Patents of Business Destruction

SnapShot writes "Over on Slate there's an opinion article on the Blackberry patent case. Here's a quote: 'It's easy to bash trolls as evil extortionists, to do so may be to miss an important lesson: Patent trolls aren't evil, but rational and predictable, akin to the mold that eventually grows on rotten meat. They're useful for understanding how the world of software patent got to where it is and what might be done to fix it.' "

Date of filing,not invention

[Flying pig]

Where the USPTO is out of whack with the rest of the world is that the US enables submarine patents by working to date of invention, not date of filing. (The European patent office allows cheap early notification of a patent to get round the potential cost issue.) Date of invention is an inducement to fraud because it is easy for Big Corp to fake or modify documents, especially as the whole idea is that these documents are secret as otherwise the patent is in the public domain. An idea originally intended to help small inventors in days when transport and communications were poor s completely obsolete today, but encourages forgers, lawyers and IP practitioners to sit on potentially patentable ideas and do nothing, hoping that someone else will do the work of putting them into practice whereupon they can establish a patent.

So yes, I agree with your proposals but they don't go far enough.

Re:Blackberry isn't relevant

[arkanes]

Blackberry aren't heroes in this at all. I don't know if the patents are reasonable, I haven't read them (and I find the politically convenient overturning of them after years of being upheld extremely suspicious, to say the least), but I do know that Blackberry has consistently acted in bad faith in the entire case. Coming the merest sliver short of outright falsification of evidence - in an attempt to prove prior art they gave a demonstration of older software that sent pager messages - but they modified the supposedly prior art software in order to get the demo to work!

Re:Funny definition of useful

[MaceyHW]

You can't can't expect actors in a capitalist system not to maximize their rewards. Any system design/reform has to assume that actors will do everything allowed to maximize their rewards, even things which are viewed as "evil" by everyone else.

The point of the author was pointing out that patent trolls illustrate a explotable flaw in the system, and that villifying them does nothing to solve the problem. There will always be plenty of people willing to do lucrative, legal things that others view as evil, ie gambling, pornography, prostitution etc.

Re:Expect the worst

[Dausha]

"This (IMHO) is a downfall of capitalism - businesses no longer compete by making a better product, they compete by leveraging laws and other details against any existing and would-be competitors. If you can manipulate the rules, you do not have to play as hard."

No, this is an example of monopolism run amok--not capitalism. The whole premise behind patents (and copyright) is that the government grants a limited-term monopoly to encourage development of an idea. After all, once an idea is out there, it is easy to exploit--so the monopoly encourages a fellow to make good on his idea. That is, patents are an artificial creation to protect an idea from capitalism.

It is contrary to the interests of good economy to allow monopolies (or oligopolies, IMO). It's been a few years since I took my economics class, but monopolies are not optimized the way true capitalism would be--the price is artificially inflated--or something like that.

Re:Too many shyster opportunists

[robertjw]

Bottom line is, this is the weakness in Capitalism.

Hold on, this isn't a weakness in Capitalism. In a pure free market there would be no patents. While the problems you discussed do exist, they are not a result of the Capitalistic system. On the contrary, they are a result of inept governments monkeying with the system.

Patents have been twisted and corrupted from something to protect innovators from having their ideas ripped off to one that penalizes innovators for having good ideas and spending the time and money and effort to make an idea a reality.

Saw this line, so I thought I would go to wikipedia and see what the actual history of patents was. Turns out they started because the governments (Kings) wanted to get paid to protect inventors.

...a long tradition by the English Crown of the granting of "letters patent" (meaning 'open letter', as opposed to a letter under seal) which granted "monopolies" to favoured persons (or people who were prepared to pay for them).

Looks to me like there have historically been many more abuses of the patent systems, both by the administrators and the inventors, than there have been benefits to any inventors or individuals. I think the whole 'protecting innovators' concept is more a sham than anything.