Big companies are stopping Congress from fixing the patent system
vox.com
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What we have is a political class that only does law and politics. Most of them look down on those of us who have to actually work and produce to make a living. Small business individually have almost no revenue or clout compared to these larger entities even though collectively we are the ones who represent most of the economy (or should be representing almost all of the economy if it's healthy).
The original pattern setup might have been better, where congressmen moved to Washington for 4-6 months a year along with their families, because there was no other option. But it's harder now to do that with working spouses, and also because they would be eviscerated by challengers locally as being permanent Washington elitists.
Congress is bought and paid, believing otherwise is to ignore the obvious.
Congress has enough time to fundraise, they have plenty of time to legislate and they do legislate extensively and almost exclusively in the interest of those who give them money.
It has nothing to do with partisan gridlock, that's a complete sideshow circus, notice how large companies routinely get their special interest laws passed no matter what side of the aisle is in charge.
And indeed they are, and this is the heart of the problem. They're just regular people like us, subject to the same prejudices, temptations, motivations, etc. We shouldn't be surprised when the motivations that are built into the system actually do something.
More concretely, we've vested incredible power with our politicians. That makes them huge targets for those with vested interests (whether those be corporation, special interests, foreign governments, what-have-you). The potential reward to them for getting influence is so great that they'll invest tremendously in trying to do so.
The idea that "public servants" don't magically become saints, but respond to the same incentives as do the rest of us, is the core of public choice economics [1]. There is, in fact, a fair amount of research and literature on the topic from an academic perspective.
From where I sit, if you recognize the problem as one where we're giving the corporations and special interests, etc., a huge potential payoff by finding ways to co-opt governmental power, then increasing that power to try to combat it doesn't make sense: it's just increasing the size of their potential payoff. It sounds like silly pop-Zen, but the way to get such corruption out of government is to limit the power of government.
Where's the power going to go? If you have a weak legislature that's clean-handed because it does little of consequence, that doesn't mean society is magically going to operate better. I'm also a fan of public-choice theory, but I think there are two aspects of the situation it fails to address:
1. Public administration is relatively transparent. Not as much as we'd like, of course regular people simply don't have the time, energy, or expertise to fully exploit this transparency (and so rely on lobbying organizations that do represent their interests, eg the ACLU or EFF), but the public sector is more transparent than the private sector. I don't have much faith in market mechanisms to correct excessive behavior in the private sector because bad actors can buy a lot of good PR.
2. A non-negligible degree of the power invested in government is the results of demands from the public, eg things like the clean water and the EPA exist because private entities exploited the commons sufficiently that there was eventually an outcry eg repeated fires on the Cuyahoga river. There are many similar demands for governmental action on climate change today, it's not hard to imagine a tipping point in the near future with carbon becoming much more heavily regulated than today. The fact that granting more power to government may well result in future abuses doesn't negate the existence of problems absent regulation.
Your example of the Cuyahoga River is pretty apt, actually. Consider:
"By the time Congress got around to passing the CWA in 1972, river fires were no longer a threat. Whatever else the CWA did — and it certainly helped improve many of the nation’s waters — it did little if anything to prevent rivers from catching flame. It’s also not clear how much the CWA accelerated improvements in water quality that were already underway at the time. While most states largely ignored water quality concerns in the first half of the twentieth century, state governments became far more active throughout the 1960s, such that by 1966 every state had enacted water pollution control legislation of its own. Progress was slow, but for those pollutants of greatest concern at the time, progress was being made well before the 1972 CWA was enacted, let alone before it was implemented and enforced." -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014...
River fires may have been an impetus for the clean water act, but observing that they were no longer a primary issue, while true, is beside the point. An emblematic issue (or instance of a general issue)is not necessarily representative of any statistical truth.
For example, I don't think most fracking activities trigger earthquakes, but it's not surprising that anti-fracking activists make a point of citing the incidents where it apparently has as a proxy for a larger number of environmental problems they worry about. Or consider how the protests over police brutality in Ferguson last year were not so much because Michael Brown best exemplified innocent victimhood, but because leaving his dead body lying in the street for hours on end was perceived as exemplary of callous indifference to local people's sensibilities (at best) or calculated intimidation of that community (at worst). One could think the shooting itself to have been justified but still be outraged about the aftermath of the event. Much of the sound and fury of the debate focused on the shooting incident but if you go back and look at contemporary news reports the initial reaction was to the way the body was left lying there in the open.
Their demographics compared to the population at large does not seem to agree with this view.
(And "millionaire" (net worth >$1M) isn't really a terribly high bar for mid- to late-career professionals.) That's not to say they're representative of their average constituents' income levels but I wouldn't reasonably expect them to be.
Also you don't get a million in debt by being poor.
http://ballotpedia.org/Net_worth_of_United_States_Senators_a... lists median net worth over a million\
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/01/millionaires-club-fo... also puts median net worth over 1 million
http://time.com/373/congress-is-now-mostly-a-millionaires-cl... also lists median net worth over a million
http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/12/news/economy/congress-wealth... also puts median net worth above 1 million
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2015/01/13/Congress-worth-43B... also puts median net worth over a million
The idea is that people are more likely to make irrational decisions when the cost of that decision is low, like in voting. An irrational vote only harms you as an individual in a very small way since the cost is distributed across the entire population.
So, it seems to me that we should look for ways to increase the cost of irrational decisions. I'm not sure the best way to accomplish this, but one way would be to reduce the power that government has, thereby reducing the impact of irrational decisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter...
But really we just need anything that gets power, perceived or real, away from the People.[1][2]
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Stuart
[1] http://www.constitution.org/eng/patriarcha.htm
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Critique-Democracy-Guide-Neoreactionar...
Consider the 1790s when it would take a few weeks to travel from DC to the Ohio valley.
Of course it's not a magic bullet. Many other things need to be changed:
1) banning corporations, PACs or any organization from giving money to politicians - only individuals should be able to donate and the sum should be limited to maybe $1,000 (allowing "NGO's" and such to give money is just a loophole looking to be abused)
2) making votes in Congress anonymous [1]. Votes shouldn't have "transparency". There's a reason why anywhere else voting is anonymous: it's much harder to get influenced this way, whether it's by money or peer/leader pressure (see invasion of Iraq, passing the "Patriot" Act, etc). The lobbyists can give you money, and then you can still vote as you wish, which over the long term it will seem like a less and less viable strategy for lobbyists.
3) switching to a much more democratic voting system ("approval voting" [2] would be ideal, but even the 2-voting rounds system that's used in some European countries would be a HUGE improvement, as it would fix the "spoiler effect" somewhat - but still nowhere near enough as approval voting does)
4) proportional party representation in Congress (seems like a no-brainer to me). The idea that 2 parties can dominate Congress/Parliament for a century seems ridiculous to me. Parties should rise and fall every 10 years or so, like it happens in Europe. That would put the focus much more on the issues and much less on "being on the Red or Blue team".
5) abolishing or fixing gerrymandering
6) maybe even regulating the revolving door issue (this one is a bit tricky to do, but I think other countries have some regulation for this)
I'm sure there are many other things that can improve how Congress works. The idea is to make them listen much more to the People [3] and much less to single rich individuals and corporations.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY
Then there's the really radical - All congress people and staffers + Kids go to public school ... if its good enough for my kids, its good enough for yours + use the VA for healthcare ... same reason + Get a nice 401(k) just like we have to live with (the people should get to pick the funds they get to invest in for extra credit) + Get fired if they are late 3 times like a large number of low-wage employees are ....
etc. etc. Bring them into the real world instead of living above it
At the scale of the US Federal government, this would require some form of automation to help inform voters of which candidates are on their short list (given preferences they've expressed). Ideally this calculation could be performed on computing hardware that the end user owns and trusts (be that a cell phone, or a RISC-V system with a fully open stack from layout through firmware to OS; this BTW is the only type of hardware that I would consider to be audit-able for inclusion in an assisted /paper trail/ (for recounts and etc) instant tally at close voting system.)
It matters less to make the voting method more fair when the choice selections are still rigged.
So better keep them from going back into society. Or... forbid them to work (later) for companies that they have dealt with while in congress (but this is difficult to check).
"People like you lose all claim to respect the first time they pay anybody rent"
We've somehow been suckered into supporting a massive class of very expensive bureaucrats whose main interest are themselves, power, and the rich. Who believes laws and regulations create wealth and prosperity, they are burdens and restrictions on the productive.
An ideal version of this mechanism would work like this: once you commit a patent to the fund you can not use it offensively in the future (to avoid worsening the problem), but you'll be protected by the "patent fund" when someone sues you. The sum of the patents of lots of small companies could quickly be enough to deter most suers that are not patent trolls.
Disclaimer: I'm not american so my knowledge of the patent system is quite superficial, perhaps a similar mechanism already exists?
In principle, that is sort of what the patent system was intended for. (I still don't agree with it, but that's another story).
I've never applied for a patent, mostly for ethical reasons since I don't believe in the system the way it's structured right now but it has always seemed to me that getting a few patents was not so difficult for someone with a bit of "innovation capacity".
A way to address some of the problems that would arise for the protection of IP (what happens if google starts tomorrow the service disregarding the non enforceable patents?) would be to not commit to the patent fund patents that are both highly innovative and/or key to the business model, while committing the rest.
Anyway what I wanted was to start a discussion on it not detail all the possibilities of a rather complex topic in a small HN comment ;)
Hell, you could get the larger organizations involved -- they couldn't sue the hell out of each other, but they could protect their intellectual property.
We could call it "The United States Patent Office" or something like that. Is the domain name available?
The difference between using what the state provides and creating such a "patent fund" is that with the former you just accept the status quo. It's obviously an option to accept it and go for it alone, I'll not take that from you but perhaps for many small companies it would be better to not go at it on their own.
The reason big companies want patents "as defense" is because they can use those patents against a competitor if the competitor sues.
A good example is Apple v. Samsung. They both asserted many patents against each other.
Patent trolls, however, don't infringe any patents. You can't hit them back.
That said, I'm not sure it'd help much, since AFAIK patent trolls don't have much to get sued for.
1. Android makers don't necessarily pay Microsoft for patents on things that were invented in Windows Phone. They pay licenses for patents that relate to either a) computers in general, or b) that you could do on mobile devices in general. Examples include the infamous FAT patent, patents on low-level concurrency primitives, and patents on synchronizing calendar clients. "Good" patents? I don't know. But it's disingenuous to compare Android to Windows Phone because a) it implies Android is licensing stuff that came later, and b) from a product that is inferior, insinuating these patents are low quality. If I were uncharitable, I'd say Google ordered a hit piece after all the love Microsoft has been getting the past couple of days!
2. The "billions of dollars spent on patents instead of hiring engineers" argument is a red herring. Firstly, these companies cannot find enough "good" engineers to hire, which is why they're lobbying for more H1s. Is their bar too high? Maybe. Or they may justly be concerned about allowing a "bozo explosion". And even if they did hire more engineers, they still have billions of dollars left over. Patents are designed to be a risk to those that would not reward inventions they practice, and reducing risk to the company is a fine way of spending that money,
3. Using these patents to crush future competition? These companies can more easily crush competition by buying them up rather than suing them. A 2009 study found only a small fraction of lawsuits involve large companies suing smaller ones: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1396319 - and I would bet none of the large tech companies would risk the PR fallout.
4. There is no "patent litigation crisis", just increased media coverage of litigation that is more or less in line with historical rates. Less than 2% of active patents are ever asserted and only a fraction of a percent ever make it to trial. See studies by Mark Lemley, for instance. The "smartphone wars" were just a drop in the bucket of all other patent litigation that happens. In fact there were higher rates of litigation in history when major technical developments happened: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=
"2. The "billions of dollars spent on patents instead of hiring engineers" argument is a red herring. Firstly, these companies cannot find enough "good" engineers to hire, which is why they're lobbying for more H1s. "
They can't find enough good engineers at below market price. If you could find a good engineer if you paid 1 million dollars, than the "market price" lies somewhere between what you are offering and 1 millions dollars i.e. the price at which you can purchase a commodity on the market.
If I can't find enough gold at $1000 an ounce I wouldn't be correct in saying that "I can't find gold". (The market now is ~$1200 oz.)
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-software-engineer-salar...
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-patent-attorney-salary-...
How many more "good engineers" would suddenly be found if they were offered 58 % higher compensation?
Considering that EEF have been hitting that same note for quite a while, I would find that unlikely
>These companies can more easily crush competition by buying them up rather than suing them.
The fear that is being currently generated is that small companies will start choosing to not deal with the problems of running a tech business by themselves since the risk and cost of dealing with litigations is so high. That scenario would ensure that the small companies can never grow to be become the future large corporations.
> I would bet none of the large tech companies would risk the PR fallout.
There is not a single week that Microsoft does no do that. The reason that they are able to get away with it without a massive media backslash is that no data about what actual patents that are being infringed is released to the public.
>http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=
Your last paper links to nothing.
Also please avoid overusing slangs as it makes your posts hard to read.
2. Sorry about the link... Must have copied it wrong. This should be the right link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2503140
3. I'm not sure what you mean by "slang" - could you give an example in my post.
From reading that paper, the raw numbers look bleak to me - pretty much all of them doubling over the last 10 years. My only hope is that the AIA is actually causing the inflation in patent lawsuits the paper claims. There does seem to be some evidence in it that it is.
I also don't find looking at percent of patents in force very useful. Even if that number remains flat, the number of patents in force increases. What I'm interested in is how many businesses are getting screwed over. If that percent remains flat but we had a huge upswing in patents granted it would be tragic, and it would be hidden behind the 2% number that doesn't really matter.
Also, "historic rates" goes back to 1923. The software sector has not existed for nearly that long, and making comparisons to a very different economy doesn't seem that useful.
You may worry that the spike in number of active patents is unhealthy, but again, there are studies that indicate that this is due to increased innovation than just over-patenting: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=556630
As for number of patents getting "screwed over", that is a very difficult metric to measure, simply because "screwed over" is ill-defined. If you can define "screwed over" I might be able to find a paper that tries to measure that. (Seriously, SSRN appears to a number of papers on all kinds of crazy topics.)
The Katznelson paper is not about just software and patents. By "historic" rates, the paper means revolutions in technology similar to those wrought by the computer revolution. Similar litigation rates have been observed in the past when major new technologies were introduced, such as radio and microelectronics. They are not the same thing technically, but the potential for new applications that these new technologies introduced is similar.
What "patents on low-level concurrency primitives"? Those go back to the 1970s. The Microsoft FAT file system patents have expired. The Microsoft calendar synchronization patent is getting close to expiration.
That, to me, looks like a solution to one of Bloomberg's interview questions, so it's surprising to me that with a 1999 priority date, Microsoft's lawyers did not find enough prior art to keep it from being asserted. (Generally when you assert a patent, if you're smart, you'll conduct another prior art search to make sure it sticks.)
But in general, independent of the quality of the patents themselves, the article [1] indicates that none of those are specific to Windows Phone specifically.
1. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/09/microsoft-drop...
Does anyone know of any such org?
I think you have patents and copyright mixed up there. Might be a good idea to learn more about this topic before developing an opinion.
The duration of a patent in the US is 17 years, AFAIK.
Because of that, since 1995, it has been 20 years from filing; prior to that it was 20 years from filing OR 17 years from issue. That enabled "submarine patents", wherein the applicant could intentionally delay consideration of the application to extent the period of market exclusivity.
Design patents have a shorter term, but no one cares how long they last because they are largely worthless, and more like trademarks than actual patents.
I have, however, gotten cease and desists based on trade mark. I had a name that was of the type Adjective-Adverb. A company claimed it owned all use of the Adverb word because they'd registered some other two word name that included the same word. I Thought it was hilarious. They weren't even registered in the same business area as I was operating-- yet they sent me several 30-40 page threatening letters and "license agreement/settlement" contracts for me to sign via FedEx. I just tossed them and laughed.
It's not just the start-ups that you see that might be killed it's all those that you never get to see or hear about in the first place, killed before they ever left the drawing board.
Start-up founders are savvy enough to take patents into consideration when they embark on a new venture, to do otherwise would be extremely foolish.
As for whether or not patents can kill companies, I've been on the receiving side of these suits and were it not for the fact that I had a main office in a country that is a bit more down-to-earth when it comes to legislation it would have certainly killed the start-up I was CEO of.
A lot of patent trolls will canvas small businesses and extort settlements. The bigger cases that you would hear about are usually when litigation happens - but by that point its when the company is no longer a start up and large enough to be a profitable litigation target.