a reasonable amount of money. Which is, really, how the modern patent system would work if patent grants were done optimal, which is admittedly impossible.
It wouldn't. The primary cause of the injustice is that someone can spend thousands of hours implementing something before they find out someone else can claim the rights to it. The would-be inventor would know there is no patent waiting for them from the start.
If the only ideas you're capable of having require more resources to implement than you have then you would go work for someone with those resources and collect a salary. Which is what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases regardless of patents.
> The system needs to support garage-workshop inventors and academic theoreticians just as much as it needs to support Intel.
Which it doesn't, and can't. The garage-workshop inventor doesn't have the resources to litigate a patent. At best they can sell it to someone who does for pennies on the dollar and thereby get ripped off, which is why hardly anybody does that. Most inventors in practice either implement and sell their invention themselves or are the employees of someone who does. Or do grant-funded research which the public paid for and should therefore get.
> The problem here is the "all the profits" part, because that's just as extreme in the opposite direction. How about a solution where the 250-hour inventor gets a portion of the profits proportional to the time and effort put into it by each party, say a perfectly linear 250/(250+5000)?
Then you end up rewarding incompetence and inefficiency. The slower and more wasteful an inventor is the more they get paid. And you're creating a huge incentive to lie about things that are hard to prove. How does anybody else know how long it took you to do something?
The assumption that ideas are always trivial isn't correct, sometimes the inventor spends years and years perfecting a design in his own garage, but doesn't have the means to bring it to market. Should the inventor not get rewarded for his work? Nothing is wrong with the final invention nor is it from the lack of trying to bring it to market, he just doesn't have the financing necessary to pull it off.
Those aren't ideas any more
The patent isn't a reward for his work, though. The patent is a reward for having an idea and filing for it. The inventor could just as easily spend years in the garage and come up with nothing patent-able, thereby obtaining no reward.
And that's exactly what the system that allows the transfer of patent rewards.
If patents wouldn't be transferrable, than inventors and entrepreneurs would be forced to be both, instead of productively working together.
You wouldn't have a product without the ideas that go into it. You wouldn't have a product worth anything if you didn't have people selling & marketing it.
In a vacuum each aspect is worthless. So programmers should be paid zero, just like inventors should be paid zero. Because unless you're going to build a business, what you just programmed is worthless.
The solution to this is to not grant patents to trivial ideas.