Patent trolls have a surprising ally: universities
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The solution is to attack those two problems. Not to attack the concept of patents themselves nor NPEs.
If the anti-patent-troll efforts were focused upon those two points specifically, meaningful reform would be much easier to achieve; fewer special interests would be aligned against the changes.
This is all exacerbated by the fact that the patent agency is a government agency, where there really isn't anything incentivizing them to get better. And yet on the other side you have lawyers who are 100% incentivized to create the most convoluted patents to actively confuse (the already ill-equipped) patent clerks and juries.
I also agree with the statement "if we could just grant the right patents then this wouldn't be a problem". I just don't see any reasonable way to increase the fidelity of patent grants, nor a reasonable fallback system for when a bad patent DOES inevitably get granted (trial by jury for discerning innovation is probably the worst method).
1000 years ago you could be a mathematician, poet, and biologist. Today, you have to go to school for 5 years to get a PhD in an incredibly focused subfield. 100 years ago the patents you were dealing with were "machine that makes light". Now its methods of improving graphics performance when running on this super specific kind of computer architecture. It might have been reasonable for an outsider to make a judgement call before, but I seriously don't think it is anymore.
But it's not my impression that the patents that have been causing a lot of trouble are largely of this extremely specialized kind. A lot of them seem to have to do with implementations or applications of networking -- like the one Newegg is currently defending against, which is claimed to cover SSL/TLS key negotiation. There was another a while back that purportedly covered podcasting. I don't think it takes years of study to understand what these things are.
As an aside, I think that the funds should come from the patent applicants themselves, and should cover the level of examination required. If examination is insufficiently deep, then the depth should be increased and the fees increased to cover the cost for this.
IME, patent office fees are tiny compared to the amount that applicants generally spend on their patent attorneys, so there should be no hardship there.
Patent application fees should reflect the real cost of processing the application. If improving patent quality requires an increased processing cost, then this should happen, since not doing so unreasonably increases future litigation costs for everyone. Subsidizing small companies' applications might then be reasonable if we want to promote startups and smaller research groups, but there's no reason to subsidize the largest companies' applications.
It's such an extremely absurd idea that I'm amazed at how many people accept it as being normal. Patents are the closest thing we have to literal buying of laws.
Furthermore, if you aren't against patents in general, there is no principled argument that can be made against software patents in particular. Software is just as inventive as other realms.
Also, please don't assume that whatever can get published in a Nature paper is ready for mainstream use. It can take years of further R&D (that's not paper-worthy) to actually create something for the market. Dis-incentivising that process would be detrimental in the long term.
Note: my comments relate to science-based patents, not software ones (I don't really understand those).
Edit: If the problem is with the Patent system, that's where a solution must be found. Identify and deal with the actual problem, not the symptoms.
I've realised from your final question that you're conflating two different issues. University research likely isn't driven by the desire to make patentable stuff. Looking back earlier in the thread, I think that's the point you're making and I do agree [1]. However, you're mixing it up with the separate discussion of whether (and how) the University should participate in the commercial exploitation of research work, e.g. when someone does want to patent something and make money from it.
On that point, it's worth comparing with what happens in industry. Employment contracts can state that anything you end up inventing during your service belongs to your employer [2]. Therefore, is it unreasonable that University, as an employer, would try to assert the same? I'm not making a judgement on this, rather pointing out a view that may be held by others (I suspect it would be an unpopular view in most of my circles and I'm not sure how I feel about it). In any case, that seems to be your main question and I'm sure it's a contentious one for any academic institution (it was at mine).
[1] Unless it's funded by pharma companies. I've had friends who can't reveal details of their work until the work is complete and the patent applications are in and the papers have been published (in that order). In all cases, they were partially, or wholly, funded by big pharma companies.
[2] http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/19422/if-im-working-...
Yes, they are. Universities are essentially a combination of a hackerspace with a startup accelerator, they have just grown to the point that you don't recognize them as such. The services they provide are essential to starting companies requiring more infrastructure than a laptop computer. They provide the multi-million dollar cleanrooms required to do nanoscale fabrication, the multi-million dollar spectrometers and chromatography setups required for chemical and biological engineering, seats on even the most expensive mathematical and physical simulation software, and mechanical prototyping facilities. They house a collection of experts, technicians, and cheap skilled labor (grad students) the likes of which cannot be found anywhere else or bought for less than a small fortune. They have industry connections that span many different market sectors and they have respect from society at large that gives them special dispensation to perform certain kinds of risky experiments (medical trials, chemical synthesis with reagents that could be re-purposed to produce drugs/explosives/nerve gas, and nuclear reactions). They even provide small stipends for their tinkerers.
These things cost money, yet many of them are advantageous or essential for starting a company, depending on the field (do you really think you can develop a next-gen neural interface, MEMS sensor, or drug delivery mechanism in your garage?). The arrangement is simple: a spun-out company can repurpose research done using these facilities if they promise to give the university IP revenue (the specifics of which are negotiated on a case-by-case basis). The nice thing about using patents to carry out this process is that they can be negotiated retroactively. Startup accelerators require equity up front, but that's not a workable arrangement if you won't know how commercializable your product will be until after you have spent your research budget.
I would hate to see this side of patent law disappear. Such "reformation" might just succeed in turning the university into the sterile ivory tower of arcane, pointless tinkering you seem to think it is. We need to fix patent law, not eliminate it.
Focusing on the "risky investment" part, the investment is not just monetary: I spent a full year of my grad research barking up the wrong tree. All I got out of it was a few pages to pad my thesis with.
Just like publications, as useful as it is to future researchers, you can't make a thesis out of "we tried this, it doesn't work", and a huge chunk of research work is exactly that.
1. The universities do have a legitimate right to the work of grad students. They provide the facilities and the environment for this work to happen. And this is not just paying the electric bills and some of the stipends. It includes teaching the right courses, inviting leading researchers to speak thereby enabling the creation of new knowledge, helping conduct research conferences and so forth. It's only fair that they earn some money off the work that the grad students and faculty do.
2. Universities have a strong incentive to monetize their intellectual property. This is why they will almost always licence the IP back to the inventors for reasonable terms if the inventors want to start a company with their work. Just owning IP isn't very useful to universities, they want to earn royalties.
3. It's the current climate of academic funding being extremely hard to find that is forcing universities to look for newer revenue streams. If you are frustrated with their behavior, at least a part of the blame goes to our anti-intellectual Zeitgeist which regards academic teaching and research with extreme mistrust.
also these academia patents probably had public money funding then also.
Yes, but does that mean that all things that made from public funding should not be monetized? Is it a requirement that a road constructed out of taxpayer money should not have a toll?
You can see the obvious analogies with patents on publicly funded research.
This is to be distinguished from congestion pricing which has nothing to do with paying for the road and should only apply at the times when the road would otherwise have insufficient capacity for the traffic volume, with the explicit intent of reducing usage. Note however that congestion pricing can be inefficient for many of the same reasons and is also undesirable unless the alternatives of expanding road capacity or improving mass transit to reduce traffic volume are both impractical.
In order for the government to fairly collect based on the utility of the roads, they would have to go out and pay all the transaction costs to determine the correct amounts -- how much should someone without a car be paying for the roads for the benefit of allowing mail and packages to be delivered, or of having goods they can buy delivered to local stores, or of having a timely emergency response? Shouldn't people more likely to need an ambulance be paying more for roads ambulances can use? Shouldn't trucks that deliver necessities be paying a higher toll since the recipients clearly benefit from them more than trucks delivering frivolous things? How do we determine what proportion of the value of some delivery of goods or other use of the road is attributable to the existence of the road, and what do we use as a reference to calculate the alternative in each case?
Apportioning the value of the roads to the people who find them useful is utterly hopeless. And if you're not going to do it right, and doing it wrong causes both unfairness and economic inefficiency, you ought not to do it at all and just fund it through general taxation.
Yes it requires technology to collect the tolls. We have that down to a pretty efficient science these days thanks to cameras. They don't even slow down traffic to collect tolls.
I've never encountered a toll road that wasn't a major expressway. The coffee house argument is non-sensical.
Toll roads have a very attractive benefit to me. I don't drive. I'm kind of happy to have the people who make the decision to live far away from their work to actually pay for the cost of their commute.
The technology costs money, it creates bureaucracy, and it wastes time. You get an EZ-Pass, you now have more charges to reconcile on your credit card which wastes time (multiply by XX million people this turns out to be a lot of wasted time), some people have to be hired to work in a call center to answer calls, maintain webservers, repair road sensors, do enforcement against people who don't pay, etc. etc. Then it's the government, so they're going to get some private company to do it, which is going to hire a bunch of lobbyists (more wasted resources), which are then going to lobby hard to keep as much of the collected money in their own pockets as bureaucratically possible.
Also, the automated systems make the surveillance problem worse by an order of magnitude or more.
> I've never encountered a toll road that wasn't a major expressway. The coffee house argument is non-sensical.
How is it that someone can't work near an onramp to a major expressway and the nearest coffee house be at the next exit or just across a toll bridge?
To get to the point, are you questioning the premise that increasing the price of something can discourage productive uses of that thing?
> Toll roads have a very attractive benefit to me. I don't drive.
Do you also grow everything you eat in your back yard, never buy anything in a local store or have it delivered by UPS and will never require any emergency vehicles to come to your home or work for any reason?
Solve it the way Houston does: frontage roads.
Also, "frontage bridge" is probably not cost effective.
I lived in Houston for quite some time, plenty of people out in the suburbs are willing to pay the toll to avoid traffic and get downtown faster. Houston is also getting rid of its cash lanes and moving towards EZ-Tag only which doesn't require drivers to slow down at all.
In Texas it's quite standard to have a highway (toll or not) with a frontage road. Land isn't exactly scarce here, it's not uncommon to have a highway with 3-6 lanes on either side and a frontage road with another 2-4 lanes on either side again.
http://www.panynj.gov/bridges-tunnels/tolls.html
Also, if you want to see a Bing Maps bug, tell it to give you directions from Newark, NJ to New York, NY and check the "avoid tolls" box. It spins for a few seconds and then says "Driving directions are temporarily unavailable." Most of the other map websites when you check the avoid tolls box it just says it couldn't avoid the tolls. I had a GPS at one point that would actually plot the route but it makes a trip that would take less than a half hour instead take more than 6 hours because to avoid a toll you have to cross the Hudson River in Albany. Obviously they've had to remove that route from the maps lest the tolls be raised a little bit more and it become cost effective.
The justification for them being a way to ensure the "inventor" is compensated came much later and Thomas Jefferson would likely be spinning in his grave if he knew how they were used now.
Edit: to clarify, I'm not saying everything they do should be released, but that whenever possible, any substantial technology should be designed so that it could be useful to other people or researchers and released with either some kind of free license or into the public domain.
Do you agree/disagree that the government should give more money to universities, so all research can be free (as in freedom).
I agree with your principle, but tgere is no free lunch. This will lead to either higher taxes, or less publicly funded research.
This phrasing I agree with (conditionally). I think as a taxpayer if more money can let research be free with patents acting more like a way of enforcing that downstream work done based on that patent is also not patentable.
To give you guys some more context. I don't necessarily think that the interests of the public are the same as the interests of a corporation. E.g. if I do research on finding a new way of curing AIDS and Big Pharma 101 takes that research and changes one tiny molecule, patents the resulting product and sells it for exorbitant costs, I should have a way to either make them pay or force to not sell it for such a cost. Considering that it is leveraged on my research.
Ah, but of course it is assumed that such free research will make its way to businesses which profit and so pay more taxes.
To your question: I'm not sure. To the extent universities can generate revenue from developments that were publicly funded, they need less public funding in the future. Unfortunately I don't see that happen much; the revenue goes into funding a large administrative bureaucracy to manage licensing and technology transfer.
As I see it the problems are that patents are granted on ridiculous things, every new type of digital device comes with a slew of patents that basically replicate everything that can be done with a computer, and in biology patents are granted on DNA simply for finding it in a creature, not for actually designing it. That is one thing that should be solved, the other thing that should be fixed are the damages awarded by courts. For a phone or software product with 10000 features any single one shouldn't be worth much more than a ten thousandth of the price.
"Are Universities Patent Trolls?", Mark Lemley, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=980776