A Bad Day for Patent Reform. A Bad Day for Innovation
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What appears to have possibly happened here, by virtue of the fact that they appeared to have such high hopes, is that they let up on the battle and effort banking on what they were told by those they were in contact with. Who may have been mislead themselves.
I've seen this pattern before and in fact I've used it against adversaries (not in the patent area obviously). And it was used against me (which I'm guessing is where I learned it in the first place.)
You allow the other side to think they are going to win and so they end up easing up just a bit on the effort because in their mind they think they have pretty much either won the battle or have come real close to winning. (Isn't this also done in sports?)
I learned this lesson early on in business (out of college) when I lodged a complaint against the electric company for pulling the power to some machinery. The electric company immediately told me I was right! And that they would, in so many words, compensate me for the lost profits and the like (not that exactly but close enough it was a long time ago).
As time dragged on they still mildly assured me that they were going to do something. After perhaps 6 months past and I drew a line in the sand (all this dating is from memory btw.) At that point they finally just told me they weren't going to do anything and "well to bad sorry".
But by that point I had lost my initial anger and steam and just decided to forget about it.
Had they told me from day one (or week one) that they didn't agree I would have approached the situation much differently and mounted a different strategy. I didn't have a strategy because, well, I didn't think I needed one.
The pulled bill was the result of two different forces coming into play: Pro-IP monetization companies applying pressure and coalition splitting among the Democratic caucus.
The IP Monetization folks (Trolls, Universities, Bio, PHrMA, old line industry, and folks like Qualcomm) have been pushing really hard to weaken the legislation. There were substantial efforts to come to reasonable compromises, but those groups were never really happy.
What ultimately killed it, though, is that there were some important special interest groups (notably the trial lawyers) who opposed any kind of reform. If the bill would have been brought to the floor, it would have split the Democratic coalition and made a bunch of big-money donors mad.
When the opposition from the IP Monetization group mixed with the destabilizing political effect, the Senate Democratic leadership decided to kill it.
That encompasses like 90% of the broader tech/engineering/R&D sector. If so much of the sector opposes reform, then reform won't be possible without getting more of these folks to switch sides. I think sensible reform is possible without prejudicing the interests of most of those folks. Its a matter of conveying that to them.
What made the coalition for reform though, was the non tech industry. Retail, the Chamber of Commerce, banks, grocers, restauranteurs, hoteliers, gaming, insurance, venture capital... Basically everyone else. The pro-reform group was called the big tent for a reason.
This was about a smallish number of companies wanting to extract profits from other companies, and using the brokenness of the patent system to do so.
No one would have objected of there was a sense that the allegations were fair or well-founded. The problem is that courts would by statute try to uphold claims that were ridiculous.
Patent suits are the spam of the court system - spam you have to pay to delete.
I'd rather see reform that either eliminates software patents, or provides the patent offices the resources to come up with a way to examine software patent applications sufficiently to stop issuing bad software patents.
I think it's the nature of the field. Patenting a specific way to do something in software is completely useless because there are always many different reasonable ways to achieve the same result. The only software patents that have value are the ones that are unreasonably broad because anything narrower can be easily avoided.
The only way to get something done would be to throw more money at lobbyists than content and pharma. But that is not likely as in Pharma's case the current system is what keeps them in business. Gov't pays for research, pharma picks it up, hides the flaws, markets it to the public then heavily markets against themselves when their patents expire. No sonny, this is regulatory capture at its finest and if you care about software/technology patent reform you have to figure out how to reframe the debate so protected and well funded industries are no longer effected.
follow the money, the dems reek of special interest.
It makes me laugh when someone with ideological allegiance to one side or the other points out how corrupt the "other guys" are and either disingenuously doesn't mention or just plain stupidly doesn't notice the same problem for those on their "side".
This is a big part of the reason I support MayOne (https://mayone.us). The odds are stacked against them, but meaningful and broad campaign finance reform is the only thing that is going to fix the now incredibly broken US government and give non-corporations any meaningful voice in future legislation, and I have yet to see any better plan on how to make it happen.