How Patent Trolls Harm the Economy 123
WebMink writes "It used to just be speculation, but the numbers are now in — patent trolls are costing America jobs and economic growth. Newly-published research using data commissioned by Congress shows big rises in patent troll activity over the last five years — from 22% to 40% of all patent suits filed, with 4 out of five litigants being patent trolls. Other papers show that jobs are being lost and startups threatened, while VC money is just making things worse by making startups waste money filing more patents. Worst of all, it's clear this is just the tip of the iceberg; there's evidence that unseen pre-lawsuit settlements with patent trolls represent a much larger threat than anything the research can easily measure."
Indirect damage (Score:5, Insightful)
This study only looks at the first order effects. What about the technologies that are going undeployed or never see commercial application because of patents and copyrights? They were originally supposed to inspire innovation, not inspire innovative people to flee our country to sell their work overseas. I have any number of ideas that could create jobs and help our economy that simply aren't possible in this country because of our stupid laws.
Take auto-updating software and system security. Right now, the only thing the end-user has is overpriced anti-virus and malware software, and they have to go to "Geek Squad" or some other place and pay an arm and a leg to do routine maintenance. If I could package and distribute software, and somehow integrate licensing and payment into a single deployment platform, I could help people keep their software current and establish my own "app store", but with finer-grained controls and the ability to not just download and install software, but actually integrate support for the product as well. No more searching for a phone number to call, or floundering with "how do I do X in this?" If you got infected with some malware, someone could remote in anytime and fix it, at a very low cost due to economy of scale.
But unless you're a multibillion dollar company like Apple, Google, or Microsoft, there's no way you can hire enough lawyers or have enough market clout to get something like that off the ground. The cost of entry into the market is so high that only mega corporations can afford it. Rather than lowering the barrier to innovation, it's created a massive wall to it, where only a select few can release anything new.
And then we get crap like the FCC -- they botched the digital TV transition so bad they should all be hung by their balls in the public square until they drop off. It was pure profit, and the consumer suffered in terms of price fixing, limited supplies of converter boxes, and the spectrum that was sold off hasn't really benefited them in any way -- they took public spectrum and made it private, while raking in billions. And then they cost us billions more in conversion costs, when they should have been using the money from those auctions to help out the people they forced to upgrade in the firstplace. This is the kind of shit copyright and patenting do -- force people into only a handful of solutions, all overpriced and not competitive, and deny anyone else the chance to come up with a better solution that would benefit someone other than the corporate overlords.
This is fine for a litigation based economy . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
. . . but can litigation really fuel a whole country . . . ?
The members of Congress might want to change this . . . except that most of them are professional lawyers.
Oh, well.
Solve the problem at the root: change the law (Score:5, Insightful)
Patent trolls will continue to be a problem as long as the patent laws aren't revised. The trolls are merely a symptom, the laws are the cause.
Grain of salt (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter how much I dislike patent trolls, I view this kind of report with the same skepticism as I view RIAA reporting how much they "lose" to piracy every year.
The economy matters now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should anyone suddenly care about what hurts the economy?
- Environmental trolls harm the economy by stopping commerce and development, often with zero benefit to the environment.
- Malpractice lawsuit trolls raise the cost of health care, which is bad for the economy.
- Government union trolls continually seek to provide fewer government services for a higher cost, which is bad for the economy.
- Education union trolls do the same for education, which is bad for future productivity and bad for the economy.
- Disability lawsuit trolls, who sue businesses for such evils as having signs a few inches too high or too low, cause harm to those businesses and the economy.
- Defense appropriation trolls, who spend government money in thinly-veiled giveaways to crony companies, take money from productive enterprise and funnel it to non-productive uses. This hurts the economy.
- The same goes for green energy grants to cronies, arts-related grants to cronies, and transportation appropriations to build vanity projects.
- Shareholder lawsuit trolls, who sue because their stock went up or down, cause harm to businesses and the economy.
- Race grievance trolls, who tell companies to spend their time meeting workforce racial quotas instead of producing goods and services, hurt the economy.
- Class action lawsuit trolls, who sue for millions and then settle the lawsuits for millions of dollars for the lawyers and a $1 off coupon for their clients, hurt the economy.
- Farm trolls, who have convinced the government to write them checks not to farm, hurt the economy.
Clearly the patent system needs some reform to rein in the patent trolls. But what about all the rest of the trolls that hurt the economy? Can we reform them too please? Or are we all just pretending to care about the economy this time as an insincere talking point?
Re:I have a patent (Score:4, Insightful)
on stories complaining about absurd patents pay up slashdot
4Chan called... they said it's invalid: they're prior art and patented online absurdity in its entirety.
Patent Standards, Not Trolls (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with patent litigation is not whether the party doing the enforcement produces things, but whether the cost of the patent enforcement outweighs the value. The purpose of patents is to reward inventors, not manufacturers. If an inventor comes up with something novel that should be rewarded through the patent system, whether he builds a factory or licenses it to a manufacturer and continues to focus on invention does not change the worth of the patent. If he deserves to be rewarded but wishes to focus on continued invention instead of licensing, and a third party company is willing to pay him for the patent, it does not change the net value of the patent.
What makes patents harmful is that they are too long, too strong, too easily granted, and given the presumption of validity in court. As long as that is true, harmful patents will be harmful whether they are wielded by abusive licensing agencies or anticompetitive manufacturers. It could be even worse with manufacturers, since they are not merely maximizing direct revenue from the patent but also have a financial motive to harm their competitors. Surely the mobile device patent war has shown us that merely being a manufacturer does not prevent bad patents from harming our economy.
By focusing our disdain on those companies that specialize in patent licensing and enforcement, we are distracting ourselves from the real problems of the patents themselves. It will lead us to attempt legislation which will only prevent independent inventors from having an open market for their inventions and force them to work with incumbent manufacturers. If patents are to reward inventors, we should not narrow their markets and chain them to manufacturing. If patents are harmful, we should limit their power for everyone, including manufacturers.
Patent Troll is the wrong name... (Score:4, Insightful)
A troll, the modern internet variety at least, is something that is annoying but mostly harmless. Patent Trolls are anything but harmless.
They're more like Patent Privateers - except that instead of having letters of marque to attack foreign shipping, they have letters of marque to attack local companies and any foreign company trying to do business locally.
Worse, not satisfied with destroying their own economy, the US is repeatedly trying to extend their jurisdiction with ACTA, SOPA, so-called "Free Trade Agreements" and the like.
Marx was right, capitalism will eat itself...and patent privateers are just one of the more obvious carnivores. The capitalist ecosystem has evolved predators and, as is common with predators, both the young and the old & tired are the easy prey.
Patents are the least of your worries (Score:4, Insightful)
Methinks you're seriously underestimating the difficulty of creating what you've in mind.
There's nothing unusual about doing so, btw. Typically, this stems from over-thinking about the success case, while neglecting to think about what can go wrong. In real systems, basically everything that can go wrong eventually will. And things need to scale. Potentially massively.
This stuff is so hard, that not a single company out there gets it right. Not a single one. Not even Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, you name it. Also note that none of the various app stores even begin to try to touch support or custom-licensing with a 6-foot pole. Both are cesspools of problems in their right.
Anyway, regarding your worries about patent trolls: if you actually did pull it off, then IP and patent issues would be, IMHO, the least of your worries.
Re:Interesting quote from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Your statements are so retarded.
People go to court because there is a genuine disagreement over something
Yea... I doubt anyone would ever take someone to court just to drag them through a lengthy court battle to cause financial ruin... nah, surely that wouldn't happen.. right? wrong, happens all the time.
Given competent counsel, you would expect that each side wins about 50% of the time (i.e., a coin flip)
bullshit... in reality the side with more $$ to throw at the lawyers wins.
Settlements happen because one side knows they have a loser case and are trying to mitigate the damages
If you don't want to settle, have to keep paying the lawyers somehow to represent the case - lawyer firms don't run a charity. You have no choice but to settle most of the time, even if you've done nothing wrong. There is no way in hell you can pay your lawyers to defend your case if you have a small business to defend. Small business means even if you win the case, there's no way in hell you can recoup the money you wasted on lawyers. As for the patent trolls, they can keep suing the hell out of everyone and they have nothing to lose.
invalidating an already issued patent (with good prior art) is much less expensive than most patent settlements
bull shit. Apple. several dozens of prior art. Samsung still lost the case because idiot jury thinks "prior art runs on a different cpu hence must not apply". That's like saying you patented window hinge? ooh that must be completely valid brand new patent even though it's the same exact hinge used in a door, the door hinge doesn't count as prior art because it's attached to a door, and this is totally brand new because it's attached to a window. zomg, idiotic shit likes this makes it to court and despite being laughable, it is a crippling nightmare. It's a total waste.
In the end, frivolous patents and their trolls cost everyone billions, and the only people who make a profit are lawyers... and that's exactly why the patent system isn't going to change - because the lawyers profit from it. We have a country run by lawyers. They wouldn't dare change the law in a way that could hurt their college buddies. The whole thing is mind numbingly idiotic, yet there's nothing anyone can do about it. Then there's idiots like you who say patent abuse is somehow alright. Bull shit.
Is there a will to change? (Score:5, Insightful)
We already know how bad the impact of patent/copyright trolling is, even before they came up with the numbers.
For years and years, - if not for more than a decade, - so many unwarranted lawsuits had been filed just to satisfy the insatiable appetites of the patent/copyright trolls.
I don't, not even for a femto-second, believe that the critters on the Congressional Hill do not know the damage done by patent/copyright trolls.
They already knew what happened, it's just that they had NO INTENTION TO CHANGE.
The more patent/copyright trolling lawsuits got filed, the more the lawyers' lobbyists will pay them congresscritters.
I can bet, with my bottom dollar, that no concrete change will be forthcoming from Washington D.C.
They may pay some lip services - after all, they _ARE_ politicians - they may even "Ooooms" and "Aaaahs", pretending that they are doing something, but the final outcome will be the same old, same old.
As long as the lawyers get paid, they will pay the congresscritters.
And as long as the congresscritters get paid, all of us get screwed.
Re:Patents are the least of your worries (Score:5, Insightful)
RedHat and Suse are doing that just fine for thousand of packages. So do Debian and Canonical. It's called package repository and with the main package repository that contains applications like Apache, Bind, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and many more, they offer support and security updates.
They can do that because they have no limitations of copyright, because every copyright holder of the applications in the main package repositories agreed to that a third party can modify and distribute their applications. Also known as Open Source.
I don't know, but I think girlintraining are thinking like that kind of repository but for proprietary applications.
Probably right (Score:5, Insightful)