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."
The headline lies (Score:5, Interesting)
First, I am no fan of patent trolls. However, both the article's headline and the slashdot headline are misleading.
The article claims "the numbers don't lie." The "numbers" it speaks of are basically the results of a survey in which one researchers polled a few startups and asked them if patent trolls were an issue. Quite a few said yes.
But the number is entirely without context. To use a slashdot favorite, the existence of cars also puts buggy whip manufacturers out of business and "costs them jobs." Just because something has an adverse effect on somebody's business.. or in this case somebody's potential business doesn't make it bad for the economy. in fact, taken as a whole you'd be hard pressed to find a legitimate study (not some boldrine and levine ass-pulled crapola) that suggests that patents taken as a whole are bad for an economy and for r&d - quite the opposite, taken as a whole, they're very very good. are there rough edges in patent regimes? of course. but i'd argue that patent trolls aren't really the problem. the real problem is the granting of patents unnecessarily for obvious bullshiat. if that goes away, then the sort of patent trolls that peopel complain about go away.
i have no problem with legitimate patent trolls, by which i mean some small company has made some innovation and then sues the hell out of some large company who simply ignores the small company's prior art. too many of you on slashdot are ironically too pro big business by proposing systems by which big companies could more easily do just that. legitimate holders of worthy ideas who lack the resources to turn those ideas into products have a financial incentive to license or transfer the ideas to those who can. and if they do get treated unfairly, like the guy who made the intermittent wiper blades was, then by all means, sue sue sue.
it could be that "patent trolls" really are a drain on the economy, but this article makes no such case. let's not forget that to somebody wanting the IP of somebody else, it's often convenient to "cry troll" and complain about all sorts of doom and gloom. i mean, darn that patent troll, oh, i dunno, porsche with their patent on some innovative brake mechanism who are keeping me from developing the next generation supercar and hiring tens of thousands of workers to develop it! if only they weren't such patent trolls hanging on to patents for the inventions that they developed!
more likely than not, this is only so much more verbage, planted here on slashdot where most anti-IP slanted stuff, no matter how specious, gets modded +5.
Re:First Post (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, Mr. A. Coward is an employee of Mr. Big Corporation. In the fine print of his contract, all rights to patents are assigned to Mr. Big Corporation, his employer. If you think I am joking, take a gander through a patent database, and take note of the "Assigned to:" field.
He still gets to have his name on it, though.
Re:The headline lies (Score:5, Interesting)
The current example I can think of is "floating-point textures" for GPU's. 15-20 years ago (1990's, 80287/80387, TMS34082), it was impossible to put all the transistor logic to handle floating-point calculations onto a single chip, let alone a cluster of them, so that concept was patented. Today, it's possible to get off-the-shelf logic cells that implement floating-point calculations, and the size of a GPU core is smaller than a NAND gate of a 6502. But the minute you combine graphics with floating-point, you suddenly become liable to pay-the-troll, even though CPU implementations (software rendering) won't be liable, nor will languages like OpenCL. It's only when you combine floating-point with graphics that the patent applies.
Shakespeare's Dick (Score:5, Interesting)
The character in Henry VI, not what you first thought (you insensitive clod!), was spot-on. "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
As long as 99% of all American politicians are lawyers, and lawyers can make money from patent law, there will never be meaningful patent reform. Until enough of a voting block decides that attorneys make poor statesmen as a class and throws the lot of them out of office in favor of truly populist, honest representatives, we're stuck with what we've got.
Patent law, civil torts, and personal injury are all areas where the Rule of Law has been perverted into the Rule of Lawyers.
Nothing short of an electoral or economic revolution can rectify the problem.
Any odds-making experts care to venture an estimate on that happening?
Re:Indirect damage (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not just a problem for the USofA. It is a problem for everybody in the world. Well, unless you are a CEO or a lawyer, that is.
I've been helping an ex-pat friend of mine in China set this exact thing up. You wanna know what the government and investors told him after he propped the idea: "Let's do it. We'll make sure you get the approval you need." And by approval, they meant bribes. They love ex-pats over there, and even the everyday joe here can, with a modicum of business sense, become a demigod over there. The only reason I don't move over there is... well, it's still China. I could be rich, but I like my freedoms more than money.
Re:Solve the problem at the root: change the law (Score:4, Interesting)
"only specific implementations of ideas are patentable, not the ideas themselves" - yep that's a good one... and it's already on the books if only it would be enforced.
As for "patents are only valid for things you manufacture" I can see two big problems with that: For one it kills "ivory tower" research patents, royalties on which often help fund further research by folks who don't care to be involved in the mundanities of bringing things to market, but are actually creating *real* innovation. For another it would create problems for those who invent something brilliant, but lack the business acumen to rapidly bring it to market - if you're talking about something that can't be readily produced in some Chinese factory it can take years or even decades to get the ball rolling - you're racing against the clock before your patent expires.
Personally I think reverting to the original method where each patent grant required the President's signature would solve most of the problems. The guy's got enough on his plate without signing hundreds of patents a day (an average 602/day were granted in 2010) - so it would force the patent office to massively restrict the number of patents it grants, limiting them to (hopefully) only the most truly innovative andmuseful.
Nice Daydream (Score:5, Interesting)
"We" have been here before. Politics never seems to change. The following is a very loose description of a complex process over a few hundred years. It's hardly exact history, but it's reasonably true and close enough for government work.
Somewhere between 1750 and 1850 the Brits invented the Enclosure Acts as a way of throwing people off the "commons" (and off of their own property). It's not the only time when this occurred, but it was significant.
The dumbed-down version is that to keep the crappy little piece of land that had been in your family for a couple of centuries you had to build a fence or plant a hedge around it. Of course the cost of either of these was more than the value of the land.
A lot of people became dispossessed and their decedents wandered the roads of Great Brotain for two or three generations begging and starving. The smart guys sold out for the few pennies they could get and bought a boat ticket to the colonies.
When they arrived, many of them had one simple goal - to find a piece of ground, draw a circle around it, and make sure that no one ever gor to f%ck with them again.
The Native Americans never had a chance.
For those who need the still more dumbed-down version: The 16th and 17th Century British Aristocracy invented property and made sure that they got to keep most of it. Currently, Corporate America invented "Intellectual Property". In order to do this they corrupted the Patent Office and the Patent Court.
Prior to the Enclosure Acts, any peasant could raise a goat or a cow on the commons. It was part of their livelihood for a lot of years. Once they got thrown off their own land and the common land the got the "opportunity" of working for one of the pre-industrial revolution factories.
By the time of the American Revolution, British Manufacturing had become so sophisticated that no one in the colonies had a chance of setting up a competing factory. (Kind of like us and China btw).
And all this intellectual property crap does make a difference. When Lotus sued Borland, claiming that Borland's Quattro Pro spreadsheet emulated the "look and feel" of Lotus 1-2-3, it took ten years to get the judgment overthrown. During that period of time, one of the most creative companies in the US was unable to get financing. The couldn't even sell the company.
By the time they got out from under the judgment, the bean counters wound up in charge of Borland and Microsoft had moved on to the .Net platform. Borland's Delphi was a significantly better RAD development tool than Microsoft ever dreamed of, but by the time Borland was again able to compete, it was too late.
Re:Nice Daydream (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Indirect damage (Score:5, Interesting)
No, wrong. You don't need bribes to do business in China. Only fools conduct business that way.
"One of the things I have always found troubling about Westerners doing business in emerging market countries is that they sometimes take an almost perverse pride in discussing payoffs to government officials. It is as though their having paid a bribe is a symbol of their international sophistication and insider knowledge. Yet, countless times when I am told of the bribe, I know the very same thing could almost certainly have been accomplished without a bribe."
--Dan Harris, chinalawblog.com [chinalawblog.com]