Nokia Tells Reddit It Infringes Some Patents in Lead-Up to IPO

... but ...

Seems like that isn't their main use anymore.

In practice, my understanding is that you can't really afford to enforce your patent without a big legal team, and even then, the cost can sink your fledgling company

I think the real problem is the cost of accessing and navigating the legal system (including: the cost of invalidating bogus patents)

The alternative would be a gold rush every time a good idea is had. It would be chaos.

Patents could be shorter though. Ten years?

For me, the Polio vaccine is an easy one. Of course, Salk chose not to patent it, but I would have been happy to make him and his lab very rich.

I've read a fair number of patents, both in and outside of software, and my biggest problem with software patents is that most of them are absolute crap: they are generally neither innovative nor insightful.

There are some avid supporters of this strain of thought. Here is an example: albeit old, this may give some background:

https://mises.org/library/book/against-intellectual-property

Particular industries, eg drug patenting, could be far better addressed with targeted legislation but at this point it's mostly just momentum and vested interests. It provides huge benefits for a small group and diffused costs. It's hard to imagine it being possible to get enough momentum to change things.

Every patent is taxed at some arbitrary rate - say 3% a year. The catch is the patent holder decides how much it’s worth. Low value means low tax. However, whatever value you pick is an open price for licensing by anyone else.

Ultimately, use it or lose it. If you don’t think it’s valuable and someone else does, the world still benefits.

Tune the tax percentage based on how much you want to hurt patent trolls vs impact on actual long term R&D

How patents are supposed to work:

You come up with an idea for a novel device. You spend time, money, and effort figuring out how to create your novel device. Once you actually have it working—or at least a detailed schematic, if building a prototype might be cost-prohibitive—you file a patent. That patent does two things: First, it ensures that, for the duration of patent protection, you have sole rights to produce the novel device. Second, it ensures that once that duration expires, anyone with the resources to obtain the raw materials and manpower can create as many of your novel devices as they want.

Then in comes the information revolution. There's much less demand for novel devices that do specific things; now people just want software that can run on general-purpose computers. Software is already protected under copyright law, so there's no logical reason for it to be patentable—but some people still want it to be patentable too...with a twist. They don't want to just be able to patent a specific implementation of an idea in software. They want to be able to patent the idea itself, so all they need to do is come up with a thought of a kind of software you could write, translate that thought into patent language, and submit it to the patent office.

This is how you end up with idiocy like saying you own the sole rights to "selling people stuff by adding it to a digital shopping cart—over the internet!"

TL;DR: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Get rid of software patents, and the whole concept of "patents on ideas", but keep patents on novel devices.

I can understand why Nokia might have sued these companies because all of them make phones/hardware and there could even be legitimate patent infringements.

I am confused why they sued Reddit though. They don't make any hardware.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/0nn7e1e