Patent Reform Town Hall Meeting (Balt/Washington Area IEEE Consultants Network)

But handing out a "License to Extort" to everyone with a new idea (whether brilliant or half baked) is no way to run an economy.

Reply to
Brad
Loading thread data ...

If the idea's half-baked then people will do something else rather than pay even a small licence fee to use a bad idea; there aren't enough brilliant ideas that a dollar per device per brilliant idea is economy-threatening.

You do need some kind of judicial review process to ensure that the fees don't get extortionate, and it may well be that people would use more trade secrets in an environment with compulsory licencing.

Tom

Reply to
Thomas Womack

snip

it's like a cold war, big corp A, needs patents to defend themselves against big corp B and vice versa.

when they occasionally clash it usually ends with a deal to cross license and they now have a bigger hammer to hit any small players trying to get in on their business

seems like any startup doing anything that involves software is just a lawsuit waiting to happen, if it ever makes it to making money the patent trolls are ready to strike

maybe the reality isn't really that bad but when you read something like this:

formatting link
..

-Lasse

Reply to
langwadt

I think it is important to cover the case where some inexpensive research leads to a significant breakthrough and the owner of the IP wants to keep it exclusive. There are many market cases where the return on investment will be maximized, and therefore the incentive to do good research maximized, if competitors are not allowed to use it. This also encourages research by the competitors in order to close the market gap. That's good for everyone, incuding the research and engineering communities, the consumers, and the owners of the IP.

Compelling someone to license the results of their research to a competitor just seems to me to be a bad idea all around.

There are some general market yardsticks for what license fees should be, and "reasonable and non-discriminatory" wording tries to be applied sometimes, but free market forces should be allowed to have their place, too.

One of the attorneys I used to work with on such matters would often say, "It's not really a patent until a judge says it's a patent." There's so much crazy stuff gets patented, and patents granted that seem to overlap a lot, etc., etc., that IMHO it's often impossible to tell whether you'll infringe a certain patent or what patents might possibly be asserted against someone for a particular device.

Long ago I reviewed a patent for an investor that seemed to cover the general idea of wireless cellular communications. Some tiny, unknown company owned it. Cellular systems were already widely deployed at that point, and the patent field in the area was already huge. What was the likelihood that anybody could be successful asserting that patent against the cellular industry? Would the patent hold up to scrutiny, i.e., not be declared invalid if the heavyweights of the industry challenged it? There's no way to know unless someone wants to try, and that's a very expensive proposition.

And there seems to be a lot of opinion that the recent "reforms" make it even worse for small companies. Time will tell, I suppose.

Eric Jacobsen Anchor Hill Communications

formatting link

Reply to
Eric Jacobsen

I'm not anti-patent. I think patents are not just useful, but essential to stimulating innovation. But the Apple patent (at least what was written here) is not about a slider bar. It is about a "gesture". In my opinion that is so vague (to the point of being obvious) that it should be unenforceable. As I said in the part of my message that you snipped, all Google or anyone else has to do is to not call it a gesture. If Apple insists that all methods of contact with the display would be a gesture then your suggestions would also be gestures.

Rick

Reply to
rickman

Isn't that the point that by giving inventors "rights" to their own invention that it encourages the invention process? I can assure you that many inventions would have happened much later or not at all if patents didn't exist. If for no other reason because many inventors and companies would not be in the business. They would probably be on Wall street.

Rick

Reply to
rickman

y

That is only the case for a fast moving industry like the example given. I did my work in pharmaceutical research and it wasn't uncommon to take 5 years to get a product to market. The FDA testing and documentation alone would take a couple of years. Meanwhile half the people who worked on the project have moved to competing companies and results of clinical trials are public knowledge. Of course to compensate the company that bears the actual costs the patent date is actually moved forward to provide for a few additional years of protection. They also seem to be VERY sympathetic to CIPs. If you were to invent the syringe today, you could probably continually patent it indefinitely every time you came up with a different sized needle.

Unless I miss your point it is ~different inventions warrant different lengths of protection. Some of this is already in the system but it could be improved.

But who is the judge who gets more and who gets less. Trivia question: What do Fredrick's of Hollywood and Howard Hughes have in common? They both have patents for push-up bras.

Personally I think patents for things like push up bras should run for

30 years to encourage development in that area.

Patent attorney where I worked once leaned back in his chair and laughed "I hope people do infringe, the more the merrier! Standard royalty for patent infringement is 7% so we would make 7% of what everyone else sells for doing nothing! Great business to be in!"

Rick

Reply to
Rick

(snip, someone wrote)

(snip, then I wrote)

I was thinking of the case where someone wants to be anti-social, not license it, and also not sell the devices. Or, say, only sell to people with a certain political or religious viewpoint. Maybe someone already rich enough not to be moved by market forces.

If free market works, I think I agree. I am not sure that it always does.

(snip, I wrote)

Well, that is true. The latter gets back to not reading patents. If you don't read your competitors patents, you have no idea if you might be infringing. If you do, you have at least a chance to notice.

Next time you get stopped by a traffic cop, try telling him that you didn't read that page in the DMV book, and didn't know that speeding was illegal. Again, might work against willful speeding, or willful infringment, but in the end, it is still illegal.

Well, I was told by someone who works closely with patent lawyers that it is better to read them. You at least have the possibility of designing around the patent.

Just like buying a lottery ticket. Well, many of them. There is a cost, but a low probability of a big payoff.

Or license to a big company for a reasonably price and let them argue it out in court.

-- glen

Reply to
glen herrmannsfeldt

No, that's not the way the patent system works. This will go to court, and a jury of 12 zombie farmers in Texas who just came from their pumpkin patches will rule on this, and of course Apple will insist that anything is a gesture. Afterwards, Apple will sue the pumpkin farmers for violating their trademark, because a pumpkin looks somewhat like an apple.

--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Bernd Paysan

nts

This is exactly why patents are granted. Not only is the inventor able to benefit financially from his invention but the invention is made public. Once the patent expires the world is the recipient.

Rick

Reply to
rickman

Project that onto Tesla. He invented the electricity power grid, with a distance the most import invention of all times, and sold that for a pittance to Westinghouse.

Project that onto Chuck Moore.

What did inventors do before there where patents? Wall street? Come one!

Groetjes Albert

--

--
Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters.
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Albert van der Horst

article,

That is certainly part of my point, yes. Given the newsgroups here, the bias of the conversation is towards patents in software and embedded systems, and in my post above I was referring specifically to the case of swipe-to-unlock.

In fields where "inventions" take a long time and cost much more money, then there needs to be more and longer-term protection. 21 years is still far too long, and the patent system needs a serious overhaul even for long-term industries like the drug industry (maybe in a way that makes the whole system faster). But there is no doubt that a company spending 5 years researching a drug should be entitled to more protection than someone who thinks "wouldn't it be cool to use a finger swipe to unlock a phone? I think I'll patent that".

Patents /don't/ encourage development. That's the problem. A 30-year wide-ranging patent like that stops development - no one can invent a "push-up-and-together" bra because of that patent.

And there you see who benefits from the modern patent system and its usage. Occasionally, a real inventor will get lucky and make some money

- but mostly it's an overall loss for the inventor, and a loss for others, and as the money flows back and forth between the patent owner and licensees, only the lawyers get paid regularly as they grab their cut.

Reply to
David Brown

This creates an incentive to find another way to do it. If the new way is innovative, it can be patented and provide a benefit to those who sorted out the new way. I don't see how patents discourage innovation or development.

Eric Jacobsen Anchor Hill Communications

formatting link

Reply to
Eric Jacobsen

That's what I'm saying, Wall Street COME ON!!!

Rick

Reply to
rickman

y

n.de/

Reductio ad absurdum.

Rick

Reply to
rickman

It conceivably creates an incentive to find a totally different way to do it. But that requires the inventor to find a completely way new way to solve the problem, /and/ to be able and willing to file his own patent - which costs a lot of time and money, /and/ to be willing to fight off claims of infringement from the original patent owner, /and/ to be willing to fight future infringements in court. It's a huge investment in time and money, and is more about being a lawyer and a cut-throat businessman than about being an inventor. You can only avoid it by cross-licensing deals and other arrangements with existing patent holders.

Successful invention and innovation today is about steering clear of everything patent-related and hoping for the best, or being part of a huge company with an army of lawyers, and accepting that you will spend a much larger budget on legal fees, lawyers, and licensing deals than you will on actually developing new products or researching new ideas.

Nowhere in this is there a place for someone coming up with a good idea to improve an existing patent. Nowhere is there a place for the "little guy", no matter how brilliant his idea is. It is all about the big companies being able to maintain the status quo, and the lawyers getting their fees.

I am not sure that patents need to be totally abandoned (except for software patents, which should never have been allowed in the first place). But there needs to be a complete re-think to get back to something that actually encourages innovation and invention, gives /appropriate/ reward to people doing research and coming up with good ideas, works for individuals and small companies as well as large ones, allows for improvement on existing ideas, and minimises the bureaucracy, legal costs, and wasted time.

Reply to
David Brown

In comp.arch.fpga David Brown wrote: (snip)

Well, in chemistry (drug development) sometimes it is easier. One can slightly modify a molecule, even if the active site is the same, and get a new patent. (Also, new testing and FDA approval.)

Sometimes the new drug is from the same company to keep revenue flowing when the previous patent expires.

-- glen

Reply to
glen herrmannsfeldt

Well, maybe. But the history shows that it is otherwise. E.g. take the "innovation" of the steam engine by James Watt. What he really did was an improvement (the condensor) over existing steam engine. The condensor is a vital part for any improved steam engine, and because James Watt wanted his monopoly badly, there was no further improvement on steam engines for 20 years. After that, all those who were waiting to build better steam engines were collaborating together, and didn't patent their particular improvements. Efficiency and deployment of steam engines skyrocketed.

There is already an incentive to be innovative: Make products and sell them, people like innovative products. Run faster than your copy-cat followers. I've been working for a copy-cat company for two years (haven't applied there, they bought the complete company I was working for before, and then sold our team to another bunch of idiots who couldn't deal with innovations), and I can assure you: me-too-product companies don't copy immediately. They wait to see you succeed, and if you do so, they will start development - no earlier. And then they can only sell by the price - you have to be significantly cheaper to get into a marked already owned by someone else. They were successful with their strategy for long-running very simple devices (the company is called "Diodes" for good reasons ;-), but they weren't for the more complex devices, which our group built.

Patent pools are there for ridiculous fights between large companies, which harm everybody, except the lawyers involved.

Any innovation today consists of 99% readily available technology, and a

1% adder, which is new. If the 99% are covered by patents, forget about any progress. Just imagine that Berner-Lee could have patented the web. Now, 20 years later, this patent would be about to expire. Do you think this would have caught on? Not the slightest. The reason why the Internet and the Web did succeed was that they were open, for anyone to use, for anyone to improve. Competing network protocols were comvered with patents, and they all failed, for good reasons: Nobody else would have used them as basis to innovate on. If there were no free networks around to build on, and everybody had protected their claims, we would still have stone-aged AOL-like walled garden networks.

Anyway, big incentives are the wrong idea. Small incentives are much more effective, they strive people to continue to work, because they get the money they need, and they don't accumulate enough money to stop working, and just relax and spent what they have earned. Economy is not about getting rich, it's about using resources efficiently. Inventors are resources, they are indeed rather scarce, use them efficiently. Let them collaborate, give them just enough money to make a descent living, bot don't count for their greed - many don't have that; they will stop working once they have accumulated enough money.

If you are motivated by greed only, go to Wall Street, and ruin the world.

--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Bernd Paysan

It's usually easier than you make it sound. Finding workarounds to existing patents is not uncommon at all, and it is up to the developer of the new method whether to file a new patent or just keep it a trade secret, or even publish the new method.

If a patent can't be worked around, then kudos to the folks who figured out the great way to do whatever it is that's being done and for writing a thorough patent. Life is a two way street: if you want to be rewarded for your own work you have to be prepared to reward others for theirs. People who grouse about not having access to patented technology usually change their tune when they have something of their own that they want to protect.

That's a pretty narrow and gloomy view of the world. I can say that I don't share that view, and I hope that your situation improves enough or you have enough success that you see the better side of things.

Many patents and new innovations are improvements on existing patents, often by "little guys". I have a number of granted patents from working for a large company and a pending patent of my own. Several close friends and associates have done well with patents that they filed on their own as an individual or as part of a very small company. I recently did an evaluation for an independent individual inventor on a pretty innovative, new way to do things in an established, mature field. There are plenty of success stories that are example proofs that counter your argument.

That's not to say that the system favors small inventors, just that it's still very much possible for a small company or an individual to benefit from the process.

Often when a VC or investor looks at a new small company one of the first questions is whether they've patented their technology or not. That wouldn't be the case and wouldn't be important if small companies couldn't play in the patent arena.

Eric Jacobsen Anchor Hill Communications

formatting link

Reply to
Eric Jacobsen

[...]

A lot of this ground is covered in a book called 'Sex, Science & Profits' by Terence Kealey (I don't know why sex is in the title as it is hardly mentioned in the book). As well as saying and justifying that patents are bad he also claims, with evidence, that government funded research is much less effective than just letting industry fund it themselves.

--
Gerry
Reply to
Gerry Jackson

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.