Jury awards Optis $300M in second patent trial against Apple

Sure, that flawed argument has some appeal in simple, unitary products made for caveman in the prehistoric age.

According to RPX, it's estimated there are over 250,000+ active patents with thousands of unique inventors in any given modern smartphone today; and, of those, at least 23,00+ wireless patents were declared "standard essential" in GSM/3G alone. It's pretty dumb to argue that each individual inventor's patent, or the current assignee's, is legit if and only if they are in the business of making or productizing them themselves.

Let's personalize it:

Fulfilling that "standard" for my own personal patents would require me to register as a financial institution and employ people with all the licenses, some of which not one individual can hold all of simultaneously, actually run that institution, launch products, get traction on those products and then pat myself on the back because all is right with the world.

All because I had a particular idea in a niche market first, which only I consider an improvement and worthwhile at the priority date, while nobody else would or did.

So as someone with much more immediately lucrative and interesting ideas, I'm clearly not going to pursue that path. So.... are people proposing I just drop the idea when I had it, or what would the other incentive to share it with the world be? I should just let others independently come up with the idea an unknown number of years in the future and just say "hey look haha I had that idea a while back", or even worse, risk allowing reality to go in a completely different or less improved direction?

I feel fortunate that I was even able to afford to make a record of my idea in the compliant and uninfringeable way. I know plenty of people that are too segregated from the system to even attempt that. It is insulting to think "ah fuck that person [with $20,000] because they didn't build a prototype in their modest garage!" The gatekeeping, how does that even make sense?

Okay so now there is a document saying I had an idea first (speaking on behalf of all patent inventors), and even more rarely and privileged is that fact that I am not having to assign all my ideas to an employer who then owns the patent.

So what is being proposed here? I'm a "non practicing entity" and all my paths to monetization are invalid because of it? Should I leave it rhetorical?

Should I say "hey cool awesome tech or fintech firm, I really admire your work, you should buy my IP" because that works so well?

Should I say "hey cool awesome tech or fintech firm, cease and desist now" because that works so well?

Should I say "hey well capitalized company in the business of monetizing intellectual property, I'm trying to recoup costs so that I can build a workbench in my garage because people on the internet will respect me more so what kind of arrangements do you have for patents again?" thats likely whats going to happen and is the path people take

So what do you and anyone passing by actually propose? Because what is suggested doesn't really make sense and hasn't really factored in what individuals do and why

I'd be interested in seeing someone think these issues through more deeply. For example I know a reasonable amount about the development of next-gen DNA sequencers. How would developments like this have played out in a world without patents?

It doesn't seem feasible to say that academics would be willing to prepay to fund the development of a life science tool that might help their research and appear in 10 years time or might just fail and not get developed at all. Research markets were the initial markets for these instruments.

Same goes for drug discovery, perhaps they need some new analytical tool. So do they directly fund multiple high risk approaches to develop this tool? In our current scenario VCs/startups take on this risk, in exchange for a time limited monopoly.

It doesn't seem reasonable to expect individual drug development companies to take on this risk. Do they ask prospective users of the drug to pay these downstream development costs? Do they take out a loan to cover the development costs?

Not to mention that for software there's a good chance that this would just supercharge DRM and SaaS.

Because mechanical engineering isn't only math? Math is used of course, but that's true about essentially all professions. But yes, if there is some sort of a pure mathematical model/equation that could apply to mechanical engineering, I'm sure the GP would also agree that it should not be patentable.

I was explaining why people do what they do.