Every so often a patent troll story comes up on HN, and people like me bitch about how broken the system is and get group therapy from shouting into the wind on a web forum.
What can we actually do. How do we start fixing this problem?
What can we actually do. How do we start fixing this problem?
Do the hard grunt work of getting enough of a broad base of political support for Congress to enact reform. Seriously, that's what it comes down to. And it's not some impossible thing even for a minority so long as it's focused. Precisely because majorities don't really pay much attention to such things and these days are fairly fixed, even a fraction of a percentage of the vote that always votes and will do so based on a single or very small set of issues can have an outsized impact.
In this case, the goal would probably be a few very targeted things. My nomination would be 1) Eliminate software and "business method" patents entirely, with the argument that software is already covered by copyright and vague ideas shouldn't be patentable, and 2) actually fund the USPTO to a much higher degree and give it more teeth so more patents can be taken down early.
I don't think it's an impossible dream. It's an issue that doesn't fit into typical polarization, since there are major business benefits both ways. There are easy outrageous examples of patents that will strike the average person as obviously wrong. It's something Congress can do without the slightest question. There will be economic interests against it, but there are ones for it as well. And the tide has been turning a bit on IP maximalism.
I've written my Senators at least, talking about some of the personal harms I've seen as a developer. I got replies. If nothing else, everyone should do that and not just post on the internet. They certainly are unlikely to immediately change their stances, but they absolutely pay attention to letters because so few write them. If they start seeing enough people concerned about an issue, they will if nothing else give it some much higher level attention. Unfortunately I don't know of any national advocacy/lobbying organizations devoted purely to patent reform. The EFF does some good work there, but they've got a wider umbrella of critical issues to fight as well. I donate what I can to them but it'd be nice if there was some place just for this too.
Still, I hope to see some progress in my lifetime on reigning them back in from when they were invented in court in the 80s.
China is now starting to enforce IP rights because as they move up the industry maturity scale, the rights become more important.
IP rights only become relevant to developed nations, where manufacturing and other primary/secondary industries become less important than service industries.
There is no "global turning against protected invention".
There is "developing vs developed nations ongoing opposing interests".
But software is very different from medical patents.
That’s a decent chunk of money, but it’s important to put it in perspective. Pfizer alone spends around $10B per year on R&D. J&J: $12B. Merck: $13B.
That $100B is just for drugs that later got FDA approval, not the NIH grant budget.
Patents necessarily put more capital investments into patentable work than unpatentable work, but that doesnt mean it is more efficient. I understand the principle of patents, but eventually you end up in heavy interventionism, state funding, litigation, etc. Best to do away of all of that imo.
So if you got rid of patents innovation in some industries will be fine (software) and others will be wrecked (medical).
Patents are not the only way to incentivize innovation, and I think it'd be great to experiment with some other ways.
Socializing medicine is completely orthogonal to this issue. Unless you mean socializing drug discovery which would be a completely unproven way to develop drugs at scale.
It feels like every field knows that they're a cash grab without a lot of benefits, but assumes there's some industry that they don't work in where they're needed.
I spent a few years in medical research and realized that ohhhh shit, even worse in this industry.
The whole thing is a big lie.
End copyrights. End patents. The ideal length is zero. There is no case to be made to support them. We need to abolish them outright.
I don’t buy that IP protections incentivize innovation anymore than they prevent it. The reality is that the gains from intellectual property are not distributed evenly, and corporate executives know this. If IP is making you millions of dollars, that is a very different situation from IP just “making you a living.”
Even if you are doing well as a small IP-based business, you’re still stuck paying a premium on everything you buy (thanks to the existence of IP monopolies), and you still have little recourse against IP violations from large corporations and anonymous pirates.
I just don’t get how this isn’t all an enormous waste of resources for anyone but the already rich, or a completely raw deal for people who mod games, remix music, repair electronics, etc etc.
One slight nit: it helps if you don't spread the big lie "intellectual property" (since it's an oxymoron). Someone here on HN told me about the term "imaginary property" which works great, because then you can still use the "IP" acronym.
And it currently costs billions of dollars to get FDA approval.
Basically assume I find a new antidepressant. I spend 2 billion dollars proving it's safe and effective.
How do I get my money back when any drug manufacturer can now manufacture the same drug?
I too believe that medical innovation would be wrecked by the elimination of patents, but I think that is less to due some inevitable aspect of human nature, and more due to existing incentive structures that have been created by means of policy.
On the patent side you have such modern marvels as OxyContin, which has arguably caused more loss of life than COVID-19.
Patented drugs are generally awful. The idea that it costs $1B to make a game changing drug is a lie. It costs $1T. The US taxpayer pays 99.9%, and the big pharma company spends a billion to generate some shitty subpar derivative that they can then get monopoly protection on and create an artificial racket supported by false marketing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_Unite...
The average Opiod death is 3x that by years alone, and more when going by expected healthspan.
Hence "loss of life" and not "deaths".
This number is impossibly wrong. There were 48 new drugs brought to market in 2019. At an average cost of 1 trillion dollar per drug would mean the entire economy of both the U.S. and Europe were devoted to drug research which just isn't true.
...opium and extracts for pain relief, cinchona bark for malaria, cloves and clove oil for oral pain relief, I could go on, but you could also Google this.
And the fact that a "patent medicine" is a synonym in history for "snake oil" shows how little scientific rigour patents brought to medicinal development, and how the patent system was initially co-opted to lend an air of legitimacy to quackery.
That's only if you look at how the system is today and evaluate as it is today.
Software mostly doesn't have patents: theres no patent to an uber, to a paypal, to an amazon. You would have a different business model to fund medical innovation, for example, advance payments from prospective patients.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures
I guess if you are a tech CTO, you don't beat them, you join them.
The sad part of Myhrvold's troll company is that it quickly spilled over into sectors other than software and "tech". Sectors that did not necessarily have the same knee-jerk negative reaction to the patent system (because despite its flaws, they depended on it).
I can't imagine the carnage they could collectively unleash on the Judge, Jury, County, State, etc if they really wanted to? But it isn't worth the time, money or effort. At the end of the day it's just pay the "Parking Ticket" and move on.
That doesn't mean that Apple and Google are intentionally trying to preserve the legal environment for patent trolls to operate, but on some level it still is in their interest.
How can we realistically boycott the companies that abuse patents? I suppose I could stop using Apple products, but most current software jobs require some form of smartphone for authentication, so I need an iPhone or Android phone, thus supporting Google or Samsung or LG or one of the other big megacorps that abuse the American patent system.
I feel like the only thing that could conceivably happen is to fight fire with fire, and start suing these companies and challenging these patents to a point where it's so expensive for them that they lobby congress to regulate it better. Even still, I have doubts that that would even work, since it's still probably more profitable for them to keep all their ridiculous patents than the loss in legal fees.
Unfortunately, a patent portfolio doesn't protect against NPEs. A patent portfolio lets a company settle patent disputes with cross-licensing deals, or counter-sue with a "no you" argument.
An NPE doesn't have a product, so there's no reason to cross-license, and no way their product can violate any other patent.
You mean law firms?
Most patent trolls don’t make or sell anything. There’s nothing to boycott.
Write draft legislation that would fix the problem. Propose this to your country's legislature (Congress in the US, Parliament, etc).
Push for the new law.
Form or join an organization that writes and pushes for legislation that will fix the patent law mess.
Etc.
Alas, there's no such thing as unbiased.
So basically, neutrality nihilism? ie. "every source is biased so it doesn't matter whether I'm getting my climate change facts from the IPCC or InfoWars".
It doesn't make sense to give conspiracy theorists any space for the sake of neutrality.
But this is different to conspiracy theorists. There is a range of reasonable, good faith positions to take on this issue (eg, some on this discussion advocate the abolishment of copyright - not just patents - which is a position many in the software industry would disagree with).
We have a chip shortage right? And an American manufacturing crisis, right?
"We need to eliminate trolling waste and abuse for national security. In Asia they don't have this dysfunction and we're ceding ground to adversaries simply to make lawyering trolls rich!"
This issue is maybe in the top 1000.
All this points to larger problem that many thinkers are in denial, that is of humans themself. Humans in general are terribly flawed and that problem can be only marginally alleviated with laws, activism etc.
Or invest in seasteading.
This doesn't mean anything. It's just cynicism masquerading as fatalism. We thankfully don't live in an absolutist monarchy. Laws can change, and in fact do change all the time. Election upsets happen all the time. But like a sibling comment said, no one wants to actually go out and do the grunt work.
Whining on Twitter is certainly easier than canvassing a neighborhood.
Equitable progress (and progress in general), is a fraction of what it could be.
Changing this one rule and shifting our energies from endlessly regurgitating old ideas to gardening great new ones will lead to a golden era of progress in area like healthcare, education, and equity.
#EndIp. #LiberateIdeas. Start sharing big truths and fight big lies. The people will pick up on it.
Write down and publish as many things as possible to enable prior art searches. If an important case affects a field you've been working on for decades, actively help victims find prior art.
Consistently vote against IP maximalists wherever you have an opportunity. Don't have relationships with IP maximalists.
Remind the general public about how bad and stupid patents are when you have the opportunity.
Don't buy products that advertise using "patented technology" or "patent pending". If you have no choice, buy used.
If you are in control of a company's patent strategy, file lots of provisional patents then abandon them, so they show up in the database when patent examiners search for prior art.
Financially support victims of patent attacks and help them get as many patents invalidated as possible.