Too Many Patents as Bad as Too Few 203
NonSoftAntiCurve writes "Forbes.com has an interesting article about how too many patents are as bad as too few when it comes to incentives for innovation. 'The tension between the patent as a way to stimulate invention and the patent as a weapon against legitimate competition is inherent in the system.' There is a scary example of how this plays out in practice."
same as laws.. (Score:4, Insightful)
All in moderation, as one smart person said.. but I'm too dumb to remember who said it.
---
If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way.
Re:It is Scary (Score:3, Insightful)
It is how its supposed to work, but patents are often much more useful as leverage to supress the viability of copmetitors' work than as a means of getting paid for that discovery.
If you think about it, you only need one good marketable patent to support yourself. Any more patents, you can just use that as ammunition to fuck other people up.
Its the same with copyright. Can you imagine we are (happily, according to the IP camp) paying people's sons and daughters for a few years of creativity on behalf of a father/mother/uncle/aunt or whatever?
The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is simply too rich. People are altruistic (well, altruistic as in 'i wish to life with minimal social friction, and i dont need *everything* I can get, I'll share that so that I dont have to consistantly fight and keep my gaunrd up), until you put them in a pit and convince them that fighting to the death is the only way to live.
Look who's talking. (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't RMS, it's a patent attorney writing in Forbes.
I think I'll stay in tonight. Surely, there are pigs flying about.
Is it just the USPTO? (Score:3, Insightful)
According to the article, this is no longer the case because the nature of the USPTO has changed in the past couple of decades. If that is the case, fine. Reform the patent office.
But what if that is not the only factor? What if technology has gotten too advanced for any practical patent system to work anymore? What if genuinely new ideas can only be separated from the mass of old obvious ideas by the experts in the fields? It used to be that someone with a B.S. degree had a good chance of deciding whether or not a patent should be granted. If a doctorate is needed, can the USPTO sustain that? There is no way they could hire enough good people for every field. The people they would need are the people who should be out inventing. Maybe patents on IP have become impossible. Now there is a brave new world for you. I'm no rabid slashdot IP ranter either (you can be the judge though). I support a good patent system. But this article got me wondering if it is possible anymore.
Not trying to troll but... (Score:3, Insightful)
PPA, the girl next door.
Well this seems to be obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Sadly every time a new subject is broached, two factions arise with the same redundant "yes but" arguments. And you always have the brave few trying to reconcile everything. But it's always pointless. After a point all the damn DeCSS/MPAA/RIAA/DMCA topics look the same.
The core of the problem: there is no concrete value of optimality that can be stated that is true in all infinite cases.
Examples:
How many patents should we allow?
How much protein should we eat a day?
How many rights does a corporation have?
Re:Sound like a martial arts movie plot (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It is Scary (Score:2, Insightful)
Too many patents are worse than too few. (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the patents that I've encountered recently seem to be of the sort that violate the basics of patent law. Prior art, trivially obvious, etc. But nobody can challenge them because it's too expensive. It can tie you up for YEARS, even if you can afford it (and we're talking millions here, when you count the appeals and all).
Plus, of course, you don't know *when* they will decide to drop the shoe on you. And when they do, if they win they'll be able to collect all of your profits, and then some, as damages. Unless you devote the time and effort to fight them at a time of their choosing, and frequently in a court of their choosing (though that's a bit limited).
The patent system is so broken that we would be far better off without any patents at all. It needs to be started from scratch, and not have *ANY* of the patent lawyers or members of patent cartels be allowed to take part in the redrafting of the laws. (Yeah, fat chance, I know. But that's what's needed.)
Re:It is Scary (Score:5, Insightful)
Sons and daughters? Copyrights last for, what, life + 70 years? Barring advancements in logevity treatment, my children (~20 years younger than I) and my hypothetical grandchildren (~40 years younger than I) will all be dead 70 years after my death. My great-grandchildren will be either dead or retired. At some point, the recipients of my creativity will be my great-grandchildren and my great-great-grandchildren.
Patents, no matter what else is wrong with them, have the good grace to expire 20 years after being issued. Let's all hope that no one ever comes up with a Sonny Bono Patent Act.
No patents? No problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
The first part of the answer is: most companies with programmers on the payroll don't make any money selling the software or enforcing patents. Most software is developed for in house use or to solve a particular problem for a specific customer. So only the minority of companies need to worry about this at all.
If you're releasing under the GPL, your competitors will be unlikely to take your source. If they do, they either have to release their source back to you so you can take their improvements, or they're infringing copyright and you can sue them.
As for "stealing ideas," an even smaller number of companies develop any ideas worth patenting. Most software which is sold uses well understood, non-patentable techniques.
As for stealing your ideas, so what? Companies like Cygnus and Red Hat managed to do alot of business selling a product that wasn't patented. Only recently did Red Hat start getting defensive patents. There are other things to sell beyond a monopoly on an idea. Most notably, if you had the idea first and developed it to fruition first. Who is going to be able to have the first to market advantage? You. Who is going to be in the best position to push the idea to its limits and maintain the cutting edge? You.
Will the elimination of software patents reduce the profitability of some software companies? Certainly. But it will be a very small number of companies. Those companies will still have some advantages in the market. And if the market grows and competition increases as a result, maybe it's a good idea.
Re:Well this seems to be obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
- Freely duplicable
- Potentially short span between conception and implementation
- Highly reusable
- Highly expandable
I am a fiscal conservative, and I love the elegance of the Free Market system, but it's based on assumptions of the Industrial Age. Our economic system is splitting apart at the seams trying to reconcile all the implications of digital data and communications.While you are right that there is no concrete optimal value (for anything really), our system will remain skewed until we figure out a more effective method of rewarding contribution to society rather than rewarding legal expertise and clever marketing.
For the love of America, politicians better wake up to this problem, because otherwise all the creative minds who are responsible for true innovation will all move overseas where they won't be squashed by huge corporations.
The problem is duration, not quantity (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO, the biggest (perhaps the only?) problem with patents, is that the duration is not a function of the development cost. If a company really does spent a gazillion dollars developing something, then maybe a 20 year monopoly makes sense. Or maybe 40 years. Or maybe one year. But that's not how the system works.
And that's reason software guys, in particular, bitch about patents so much. (And it's not just Free Software guys. Commercial developers of less-than-megacorp size are going to tend to hate patents as well.) We happen to work in a realm where development is so ridiculously cheap, that the arbitrary hard-coded duration is completely inappropriate and senseless.
Keep it simple and not be simple (Score:2, Insightful)
I know I'm not popular here for being in the "Slashdot party line" of Linux against Capitalism, but I think just about anyone can find name just at least a dozen patents which are plain old corporate recycling of ideas that were well known before the "innovative party" was even born or their company was set up.
Personally, I'd rather see some amount of responsibility taken by the Civil Service and the corporations because I know exactly how much damage playing monopoly with Geneticically Modifified Food causes.
Has anybody wondered why they have been addicted to junkfood, and exactly why nothing is being done about it ?
This wouldn't have anything to do with creative science tampering with life just for the bottom line ?
Self correcting? Nope. (Score:3, Insightful)
My reasoning went like this: IIRC, patents granted in the U.S. provide protection from competition for 11 years, and may be renewed, but not indefinitely; hence the Unisys patent on LZW compression (used in
Once a patent has expired, that's it -- you can't re-patent it, and neither can anyone else. So logically, if people are currently filing zillions of frivolous patents now, that means in twenty years it will become considerably more difficult to file frivolous patents.
But then I sat back and thought "No, in twenty years they'll be filing a whole new set of frivolous patents on technologies that don't yet exist; and nobody will care about all those frivolous patents that they filed way-back-when."
A problem like this -- too many patents filed -- would be self correcting in an era with a more stable technological basis. When the innovation rate is slow it's a lot easier to make a patenting system work well; incremental changes are a whole lot easier to evaluate for patentability. This is why the USPTO did so well for its first couple of hundred years; innovation was definitely going on, and fairly rapidly compared to historical levels (eg the Middle Ages), but it was still occurring at a manageable pace. The car fulfills the same function as a cart; light bulbs are a light source, just like candles or lanterns. The technologies seen in the first couple of centuries of American history were, for the most part, logical extensions of and replacements for pre-existing devices.
But all that began to change when the pace of innovation really picked up. It's hard to assign a date, but for convenience you might pick the last years of World War II as the beginning of the rapid increase in the pace of innovation. Even then, it wasn't so bad at first. But as the rate of innovation picked up, two factors were greatly exacerbated: 1) the complexity of new devices, and 2) the increasing prevalence of new devices with little or no ancestral devices. Television, for example: a television is not only considerably more complex than it closest pre-existing analogue, the radio, but also performs a previously unknown function -- the transmission of images over distance. Evaluating the originality of the first TV is not hard; but what about all the subsidiary patents that soon follow? Patents on improved antennae and cathode ray tubes, channel selectors and so on. To seriously evaluate all of those, you basically need to be an electrical engineer, with lots of time to study each new application.
But when you're getting dozens of patents a day, and you have the same size staff as you had before, and the applications you get increasingly arcane, your ability to fairly evaluate each new app goes down the drain under the workload.
The current pace of innovation cannot be sustained indefinitely; eventually our tech base will settle down again. In the meantime, we need two things: more specialists at the USPTO charged with evaluating patents in a particular field, and stricter standards for what is patentable. Business methods should not be patentable, nor should software -- or compression algorithms like the LZW one mentiond above.
Unfortunately, these reforms are going to be difficult to implement. Stricter patent standards will not be practical until we have more specialists to fairly evaluate the influx of arcane high-tech patents. Unfortunately, those specialists are mostly the ones applying for patents. You can make a heck of a lot more money by getting patents than by granting them. In order to attract the specialists it needs, the USPTO is going to have to offer competitive salaries; and that, I think is going to take an act of God. Chances are slim to none that Congress would raise their budget without a pressing political reason, and the only other source of cash are the application fees and maintenance fees. Increasing the budget by soliciting and granting more patents would simply worsen the problem we're trying to avoid in the first place.
I sure hope this gets worked out, but I predict that the USPTO will continue more or less as it has been for the forseeable future.
Wierd contradiction (Score:1, Insightful)
Patents were a good idea when there was less innovation. Now that there's a lot of innovation, the large number of resulting patents is stifling innovation.
This seems like a very strange position to me. The evidence for the innovation-stifling effects of patents seems to be almost entirely the rapid increase in the rate of innovation.
The reason a lot of things happen faster now is that things are done in software that could previously only be done in hardware.
While open-source development is a wonderful thing, don't get me wrong, most of the actual work in the country is done by for-profit organizations who are doing it because they think it will make them money.
If such organizations were unable to protect their new products against instant competition (remember, when it takes little time for the company to develop the product, it will also take very little time for their competitors to copy it), there would be very little motivation to develop them.
To my mind, the existance of software patents is patently (pun intended) obviously necessary for the rapid rate of innovation.
Of course, the term of those patents might be longer than is reasonable...
But us software geeks often seem to think we're unfairly impacted by patents. We routinely deal with thousands of software components in each of our products... why, if we had to worry about whether each of them were patented, we couldn't get anything done. And our products are obsolete so soon that we shouldn't be burdened by this ridiculously long protection.
On the other hand, I have first hand knowledge that almost every one of the 1000s of parts in your car is protected by one patent or another.
And each of those car models has only a 3-5 year product lifetime.