Patents against prosperity
economist.com
economist.com
People largely think of computers as "invented", but that's horseshit. We've seen maybe 1% of the disruption that computers are going to cause.
Bitcoin was one of those "holy shit" moments for me, when I realized that we've only begun to see how computing is going to radically transform the shape of money.
Huge aspects of our lives remain largely unaffected by the invention of the computer, because actually applying the computer to our problems takes decades. It is a slow process of hacking out brittle solutions to niche problems, and then waiting as those solutions are slowly absorbed and molded to our culture, and then used widely enough that someone else can take the next tiny step.
Think about this: Medicine turns out to be a low hanging fruit as far as A.I. concerned, in that relatively simple statistical models can be valuable diagnostic tools. Doctors still operate the way they did 100 years ago... reading lots of books in medical school, and then looking in those books as they do their job. Only now, in PubMed and the like, they've got a much bigger book and they can flip through it faster. AI hasn't even really poked over their horizon.
And that's an easy problem. The hard problems that computing will obliterate are a hundred years off.
We have yet to experience a single generation where every child had access to programming tools from birth.
We have no idea what is coming. But I am certain we will be seeing decade after decade of relentless innovation as this plays out.
Alas, hammering this into a legally rigorous argument would be quite a challenge, but in general the very idea that hundreds of people could be in violation of your patent without any sort of communication between themselves for the purposes of violating this patent, or any sort of trail back to the patent holder, shouldn't actually be possible.
Say AntiLodsys invents micro transactions - which, for the purposes of this post is a non obvious technology that wouldn't have been invented by anyone else anytime soon - and patents a specific implementation of it. Unlike real Lodsys, which bought a junk patent and claims it covers every piece of software that networks, AntiLodsys actually invented something useful, which has value.
Sony, Microsoft, IBM etc are given presentations by AntiLodsys, demonstrating the system they've come up with. They all think it is fantastic, and license the technology.
From this point on, micro transactions will be seen as the direction that the industry is going in, and AntiLodsys is some obscure technology company that most have never heard of.
From there, a whole flood of smaller companies start using micro transactions, violating the patent, and a few years later, AntiLodsys starts sending out legal notices to companies violating its patent. The industry cries foul, because the whole idea of micro transactions is seen as obvious, the way the industry was going, etc. It's painted a patent troll, trying to steal bread from the table of hardworking independent developers.
So there's a situation where, if one accepts the premise of patents to begin with, a company nobody has heard of actually does have a legitimate claim.
"A new paper on "The Myth of the Sole Inventor" by Mark Lemley, a professor of law at Stanford, reinforces Mr Sanchez's point.
[S]urveys of hundreds of significant new technologies show that almost all of them are invented simultaneously or nearly simultaneously by two or more teams working independently of each other. Invention appears in significant part to be a social, not an individual, phenomenon. Inventors build on the work of those who came before, and new ideas are often "in the air," or result from changes in market demand or the availability of new or cheaper starting materials. ..."
It's very common that ideas multiple people in the same time throughout the world, and that multiple businesses are working on it in the same time. Even the light bulb was invented by many people in about the same time, without knowledge of Edison doing the same.
The world consists of 7 billion people. Surely, quite a few of them manage to see where some technologies are going and try to work on the next step in the technological progress.
Also, don't forget that as human beings, we've always used prior knowledge to improve ourselves and our technology. No technology can be invented in isolation from other technologies right now. They are all invented in the context of technology that has already existed.
Patents don't seem to account for that. They act as if technologies are born in isolation, and also they act as if only one person in the whole world (or country) can invent something at a time. Both are flawed concepts.
Check out this video here about how inventions are born:
Basically, I was trying to point out that wide infringement without knowledge of a patent does not a priori mean a patent should be invalid.
Actually, I think you're right about the way invention usually happens. Software patents are by far a net loss for the industry, and I'm against them. I just like to reply when I see what seems to me to be a flawed argument, whether I agree with the conclusion or not.
Maybe we should ask to change the law to say that because of the nature of software and the rapid change of growth in emerging technologies, the length of time a software patent owner gets to generate money from his invention is limited to a much shorter length of time, say 1 or 2 years. This way, legitimate patent owners as per your example still have time to generate income and establish themselves as market leaders in whatever technology, but there is much less incentive for people to patent troll, since the patents aren't intrinsically worth as much.
Also, perhaps you shouldn't be allowed to sell patents on to other people. That seems completely against the spirit of the whole thing - I should only be allowed to license you my patented idea. If I sell you my patent, does that mean you came up with the idea, suddenly? Buying and selling patents is surely only for evil purposes...
My favorite part of the broadcast (the abridged ATC version - I haven't listened to the full hour, is it better?) was the engineer who went on about what unintelligible garbage most software patents are. The ones I've read remind me of the bogus design documents put forth by architects and middle managers in large companies -- box charts and technobabble.
And they call them "inventions"!
When you think of it like that, doesn't the whole edifice come crumbling down? The goal of patents was to encourage publication of new techniques. But the most valuable ones escape.
These edge cases exist; the problem is the patent system doesn't assume they're edge cases and instead seems to encompass anything and everything that can be classed as an invention (not to mention some concepts that are so vague and broad it's question whether they actually describe anything at all)
The problem with trade secrets companies are unwilling or unable to patent won't go away.
It is nice to see this issue filtering its way through popular media, but the problem is that some of the nuances seem to be getting lost along the way.
Maybe it's just me, but I would have liked to see a bit more background on this issue than what was presented in this article. Even just a little discussion regarding the problems specfic to software patents. (I.e. the question of whether software is even patentable.)
I guess the problem with that is the more details get included, the further from the mainstream you get.
Really, I think that it would take something really shocking to get the real mainstream into this. Something like an injunction against some popular piece of hardware (or software). Then you wouldn't need to include all of the details. You could just rely on people having knee-jerk reactions against patents in general.
The fix comes when a cool new technology gets invented in America, produced in China and then sold everywhere on earth but the USA while garnering huge media attention. Something almost iPhone big that Americans just can't get.
I was hoping Spotify would be a good trial run. I'm hoping they just pack up and head to greener pastures.
Even more fun fact: the National Review has also been pro-legalization for ages, as was William F. Buckley Jr.
This is indeed amazing.
Case In Point 1: If the company suing Spotify is truly a patent troll (i.e. a non-practicing entity), then buying into IV's patent fund would not help them. Having defensive patents only works when the aggressor has a line of business that could be threatened with patent infringement.
Case In Point 2: I have to take issue with Lemley's critique of simultaneous invention. To name two high-profile cases, consider the Bell-Gray simultaneous invention of the telephone, or Dow and Exxon's slugfest over metallocene-catalyzed polyethylene patent protection in the late 1990's.
There are many things that you can do within the law that many people will find unethical. That is the case of Intellectual Ventures. Complaining about unethical behavior is very much valid.
Moreover, publicizing (i.e. complaining about) the behavior of entities like Intellectual Ventures is pretty much necessary for fixing the patent systems. The prevailing wisdom, at least among people who decide those things, that patents are good because they lead to economic prosperity.
Those people need to be told about cases where the exact opposite of that is happening and that's why we need to complain about IV and Loadsys and others as loudly and as frequently as possible, so that the people who can abolish patents hear those complaints.
Also who decide what is ethical or not? Why is Apple making ungodly amount of money on the backs of poor consumers is ethical while IV making bucks for their investors is not?
My point is it's better to attack the source of the problem - patent system, than focus on the superficial feel-good stuffs.
And Apple is getting tons of flack for the HTC patent case. They are not escaping freely while Intellectual Ventures is getting pounded on. And as far as poor consumers who buy from Apple, that's their own damn fault for doing so.
It's completely different when then a company like IV prying on small company who build things with patents that wouldn't stand in court. The little guy cannot sue IV to prove that since they don't have the cash. Public shaming in this case is the best way to go and it's the best way to bring it to the attention of the politicians who can fix the issue.
How can Spotify use IV's patent pool defensively against PacketVideo, a patent troll when they PacketVideo doesn't do anything other than sue? The defensive aspect only comes into play against companies who have other lines of revenue that you can threaten... thoughts?