Why There Are Too Many Patents In America 189
whitroth writes "The judge who just dismissed the lawsuit between Apple and Motorola writes a column explaining what he considers to be reasonable uses of patents, and unreasonable ones. One of his thoughts would be to require a patent holder to produce the patented item within a certain time, to cut out patent trolls."
Re:As someone (Score:4, Informative)
Ironically, I once worked for a company, developing cutting edge network technology and internet applications. I dropped the suggestion to a VP that what we were doing was all new terrain and we could patent some of the complex processes and end products we were developing. The VP simply stated, we're a development company, not an intellectual property company, so no patents were going to be considered, even defensively.
I envy the place you worked at, man. Sounds like they had their priorities straight, getting a good product out.
Sucks that the reward for hard work like that is typically to have a patent troll ruin your business.
Certainly. Back then all this sort of tit-for-tat fighting over ridiculous "intellectual property" was pretty unusual. If someone was suing it was often because they have put millions of dollars into building a fab to make something engineers had spent years developing, not some bloody FOR and NEXT loop.
Alas, were tha company still around they'd probably be fighting to defend the technology we developed because some other twit filed a patent and was trying to extort money from something which is largely prior art, if not obvious.
Re:As someone (Score:4, Informative)
Wouldn't have helped anyway. A patent troll doesn't do anything useful, so they can't possibly be violating any patents themselves.
The patent troll's mode of business is suing and hoping you settle, rather then go to trial, but if they win a trial then the troll uses that as precedent to go after more companies. They're completely amoral parasites on the courts and business, but do keep a number of attorneys gainfully employed.
Re:That's true, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Posner's suggestion of having different patent terms for different industries is not news, that idea has been circulating for decades, and probably longer. It's something that he's actually endorsing it in public, I guess.
Someone on slashdot recently linked a great TED talk about the general lack of IP protection in the fashion industry, and how it has actually worked out really well for them. Trademarks protect your profit margin, but you can't prevent anyone from making a shoe.
I see software as being somewhat similar. I should be able to make an online store without violating someone's IP, but I shouldn't be able to call it "Amazon".
http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html [ted.com]