The system was put in place to protect us, if it isn't serving its purpose we need to be more objective and declare how it could be better implemented.
I'm not really kidding. I think that evidence that patents are beneficial in any field is lacking.
Alternatively, a few major reforms would help. For example:
1. Decrease patent terms to just a few years in most fields.
2. Make it clear that math, in any form, is not patentable. Codec patents, for example, should never have been valid.
3. Eliminate submarine patents. Specifically, require patent holders to notify infringers of their infringement in a timely manner. If you know or should know that my specification, technology, or product is covered by your patent, you must tell me what patent covers it and why. If you give me a list of 700 patents that "might" cover it, you get some appropriate penalty. If you fail to notify me, your patent no longer applies. If my infringing technology is public and you fail to publicly disclose your patent, you cannot enforce your patent against anyone who infringes it using my technology or a derivative thereof. By "should know", I mean that, if an attentive participant in whatever market I'm in would have known of whatever details of my technology infringe on your patent, then you "should know". Even if my technology is still under development by a standards body.
#3 is a big deal. It means that owning and maintaining a patent is a bit expensive. It means that, if you patent some incomprehensible detail that might apply to future technologies, then you must tell people that their future technologies would infringe. This, by itself, would likely blow away most codec patents. And AOM would be spared the expense of their patent search. Simply publish AV1, wait the prescribed time, and AV1 is in the clear.
4. Covenants not to sue and blanket licenses do not waive requirements under #3. If an AOM member wants to give a blanket license of their whole portfolio under defensive terms to users of AV1, they still need to disclose how AV1 infringes their patents or they can't use those patents defensively in the future against AV1.
If there's any software that has a chance of convincing me of patent worthiness, it's probably codecs. Or at least the co(d) part. I'm muddled on decoding because it seems like just figuring out how to read something should be treated differently.
Is the term 20 years now? That's too long for any kind of software, even codecs. I think an important principle that should influence the design of patent law is the rough likelihood of the invention being made by others, or qualitatively matched or exceeded by others, in various spans of time. (Of course you have to model this assuming certain patent laws in place, as well as no patent system at all, to really do it right.)
I despise patent predators, née trolls. But MPEG-LA isn't a good example for me to work with because I think they're actual companies that do stuff – make movies, Blu-ray players, TVs, etc. Some of them invented DVD and Blu-ray probably, and evidently they invented MPEG-2, which I remember was viewed as pretty slick and technically awesome when it came out (as were DVDs – I remember VCRs and boy did they suck).
But 20 years? Yeah, no, this stuff should be 10 at most. I mean, would it hurt us to have 10 year terms on codecs? Would we get lesser quality codecs? I doubt it. HEVC is pretty amazing though, and it's clearly better than VP9, so it looks like the proprietary stuff beats open source in this field (tiny sample, yes, but there are many more examples available). Daala seemed to be going nowhere. Mozilla didn't seem to be able to finish it. Now some companies have teamed up for AV1, FOSS. I guess we'll see how good it is compared to HEVC.
This is just a restatement of the fact that codec patents exist.
When the state of the art advances because of improvements A to Z and A to W are in the public domain, the proprietary codecs are still "better" because they use A to W plus X, Y and Z which the open source codecs can't use because of the patents.
The real question is whether the patented things would have been invented without the patents. But the answer is probably yes, because the industry is full of huge companies like Google and Netflix that directly benefit from improving compression regardless of whether they can sell it to anyone else.
Is it going to use more battery than HEVC? VP9 uses much more battery than H.264. Even when both have hardware decoders, VP9 uses a bit more juice. It's the computational complexity difference. Of course HEVC probably uses more juice than h.264 as well, but VP9 is notoriously inefficient and it would suck if AV1 was less energy efficient than HEVC.
Being royalty free does not mean it is not patented.
Here are some comparisons between AV1, VP9, HEVC, and H.264:
http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-New...
Whether or not VP9 beats HEVC, its advantages are that it beats H.264, can be used without the licensing headaches of HEVC (or H.264), and has double the decoder base of HEVC:
https://ngcodec.com/news/2017/10/21/why-we-are-supporting-vp...
You can use VP9 and Opus for video today with a view to using AV1 and Opus in the future.
Anyway, on VP9... its disadvantage is that it's very computationally taxing compared to H.264 (and presumably VP8). MS Edge won't use VP9 on laptops that don't have hardware decoding for it, because decoding VP9 with software kills battery life. Are other browsers following similar policies on laptops? (this is only applies when the laptop is running on battery, and Edge will let you force VP9 even on battery in its flags).
H.264 is quite elegant and efficient from a computational perspective. Note that even when laptops have and use hardware decoding for VP9, they still use more battery than hardware decoding H.264 (which will be in any computer that has hardware for VP9). Though there must be a threshold where a difference in bitrate would equalize them.
I guess the days of H.264 computational efficiency are over if we want better compression. I'll read your links to see what to expect from AV1.
The fact that all these businesses have vested interest and need for the best possible codecs, they have plenty of reason to invest in making new ones for self-serving purposes. No patent revenue potential required.
Look at AOM - an organization formed entirely to circumvent the patent system to produce a royalty free good codec everyone can actually use. When companies look at the patent encumbered codec of the day and reject it because of the patents you have a demonstrable show of how detrimental patents are to innovation.
People start poking around to figure out how it works, because hackers are curious folks like that, some code gets leaked at some point, and someone starts doing codecs as open source, for fun and fame. Said companies use that os and improve on it, crating the next generation.
Now iterate this a few dosen times and what I think companies would figure out its easier to just team up and outsource this kind of stuff. Or maybe we’ll see what happened in the game engine world - with only copyright protecting the code - devs would not be able to use “the exact same code” but could incorporate new techniques at will, limited only by their brilliance.
And then there will be paid and OS ones, but the paid ones will have reasonable terms because of strong competition from other paid or OS codecs. In any case I think it would be an improvement to the current situation.
But the practical reality is that these companies are doing the exact opposite with AV1:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1
The Alliance for Open Media was formed because royalty-free audio and video formats save everyone time and money, particularly in the context of the complicated licensing terms for HEVC.
Netflix, Google, Apple, and Amazon all do business on the web and the W3C's royalty-free patent policy benefits everyone:
To a certain extent, I agree. If license fees for MPEG codecs have kept codec researchers in jobs, then that's a good thing.
But take a look at the MPEG-LA HEVC patent list [1], keeping in mind that includes but a small portion of the HEVC-related patents. From what little I know about codec development, I expect that HEVC's advantage over AVC is from a few large changes and many small changes. However, it's difficult for me to believe that there are literally thousands of substantial patentable improvements over the state of the art in HEVC. How many of those companies are paying for cutting-edge research and how many just got a patent that mentioned coding so they could get a part of the royalties?
I have neither the time nor the expertise to go through that list and tell you which are "worthy" and which are "trollish", but its farcical to suggest that all of them are so valuable that the owners deserve to rent-seek the entire video industry.
1: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Pages/PatentList.as...
Pharma?
It's trendy to pretend that pharma patents are the Devil incarnate because they enable exploitative pricepoints by the patent-holder, but the fact is that's what enables the profit motive for the research in the first place. (At least, I've never seen a serious argument against this, only righteous blustering.)
(The fact that US pharma companies spend more on advertising than on research, has no bearing here.)
As an example of exploitation see the statin drugs used to lower cholesterol. These were originally isolated from an ancient Chinese herbal "red yeast rice" and found to be effective. So some company patented the molecule, did clinical trials, and profit! I chose this one because I have personal experience getting dramatic reduction in my cholesterol from taking red-yeast-rice. It's also a nice example of how the system is broken. We all could have benefited from trials proving that red-yeast-rice reduces cholesterol, but that's not what happened. The company would not have funded the trials if they couldn't patent the molecule.
IMHO if clinical trials were cheaper there would be no need for granting monopolies (via patents) to cover the costs. I also don't see why trials are so expensive. There are plenty of doctors treating plenty of patients that are willing to try things. All we really need is a set of rules to protect people from irresponsible trials, and formal study procedures to document results and determine efficacy. It doesn't seem too complicated right?
Company: "But that's a naturally occurring virus, we can't patent that so we're not interested. Do something else, or find a way to 'make it better' so we we can patent it and make money."
True story. Now imagine this:
Researcher: "I've found that this rhinovirus is devastating to certain kinds of tumors when injected into them... in mice. We need to do more testing, and in humans."
Oncologist at major center: "We've seen a number of terminal patients with that type of cancer, current treatments don't work especially at stage 4. We could test that virus on a number of people if they were willing to try it."
Cancer Patient "Sign me up!"
There has to be a way to make this work, and it should cost far less than the current approach. I'd argue that it would cost the government less to fund the studies than to pay medicaid costs for the patented treatments. Sure, change would need to happen but it would happen fast, and in the mean time nobody would eliminate current treatments - they're already established and profitable.
There was a paper from one of the Fed branch offices about this. It turns out that the US has two independent mechanisms to help pharma companies make money: patents and FDA-granted exclusivity. It's unclear that patents are needed.
I admit I don't know much about the latter, but what about international markets?
However I do agree that profit is a very powerful motivator, and I see no easy way to make sure the money is better spent otherwise (although there's no reason for all research to be profit driven, publicly funded research can definitely be good thing even if only as competition).
However I get the impression that we're at the point where there are so many things that can be cured if money is no objection that money is starting to become an objection, and nobody seems to be prepared to do what is essentially putting a price on human life.
The original argument for patents was to avoid secret sauces that die with their companies.
The reality is that companies that would use secret sauces still do, and those whose technology would be trivially reverse-engineerable patent it.
And a plethora of secret-sauce companies give up and publish to attract talent: see Apple’s move to publish about ML.
Ok but CRISPR isn't math. And the distinction between designing an algorithm and designing a machine is kind of arbitrary. If you are going to get rid of one you should get rid of the other and abolish patents entirely.
Companies don't really invent very much, they usually find things or take existing things and try to monopolize them with patents.
The distinction isn't arbitrary. If you can do something entirely in math/software then you can also hard code it into a physical machine, but the reverse obviously isn't true. There is no calculation you can perform on an abstract Turing machine that will cause it to generate electricity or thrust or refine steel or physically prevent someone from accidentally sticking their hand in a saw blade.
Already today many companies don't even patent stuff anymore, but claim their technologies to be trade secrets, and still manage to prosecute anyone trying to share them.
From Waymks Lidar to SpaceX tech to Google's TPUs, both is even patented anymore, it's not even published in any way.
That's a little bit overly generous.
It was put in place to incentivize invention and creation. But I think clear with examples like this that it's holding us back. There are so many people, and there is so much innovation, and so much ability to understand how something new works that these laws do nothing to help the public.
And even if they started with the public good in mind, we are now far from it.
As other responders are suggesting: scrap it completely, and see where things end up.
And even though we are discussing patents, the benefit to the public is ten times larger for copyright.
Copyright maximalists had a stroke of genius when they started calling it "intellectual property" and "IP rights". This allows you to make it a moral issue, rather than a public policy issue (which is what it really is).
Remember that patents were originally just meant to compel inventors to disclose the means by which their inventions work, so that after a finite time they could be publicly used. Do we need public disclosure of "inventions" anymore?
Technology makes the world move faster, and patents haven’t quite adjusted yet.
How about requiring patent-holders to show progress on their invention every X years, so that inventors can't just sit on an old and important patent they own?
Or, a more ground-up restructuring: what if owning a patent didn't give you full ownership of the technology, but just X% of profit made from it for X years after filing?
With this setup, you could further incentivize progress by granting an additional X% to the first one able to bring the technology to market.
The latter is called "working the patent", which is the opposite of what patent predators, née trolls do. Apparently some countries require holders to work the patent, and I'm a big supporter of fundamental patent reform in the US that would require people/corporations to produce and sell the invention in order to maintain a patent. That would almost vaporize all the patent predators out there.
Right now we have a system where you can just think shit up and write it down. Boom, you've got a patent (with the help of a lawyer usually). That's a ridiculous legal system. The system should be designed around actual market activity – the introduction of innovative products. I think it's an important right that someone who invents something should have exclusive commercial rights to it for a while, but not a right to just sit back and stop other people from using their brains too.
Your percentage of profits idea is something I liked for a while when I was thinking a lot about reform, but I now think that it would be way too hard to enforce. It would be such a mess to carve out exactly what the profit or revenue was that could be attributed purely to some part of a product that hinged on some dude's patent, along with all the other encumbered parts and features. It would be worse than the mess that is the income tax and corporate income tax.
You could just do a general per industry tax, which I proposed here a few years ago: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/openmanufacturing/vS4ju1VqXb...
I would much rather see a large patent fee with annual inflation indexing for the patent holder. If it costs you 1 million USD each year to hold a patent, then you only acquire one for major, truly revolutionary ideas that will easily recoup that money. It's a sum that can easily be fitted in the budget of any significant research and development program, yet prohibitive for most submarine, defensive, or warchest IP operations.
A large anual fee forces you to "work" the patent, either directly or by licensing it. If you are not sure if your "idea" is valuable, then you don't deserve a patent.
In a (strained) sense, that's already what the USPTO is doing. Except it's also associated with all this technology innovation stuff, which we would like them to stay away from.
> If you are not sure if your "idea" is valuable, then you don't deserve a patent.
I'll have to play around with that idea.
Compulsory licenses fill this gap preventing patents from being used to inhibit development.
Everyone who wants to file a patent should first post a challenge. Other parties then have, say, 1 year to come up with a solution. If none is found, the patent is granted.
This would, of course, not solve all patent problems, but it could be a first step to solve the most obvious ones.