Not really.
Some patents are fantastically valuable to patent trolls. Some are not. A $500/year fee isn't going to deter a "company" of lawyers who are making millions soaking businesses with patents that should never have been granted.
If you want a scheme that actually does what you want, you'd need something like:
The owner of the patent chooses the fee that they pay per year. And anyone can pay that fee * the remaining years on the patent * some multiplier (probably in the 2-10 range) to prematurely end the patent.
So, if someone's got a patent on a hamster powered submarine, they can keep it for $1 per year (or whatever the minimum should be). And that's fine... because it isn't harming any one since no one wants to build such a thing.
But a patent that a troll is using to milk the industry with will need to have a pretty stiff fee or people won't play ball, they'll just buy out the troll.
So basically ending patents? If you invent something fantastic, say a way for a self driving car to perfectly sense its surroundings, Ford could just come in and pay whatever amount to invalidate your patent and prevent you from bringing your invention to market?
That sounds like a highly constructed example, and even if we take it for bare value, makes a lot of assumptions, for example that whatever you invent is patentable.
The way you phrase it also makes it sound like patents are all about individual contributions, when in reality the era of lone genius inventors is long over (if they ever existed). In the US, it's practice for your funding institution to keep all the rights to your inventions, so if you invented the perfect sense for self driving, it's highly likely that a company like Ford already has the patent, because they quite literally own your intellectual output.
Imo, I feel the same way like OP, there needs to be a use it or loose it doctrine, just like there is with trademarks. Overall the legislation around intellectual property and copyright feels to be in favor of big corps at the moment and should be heavily castrated.
The "you" in that case could very easily be a startup
Some people would say large businesses can make things cheap in a way that small businesses can't compete with. However, that turned out to not happen in practice as big companies chase huge profit margins, supported only by the government.
China doesn't have this problem the US does because they have weaker patent laws. Patents need to be eradicated ASAP or we will not be globally competitive. We are also harming humanity as a whole as the inventive utility of patents simply doesn't scale in proportion to the harms, with the large populations we have now, they are clearly harmful on balance.
The fundamental problem with patents is that the benefit has lower asymptotic complexity with respect to population size than than the harm does. When you exceed some population size, patents become harmful.
The utility of copying is N^2 since you have O(N) copiers and O(N) inventions to copy from.
The harm of patents is therefore O(N^2) since this is the copying that patents prevent.
What we find is that the benefits of patents seem to scale at most around some O(N /log N) ish metric. Doubling the population size increases the number of inventors, but the chance an invention was already invented by someone else increases as population size increases. Hence the benefits of patents scale worse than O(N). Applying that to the harm and we still get O(N(N/logN)) for harm and O(N/logN) for benefits. Clearly patents do not scale.
* Here I am using Log N as a substituite for the difficulty increase of finding an invention not already invented. This exact measure is difficult to estimate.
I get that people don't like patents because they sometimes get abused, but on the whole I think we wouldn't have a lot of the things we take for granted if they didn't exist.
This is where the patent system shines. Because he got a patent he could shop around, sell it to a company which made a tidy profit on it. He didn't need to raise capital to establish a factory and all that to bring it to market and the company buying it seriously got ahead without spending an inordinate amount of money and time inventing the thing.
A slightly different approach would be for patent owners to declare an estimated value and pay property taxes on that value to enforce their monopoly. (They may also wish to update the estimated value periodically as circumstances change, perhaps every few months or years.)
To keep owners honest, anyone is allowed to pay the owner a multiple (1.5x? 2x? 10x?) of the patent's current estimated value to invalidate it.
If the patent owner wishes to hang onto the patent but cannot afford the taxes then perhaps banks would be willing to offer a patent equity line of credit, like using any other income-generating property as collateral.
To use your example, if you estimate that your self-driving patent is a ten million dollar asset and Ford pays you twenty million dollars to invalidate it that seems like you come out ahead because you have more than the patent was worth and can still build your product.
Part of the problem is having a huge number of BS patents driving up the cost of going through all of them to figure out what's what.
Its not the only problem with patents, but i think a "property tax" solution would solve some of the issues. I'd like it to be incrementing each year - like first year $0/year, and increasing each year so the longer you keep things out of the public domain the more you need to be able to self-jystify its value.
In the future you can amend the value claim, but you can only adjust it down.
The two are very different concepts.
edit: this is why you don't patent every damned thing, just the things that you believe will be profitable over the next 20 years. Otherwise, the cost of researching and filing the patent, as well as maintaining it, may well exceed whatever profit you actually get from the thing.
Unless you work for a corporation, that owns your intellectual output anyway, and encourages you to submit forms for anything that looks even remotely patentable.
But even then, if you devise some thing that will be very useful if we ever get teleportation working, your employer may still not patent it, if they believe that teleportation is more than 20 years away.
If other people are better than you at seeing what some technology could be used for it, then maybe we should lower the barriers for those people. The whole point of the patent system should be to provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people.
Companies and researchers should be free to patent to protect themselves, but patent trolls with no clear technological development (no lab, no product, no licensing+developing) should be stopped.
It seems easy to me to draw a bounding box around these behaviors with a simple test. Perhaps like a Howey test [1], but for patent trolling.
This seems like a pretty bad attempt at such a scheme.
Invalidity arguments and IPRs suddenly aren't things?
Presumption of validity is what makes patent trolling more lucrative than other forms of predatory litigation. You're guilty until proven innocent, because the law assumes that the patent office is generally doing the right thing.
It's just an evidentiary presumption that is trivially rebutted with any evidence.
I'm sure that you're aware that when you go to court, the result is never certain. Bad ruling happen all the time.
IP is property, and it's taxed at the value you declare that it's worth.
However, if you swear to the IRS that it's worth $500/yr, then you can't claim in court that a violation of it is costing you $10,000,000/yr in losses. That would be perjury.
Your patent is worth $10,000,000? Awesome! I bet your local school district will love to hear how much you'll be paying in taxes on it.
Instead of doubling every year, my proposal is 5-year terms: the first is free, then $1000 for the next 5, $10k for the next 5, $100k for the next 5, etc. Feel free to adjust the actual dollar amounts, but you get the idea. Most stuff would be in the public domain after 10 years, if not 5.
Congratulations on the massive net loss in taxable income in your country.
EDIT: Removed some mean words.
Companies are going to want to sell in one of the richest markets in the world; they can either pay for IP protection or not be granted it.
edit: I'm not suggesting these exact $ values as clearly being the correct ones, it's just an example.
You don't see how such a policy would spur terror among large, profitable companies with trade secrets, leading to them moving overseas?
If this is the only real problem, than why not just let them go overseas? Let the market play it out? The boon of progress and freedom X country would get from becoming even little more rational about IP would pay for itself and be better for actual people.
That's what China has been doing for decades, and "gongkai" [1] is just one tiny part of it. While life for the average Chinese citizen has gone up - the CCP managed to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty - the life of most Western populations has gone down the drain as entire industries, entire towns were unable to cope with unfair competition.
The societal consequences of that will haunt us all for many years to come.
What I like for IP laws is as follows:
When you create a protected work, you pay a very small fee. Say, $1 for copyright, maybe $500 for a patent.
Each year thereafter, if you wish to maintain your IP protection, you must pay double what was paid the previous year. Otherwise the property reverts to the public domain.
This ensures a period of protection if it's genuinely needed, but ensures that everything will eventually enter the public domain, especially in the case where no one is making any economic use of the material.
Currently, there's an incentive to disallow progress. If someone does not want to make use of their own patent, they are currently incentivized to sit on it and keep the ability to create that thing out of the hands of anyone else, "just in case". If we shorten the period as you suggest, to half (for example), then that freezes that progress for a decade.
If an incentive is created to put inventions into the public domain if one is not using them, then that is better for everyone.
And by doubling the fee each year, it becomes financially infeasible for even large companies to keep things out of the public domain forever. A fee of $500 that doubles annually would, at the 20 year mark that is the current patent lifespan, cost a half a billion dollars to renew for that year.
a ship declared the value of their cargo for toll purposes. They decided the price, but the catch was the customs could buy the cargo at that price.
There's clearly values I'd easily accept, you offer me a hundred grand for my car and you can take it whenever you want.
Now for regular items like a car this would be hard. How do I value it and how do I not get caught out when second hand sales spike and I don't follow the markets?
But we're not talking about everyone's car. We're talking about asking the state to forbid others to make or build certain things (yes I know it's more detailed but you get the meaning).
That extra “value” (or tax on people) you ascribe to your car may or may not be distributed in manner that societally makes sense
Or have I misunderstood your point?
It may not be intuitive how the math works but this would be exploited so hard it would cause serious social and political issues. I don’t have a dog in this fight, I am just savvy enough to the math to see how bad an idea this is. Which is probably why no government has seriously attempted it even though it is an old idea.
Lots of people don’t know what their IP is worth, and it can change with market and tech trends.
And the damages aren’t based on the harm to the IP owner, but on the benefit to the infringer.
I could have a patent that I think is worthless, but in 10 years I discover that a multinational flat out stole the IP after an NDA meeting. What is the value that I should have declared?
Some states also tax car as property.
What is not taxed is Intellectual Property. Because it is almost completely owned by the super rich. And, of course, these billionaires need all the help they can get. How about we change this? We can think of wiping out property taxes for homeowners (making homes affordable) and fund education from patent taxes. After all, the super rich are deriving these patents from the education system, its only fair they pay their fair share.
It isn't now, but we could make it so.
Those 'taxes' already exist (at least in the US system). They are called "maintenance fees".
See https://www.fr.com/insights/ip-law-essentials/everything-abo...
Failing to pay the fee causes the patent to expire, and be unable to be used to sue someone. So these troll firms must also be paying these fees to be able to sue based on the patent.
1st year = 2000 USD
10th year = 1m USD per year
20th year = 1bn USD per year
It becomes prohibitively expensive if you don't use it. After 23 years it would make only sense for the most insane blockbuster drugs to keep going for another year.
- small companies and private people can afford patents
- big corps do not get an advantage, in fact the bigger they get, the more expensive holding a patent becomes, ensuring they have to use those patents and not patent everything just because
- number of patents any single entity can hold is limited, unless they want to go in debt for holding patents
- there could still be a minimum yearly amount as proposed by you
There is literally no case in which society profits from a corp being split up into a thousand holdings.
Why punish patent holders because of patent trolls or garbage patents ?
Make it unprofitable to be a troll, and they will go away. Trolls need to be tagged , like pirates. There should be rules to make hunting for trolls profitable. For that, you need a "bounty". Here's my take:
In any patent dispute[1], the loser will pay as punitive damages (this is the "bounty") to the winner, the lower of (i) the winner's legal costs, OR the loser's legal costs x 2, plus (ii) loser must disclose the ultimate name of the beneficial owners (or material, if public) of the loser. EINs not allowed. The "trolls" are thus, branded.
The next lawsuit ensues. During research, it is found that one of the parties is a known troll that has lost 1 prior case. Now the damages, should troll lose, are 2X of any settlement OR punitive amount.
Should troll lose again, an extra 2x (total, 4x) gets applied on the punitive damage[1] to the troll and so on. If troll wins, his x is halved.
This does 3 things:
1- Incentivize public to seek out weak patents, or trolls, for a payout.
2- Makes Trolling much harder at scale.
3- Ensures huge companies face risks if they throw their weight around. Bigco can afford $$ penalties vs small fish, but cannot afford to be tagged a 2-4x troll. It makes them an attractive target for bigger fish looking for the 2X or 4X reward challenge of Bigco patent portfolio.
Erm, what service? A record in a database? How's that different from a patent office? I guess there's fancy registrar website...to do what...help me pay my recurring bill?
OK fine want an ongoing patient fee ? Make it $9.99 per year just like a registrar, who gives you convenient ways to renew and pay fees from a working, modern site, and allow migration , with a few clicks.
Is that going to prevent trolls ? Unequivocally, no.
Parent was arguing for some ridiculous, unnecessary , tax. Then cited registrars as an example.
My point, 1 gives a service, one does not. If you want to charge for a service, then make it transparent and make the fee reflect the service, not argue "hey we already charge for registrars" to make his/her point about a new, unecessary tax.
Edit: It is also there to make it slightly more expensive to create scam sites, but mostly for the anti-hoarding.
Now, Patents already require fees and also substantial paperwork. In effect that is the "hoarding" control.
I stand corrected that the point of ICANN and registrars to charge something is to introduce a barrier to entry. Yet, I'd argue you are still providing a service if the fees go towards nonprofit activity to improve interoperability.
Yet, introducing a huge fee to patents wouldn't really be conductive to anything on the patent side, which is at the core my issue: I'm not making a judgement about the margin on fees, i'm questioning whether there's a semblance of service. From my vantage point, registrars have made massive improvements in accessibility and ease of use, and as you said, they have lowered the barriers to entry. | I can't say the same at all for patents.
I work for a registrar and know people working at registries so I know that is not the case. The reason they charge more than like 1-2 dollars per year is to make it expensive to hoard domains.
I worked for a registrar for a decade+ and worked with a lot of hoarders. Very early on in my career I actually dobbed one in to our local registry authority (because I was naive, and he was CLEARLY breaching the requirements for our ccTLD and so I thought 'Well this is wrong and I should report it') and is how I discovered nobody actually cares about hoarding and just wants to maximise revenue. (Well duh I suppose.)
So TrollCo will just pay a different homeless person $100 to be the owner on paper for each of their patents?
I don't think you fully appreciate how tough is to run a business with someone's name on top of every document. Not to say its not possible for a determined actor, but its going to eliminate a lot of options from the get go.
Then, let a judge find out!
The kicker is: the values are public, and if anybody wants to buy it for something higher than the assigned value (or maybe some fixed percentage above the assigned value), you HAVE to sell. Of course, the buyer is then taxed at the higher value.
is it is always a bad idea to ear mark a tax for a specific purpose. Especially if you desire to use the tax as a punitive measure to reduce that which you deem bad for society, if it works now you need to come up with the money for the thing you funded elsewhere because all government programs are permanent
Look at smoking, all kind of things were funded on the back of smoking taxes, and when those punitive taxes worked to reduce smoking the revenue dried up but the budgets for for those programs did not so now the money had to come from somewhere else....
Using the tax code to punish or reward behavior is always bad
You seem to misunderstand the entire concept of taxation, in its entirety, also. Taxes can either be used to raise revenue, or to correct for externalities. A tax that corrects an externality is valid on its own, EVEN IF, the revenue from that tax is burned or otherwise destroyed. It corrects for market failure, which leads to greater surplus.
Isn't that pretty much the entire purpose of the tax code and why it's so complicated?
It's one of the tools the government has to shape behavior.
Actual tax revenue doesn't really matter since a permanent deficit and ever-growing debt is apparently fine.
Allowing the government to use taxation for purposes other than public finance has been and will continue to be an avenue for abuse, and authoritarian control ultimately leading to tyranny
My rationale is that it means that only people that are rich can own property as they can afford the taxes, and especially if the property has increased in value over time and has no or small associated cash flows. By all means tax gains on realization (though I’d argue there should be a CPI adjustment to the basis but that’s another conversation)
The intention of legally enforced ownership is primarily to encourage development - and not to incentivize speculation as we seem to be doing in many situations. It seems reasonable to tax such speculation.
I'm inclined to agree with you.
What would this do to people who file their own patents to protect their own inventions? Historically, that's been the vast bulk of all useful inventions in this country.
For example, maybe the fee is $10000 for the first year. This doesn't come close to recouping the cost of a single enforcement action, but it makes sure that someone has some skin in the game. Then every year the cost gets 10x more expensive. Of course you are free to choose your own base and multiplier.
For someone to keep a patent for 5 years, the total cost would be $10k + $100k + $1M + $10M + $100M = $111110000. Maybe it's worth it for a patent like the light bulb. Probably not worth it for a drinking bird toy. But either way, the value decision is up to the patent holder, and the cost of the patent incentivizes rapid monetization rather than squatting.
amusing opinions that remind me not to trust them
Why only those things?