How would you disrupt the patent system?
blog.iandavis.com
blog.iandavis.com
The main problem today is that the patent office grants too many trivial patents. It isn't surprising that it does so, it is motivated to do that: It gets paid per patent, and the faster a reviewer agrees to a patent, the quicker the work for that patent ends.
The only way to fix that is to reverse or at least balance the incentives. Which means, a big cost for every trivial patent the patent office issues.
It would be good if lawmakers passed legislature that did that. But we can't expect them to. A class-action lawsuit can do the same, though. Everyone that has ever been sued or forced to take a license for a trivial patent has been harmed by the patent office not doing its job properly. All those people have standing to sue. For such a massive amount of people, a class-action lawsuit is the way to go.
They're completely going in the wrong direction, full speed ahead.
The change has got to come from legislation, not litigation.
Patents should not be an exclusive license. Instead they should be a limited time income tax benefit. In other words, when you are granted a patent then you get some small percentage break in your income taxes for some number of years. So the only way to benefit from granted patents is to have some actual income! Once an idea is patented, you cannot charge a license fee for the idea as the idea is now public. You can, however, still license implementations of the idea - just like you can with implementations of proprietary ideas covered by trade secret.
The granting of patents would work the same way they do now - first one to file wins. However since you do not get the benefit of owning an idea for the next 20 years and collecting licensing fees on it, the benefit of filing for a patent on new ideas immediately might be a lot lower than it would be to just keep it secret under trade secret and use it yourself as long as possible. The idea here would be to balance the value of an idea in trade with the value of it as an income tax benefit. If you have a bunch of good ideas you've been using for years but are no longer really "secret" you could attempt to patent those old ideas so that the rest of the world can share them and you can get some tax breaks on perhaps the down swing of a product's life cycle. If someone else has already patented the idea ahead of you, well, so be it. The idea is out there already so society hasn't lost anything.
My thinking is that this could be balanced so that the tax benefits are such that companies would want to keep things secret for awhile but then attempt to patent older ideas once products near end of life. It's a race and balance there between keeping something secret and trying to get the tax benefit out of old ideas that might not be very profitable on their own anymore. Any tax benefit would be better than none, so it would seem that old ideas that are no longer used but were being hoarded by the company would suddenly be "valuable" to them, so they'd get the idea out into the public and everybody wins in the long run.
The patent system is already flooded with useless and novel things. The reason is that people are hoping that over the next 20 years (or whatever) that the idea might suddenly become valuable and they can profit off it. With my idea, at least, you cannot profit from a patent unless you're already profiting in the market.
You claim that since Joe is evidently providing something the market values, we should cut his taxes.
But that's what everybody with income does. So why not cut everybody's taxes? We could do that without a sideshow of filing useless patents.
This idea
1. Does not tie rewards in any way to actual innovation.
2. Explicitly suggests that people keep things as trade secrets for a while, which negates the actual purpose of the patent system!
But it should work very well in protecting the companies from the pool against large "patent aggressors", or even against other pools from competing firms. Think of it as NATO vs Russia+China.
In the long term, if patents don't get abolished, at least I'd like to see a law that allows companies to opt-out of the patent system[1], so they don't get to sue others, even if they become big companies, but others can't sue them either. This won't kill the patent system overnight, so big companies who are against abolishing patents, because they have so many, will still be able to assert their patents against other big (or small) companies who also have a lot of patents and don't want to lose them overnight.
[1]This opting out of the patent system idea came from someone else here on HN.
That's the most ridiculous idea for patent reform I've ever read. There are two possibilities.
1. Patents in fact do encourage innovation (at least in some industries) by allowing innovators to recoup their R&D costs before the copiers can jump in. Without this, copiers would get in too fast and reduce the price to where the innovator never makes back the R&D costs.
2. Not #1.
In case #2, we should just get rid of patents.
In case #1, which is most likely the correct case at least for industries where it takes a huge amount of R&D to get a new product to market (e.g., drugs), your suggestion would in effect encourage the formation of more copier companies, and give them free reign to copy.
Mathematically, your free markets need to be clamped at some boundary conditions if you don't want them to get stuck in a local optimum (e.g., big company swallows all). Patents are one way to do this, in theory at least.
One problem is that patent law reflects a one-size-fits-all philosophy: It takes years, and lots of money, to get a patent, but if you do you've got it for 20 years from the filing date, regardless whether you want or need it for that long. I once argued that the Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) could change this, without congressional action, but nothing ever came of it. [1]
[1] http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/docs/JPTOS-Reenginering-the-P...
I would create a patent pool administered by a non-profit that only grants licenses (for free) to people or entities who do not own their own patents or own other entities which own patents. Owners of patents would not be granted licenses even for a fee. Patents would be donated to the pool as a form of charity.
No idea if that would work, but that's what I'd try. A key problem I see is that getting a patent is expensive, it's hard for individuals (from whom most contributions would undoubtedly come) to compete with companies who make a game of churning out as many patents as possible (IBM for example). If however it became large enough, and there were changes in the current system to make defensive patents less valuable, hopefully it could reach a certain critical mass where it would make sense for companies to gift all their patents to the pool in order to gain access to the others.
Startups without existing patents would of course benefit from this.