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Comment by Bockit | Hacker News Reader

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Bockit·

Does anyone have any thoughts on if making patents non-transferrable would help the current patent situation?

I'll admit I have barely begun to think about the implications so it may be dumb from the outset but I think:

* No transferring to patent trolls

* No situations like the link

I haven't really thought about the opposite side of things, was kind of hoping people here would have strong opinions on the matter.

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I'm not sure how that could be done. If I understand correctly it's the person with his name on the patent that is allowing these companies to use his patent in anyway they see fit. Their name is still on the patent so it wasn't exactly transferred.

Can someone clarify the mechanics of this?

There is a difference between inventor and assignee.

Typically, inventor is a person or group of people that acutally invented something, while assignee is "the owner" of the patent that can use it fro protection, lawsuits, etc.

Noone can change inventor, but assignee can sell patent and reassign it to someone else.

Ah I see how that works now, so it would be possible to make the assignee a one time thing too but in the end what would prevent a "inventor" from assigning the patent to a troll in the first place and some troll create their own patents so that's an issue too.

Buying companies for patents would also leave another loophole. This issue isn't simple I guess.

Making patents non transferable could result in many a big ideas not getting executed because the inventor does not have the capacity to implement them or is on the way to implement it in a commercially poor way.

Why would this be so? Surely the inventor could simply licence the patent to a party which does have the capacity to fully the exploit the invention?

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