Notorious patent enforcement entity values its entire portfolio at $2, folds
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I'm not sure if it's fair to R&D costs to gut patents entirely, but I'd like to see them weakened considerably. Patent trolls should not exist.
Glad to see justice in this case.
Edit: Watched Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware, was interesting in regards to loose IP rights.
I think the patent system needs a little work, yes, but I think it’s often conflated with the bass ackwards copyright law in the US. Used together, the two give you the ability to perpetually remain the proprietor of your “invention” because your invention is only ever distributed as a licensed work. This is directly at odds with the purpose of the patent system in the first place.
Patents are supposed to 1) reward inventors, during a limited, exclusive, window, for their inventions, and 2) reward society for curating good inventors by giving everyone access to the details of the invention immediately so our collective knowledge increases. It’s not meant to be used to build your corporate fortress. However, the patent into copyright strategy is how purely digital content behemoths survive. So good luck.
Jones developed this into a service called BusCall, which had some modest success.
I think the actual solution is simply improved patent review. The patent system is broken because there are so many bad patents; if only truly innovative stuff was patented, I think a lot of the reasonable criticism would become a lot less reasonable.
But without additional funding, improved scrutiny at filing time would also dramatically increase the cost of acquiring a patent, which is already expensive for individual inventors.
Monopoly == bad
Prohibit patents
For a very specific definition of monopoly (in particular, monopoly over use of a specific resource, not monopoly in the market sense).
In that same sense of the word "monopoly", private property == monopoly.
You can rent your house out an AirBnB 20 times while still living in it, and you can non-exclusively license your patent 20 times.
In fact, just last weekend I let 20+ people into my house for a party. The notion of privately owned property didn't suddenly become absurd at the beginning of that party...
"Exclusive right to use" is not unique to intellectual property, nor is the ability to scale a piece of private property from 1 user to N concurrent users.
You can stop them from infringing your patent, just as you can prevent your neighbor from building an apartment building on your real estate.
It needs a lot of changes. One simple but important fix would be to revert the 1991 budget change that made the USPTO run on fees instead of taxpayer funds. This dramatically increased the incentive to approve shit patents, something borne out in the pre-91 and post-91 data:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/these-experts-fi...
But is has. It's the changes in the patent system in the past decade that is forcing this patent troll to shut down. To wit:
* The US changed from first-to-invent to first-to-file. This reduces opportunities for patent trolls to patent obvious stuff that other people invented.
* Bilski and Alice have very firmly shut down the motherlode of crap arising from the State Street decision. Business method patents, and "do X on a computer" are quite invalid.
* Inter partes review makes it easier to challenge patents, and SCOTUS last year upheld it as constitutional.
* Venue shopping to get that one court that will always rule in favor of patents got a lot harder, as the TC Heartland case says you can only define the residence of the corporation as its place of incorporation.
* Prior use defense: if you used a method before it was patent, you don't have to pay to license the patent.
I think there are some other reforms that could be made (the big one is moving from one fixed term for all patent categories to varying it by industry), but life has gotten much harder for patent trolls.
This is perhaps the best way to actually protect yourself in some business situations where enforcing the patent and getting it in the first place is going to require too much effort for the given use case. You can just post a sealed copy of the invention to your solicitor, then crack on with making the product. If someone beats you to market and wants to sue you for copying their patent then you should be covered nicely, you have hard evidence you have not stolen 'their' idea.
You also don't have to publish for the world to see what your key invention is. If it is a manufacturing technique that is required to make an existing product more affordably then you can keep your invention secret that way.
Snopes describes the "poor man's copyright" as not useful in the US, "may" be some use in Britain: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/poor-mans-copyright/
I hope this unlocks the many small guys who were sitting on the sidelines after seeing other smaller entities be chased with a demand letter.
Otherwise, corporations with huge budgets are the only ones that benefit from the patent system.
But this comes with a big "if".
IF the patents were actually novel. IF the patent office was actually doing its job and enforcing its own rules that a patent should be for something novel and non-obvious to people in the applicable industry.
If you don't have the know-how to implement something, can you really call yourself the inventor of that thing?
Inventors should be able to create prototypes, and if they're small-time maybe they can form a startup and gain investments.
People say patents just need to be reformed, but I think it's a hopelessly outdated system. It's a relic. It's not the nineteenth century anymore. To say we just need to review patents more carefully and only grant them to deserving and truly novel ideas is naive. The span of fields of specialization is far too wide--who would pay for such an army of specialized patent clerks for every branch of technology? How would you prevent regulatory capture when only the industry they regulate has that kind of expertise? How do you prevent bribery and corruption? It's impossible. We have a terrible patent review system because that is the reality of patent review.
Currently the company is undergoing volunatry liquidation, a phase during which they try to come to an agreement over their outstanding debts with their creditors, and try to make deals to prevent the worst case of having any outstanding debts at the end. At the same time they liquidate all their assets, so they can pay their creditors. You usually have better negotion skill/market insight/etc., so you can sell your assets at a higher price than the bancruptcy court would.
Usually, you would auction off the assets for the highest price in order to prevent insolvency, but here it seems they thought it would be better to try and defraud the creditors of their money.
The Trustee takes the assets and auctions it. You are thinking of ch. 11
They value it at 423,000$ and they give that to their creditor instead? Can they really do that and would it be better? How so?
There's a whole field of law about bankruptcy. In particular, questions about how to value assets are obviously a big component of bankruptcy law.
I imagine "it's complicated" when it comes to intangible/intellectual property like patents, brands, etc.
I'll pay 1$, and you can pay for the other 50%.
It is far more likely that you’re going to get sued by a large corporation or troll and go out of business because your innovative idea “infringes” like a whole lot of other things that you can’t afford to fight in court. They are nice to let you pay a ransom fee — look up the story of IBM and Sun Microsystems[1]. They could just bankrupt you using the legal system.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2011/07/07/microsoft...
What if Xerox had patented the GUI? Maybe Microsoft and Apple would've had to pay to license it instead of just stealing it from Xerox. What innovations did we miss out on because PARC never made any money off GUIs?
In my opinion, patents slow down innovation in any fast moving field like software. This isn’t the 1800s. If we abolished patents in pharma, we could have cures developed for the long tail!
If we abolished patents in pharma we wouldn’t have cures for anything. Nobody will blow half a billion dollars on R&D for an easily copied drug without some sort of moat.
Isaac Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants. What if had to rent those shoulders, or worse had no access?
If what you say is true (“why would anyone do anything big”) how was science done for years, in every field other than Pharma? How did Wikipedia beat Britannica and the Web beat AOL if capitalism is better?
Look up Clay Shirky’s ted talk Institutions vs Collaboration
Competition and moats are a nice system but in the long run collaboration is simply better!
The things that make modern life, well modern: jet engines, AIDS cocktails, micro-processors, electric cars, satellites, nuclear reactors, omnipresent telecommunications, etc., are well outside the reach of "collaboration." Collaboration among amateurs doesn't even move the needle. Genuine useful progress is for the most part the province of big institutions with roomfuls of PhDs. And those require billions upon billions of dollars. And that money has to come from somewhere: defense contracts, irrational VCs, governments, and yes, patent monopolies.
See this: https://forum.intercoin.org/t/study-alaska-ubi-doesnt-increa...
I don't think roomful of PhDs always beats the a motivated crowd. Not even a roomful of seasoned intelligence analysts (https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/...)
Did a top-down Britannica being sold door to door, the pinnacle of capitalism applied to encyclopedias, beat Wikipedia? Did encarta? Why did Wikipedia win?