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Comment by StriverGuy | Hacker News Reader

I would say it needs to be realigned to only allow productive companies to hold/protect patents.

That would mean only large companies would own patents. It would be the death of the independent inventor. No capital to make what you invented? Oh well…

Not at all, Patent is there for protection. So if you invent something that requires capital, but are a non-practicing entity, you can't enforce your patent. So lets say a bunch of companies start to practice your patent, all of them now have incentive to buy your patent because if any of them own it, none of their competitors can use it anymore.

If you can't make what you invented, the whole world can't have your invention? That seems suboptimal for society.

If you can't make what you invented, you can find someone who can and license the invention to them. That seems optimal for society.

>>> I would say it needs to be realigned to only allow productive companies to hold/protect patents.

>> That would mean only large companies would own patents. It would be the death of the independent inventor. No capital to make what you invented? Oh well…

> If you can't make what you invented, the whole world can't have your invention? That seems suboptimal for society.

Right now, a small independent inventor can use their patent rights to secure capital to produce their invention. If only "productive companies" can hold patents, instead of investing in small inventors, they'd just freeze them out until they lose their rights (or use that threat as leverage to buy the patents for less than they're worth).

The "whole world" won't get their invention, just the people rich enough to profit from it, and the inventor gets squat.

> instead of investing in small inventors, they'd just freeze them out until they lose their rights (or use that threat as leverage to buy the patents for less than they're worth).

I'm trying to understand your point but it seems like you are saying that all people with sufficient capital would band together to prevent small inventors from getting funding for years?

> I'm trying to understand your point but it seems like you are saying that all people with sufficient capital would band together to prevent small inventors from getting funding for years?

Legal rights are often the only protections the little guy has. Take them away, and the big guys are better able to take advantage. The people with sufficient capital don't need to band together in a conspiracy, they just need to understand their advantage, and act accordingly.

And I don't know where you're getting "for years" from. If a small inventor/"[un]productive company" can hold a patent "for years," you're basically describing the current patent system, and the ancestor comment becomes a meaningless suggestion. If the ancestor comment isn't a meaningless suggestion, someone "with sufficient capital" should be able to sue an inventor's patent into nonexistence for being held by an "[un]productive company," which would be strong leverage to demand a lower price.

One of the biggest merits of the patent system is it gives independent small inventors a chance at seeing some success. A "reform" that undermines that is not a reform worth pursuing.

Also a lot of "reforms" proposed by internet commenters aren't very thought through. Often they're just narrow things aimed to stop some specific thing that's in the front of their mind, with little consideration of collateral damage.

They can make it; they just need to pay a reasonable royalty. One of the easiest fixes for patent litigation issues would be for congress to set some bounds on what a reasonable royalty is.

How could Congress ever do that in a reasonable way? There are orders of magnitude differences in the value of various patents.

You could always license it out.

There would be no reason to buy the license because you'd lose in court if you weren't using it. Companies could just use it with no fear of you winning a case against them.

You can't even just accept that the originating patent holder should be able to sue while anyone who buys the patent can't. Patent trolls would just hire the person who registered the patent or sue on their behalf.

There is no elegant solution to the patent troll problem. If someone can sue, then trolls can sue.

You could make an exception for the inventor.

The days of garage invention and patenting those are gone. Patent process itself is so expensive and laborious that many do not do it, and upon that to keep patent 'alive' there is an annual expenditure.

I'm not sure whether today there are are many patents which are with small inventors and they are holding onto them till they gather enough funds to productionize them.

How about modifiying to if you can prove "prior art" on an invention but did not have sufficient capitol to file for the protection or start up a business with the patent so that someone else is granted the patent later, the prior art owner is not subject to the patent?

Not a perfect idea, but an idea to kick around on improving rather than just the blanket statments of "kill all patents" that are so trendy. Also, we don't have to say that all garage inventors are dead.

That's not a terrible idea. People likely underestimate how much of the legal system runs on - essentially - sensible human discretion in applying rules like that one.

Have you ever watched Shark Tank?

You realize that is highly dramatized and curated?

Annually around 1.5-2 millions patents are granted. How many episodes of Shark Tank has run till now and what subset of the participants had patents on their inventions?

And, how many of those inventors would not get any funding if there was no concept of patents.

> That would mean only large companies would own patents.

Wrong. If you applied a tax to IP that increases relatively fast over time (say doubles each year), you could "easily" select the parameters so, that it makes cheap to hold your patent for a while after the invention ( assuming you have some revenue at least on sight), while making it too expensive to hoard patents for nothing, and make keeping the patents closed unnecessarily long for even the largest corporations.

Perhaps we could do something like: if a company is not actively using a patent themselves, they lose exclusive rights after a short period of time (3 years lets say). Even when sold, the time counts from when the patent was created, not bought.

Should limit the extent of the damage caused by patent trolls.

This is a good idea in theory, but what stops a factory offering to produce one of anything for a few thousand dollars, just to meet the requirements of "making a product." If there are requirements for how many you produce, how does that affect small businesses or businesses that want to keep products exclusive?

Good point, too easy to work around. Shortening to half time as Robotbeat said might be the way to go.

This would at least force them to establish an example of a product using their invention, which seems like it'd be a great boon.

I think in general we should just halve the time of patent protection, including the lead-up time where it hasn’t been finalized yet but still protected.

With trademark, it's use it or lose it, as it should be with patents.

EDIT: I accidentally included copyright in this. It is not.

How is copyright use it or lose it?

Sorry, I should've left that out. Edited.

Although interestingly in the EU there is now a small use-it-or-lose-it element with sound recordings, where the copyright on sound recordings expires fifty years after the original recording, or seventy years after the first publication (or at least public playback) by the rightful owner. Cue a number of labels actually officially releasing a number of previously unpublished recordings in order to prevent the corresponding bootlegs of those recordings from falling into the public domain.

Is ARM productive? They're not making CPUs themselves...

Do patent trolls spend billions of dollars designing CPUs or whatever else they hold patents on?

They make CPU designs which they license out. That's copyrighted IP, and thus a product.

If ARM stopped making CPU designs and decided to just live off of their ISA patents while doing little to no actual development, yeah, then they certainly shouldn't have the right to be milking that cow in perpetuity, in an ideal world.

They shouldn't have the right to sell their existing designs until the patent expires?

This is the current system

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