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The inventor can benefit from a patent by selling it. Maybe they don't want to raise millions of dollars and spend years building a business that may or may no

The inventor can benefit from a patent by selling it. Maybe they don't want to raise millions of dollars and spend years building a business that may or may not eventually generate $20 million in profit over the next couple decades, and would rather just sell it now for $1 million and get back to creating! Even if they wanted to take the time and risk to use it directly, the skills required to invent something and the skills to profit from it aren't necessarily the same.

modeless 11y ago
> Maybe they don't want to raise millions of dollars and spend years building a business But see, this is the valuable part! This is what we should be rewarding! The idea is worthless without execution. The concept that someone who simply had a relatively trivial idea should be able to extract rent from someone else who had the same idea but actually spent years executing on it and building a real business that benefits actual customers, taking on significant risk to do so, is repugnant.
- CardenB 11y ago
  If we ignored the value of the idea, then those with the means to scale up production quickly could easily steal ideas from those who are trying to find the means to scale up production.
- golergka 11y ago
  > But see, this is the valuable part! This is what we should be rewarding! The idea is worthless without execution. And that's exactly what the system that allows the transfer of patent rewards. If patents wouldn't be transferrable, than inventors and entrepreneurs would be forced to be both, instead of productively working together.
- sbov 11y ago
  There are several things that go into a product. Using your metric, if you chip away any one of them the other parts tend to become worthless. You wouldn't have a product without the ideas that go into it. You wouldn't have a product worth anything if you didn't have people selling & marketing it. In a vacuum each aspect is worthless. So programmers should be paid zero, just like inventors should be paid zero. Because unless you're going to build a business, what you just programmed is worthless.
- chx 11y ago
  My uncle have invented a new type of sprinkler. Literally think of bearded guy tinkering in his garage for years. I can't imagine why his idea would be worthless without execution. Instead, this is something I very firmly believe should be the focus of the patent system. He made some money on it and couldn't have without the patent system. Executing this idea is quite capital intensive as you'd need to build a factory and so forth. It's much more effective to just sell the rights to an existing manufacturer. Of course this is an idea resulting in an actual physical piece. If you mean that patents not resulting in such shouldn't be allowed ... then yes, I might agree.
  - cm3 11y ago
    But he doesn't have to sell the patent. He only has to sell the rights to use.
    - Retric 11y ago
      That allows for patent trolls.
      - cm3 11y ago
        I should have written license rather than sell. And a license goes with restrictions. The other choice is to get a patent granted and license it to everyone for free with a do-no-evil-or-revoke clause.
      - serge2k 11y ago
        But not to nearly the same degree, since now you can't gather up IP from a bunch of places and then toss it to a company that's only purpose is suing.
        AnthonyMouse 11y ago
        So instead you have a company that gathers up contracts with owners of IP from a bunch of places to get a "finder's fee" from anybody they negotiate a patent license with. It's no different at all. About the only thing you could even hope for is that the original inventor will have more of a conscience about how the patent is being licensed than the troll entity. But if that happens on a regular basis then then the troll entity will just start putting liquidated damages clauses in their license finding contracts with inventors that penalizes the inventor for pulling out after the troll entity has done work to find a license victim.
- jamornh 11y ago
  This isn't absolutely true, if ideas are worthless without execution then corporations would never spend millions and millions inside their R&D departments creating inventions which may or may not come to market. The assumption that ideas are always trivial isn't correct, sometimes the inventor spends years and years perfecting a design in his own garage, but doesn't have the means to bring it to market. Should the inventor not get rewarded for his work? Nothing is wrong with the final invention nor is it from the lack of trying to bring it to market, he just doesn't have the financing necessary to pull it off.
  - hueving 11y ago
    But a society doesn't need to reward people for tinkering and failing to bring it to the wider population.
    - euyyn 11y ago
      Society isn't rewarding it, as it's not the government who buys the patent from the inventor. The patent system just lubricates a market that would still happen as long as NDAs are legal.
  - CyberDildonics 11y ago
    > R&D departments creating inventions Those aren't ideas any more
  - chongli 11y ago
    Should the inventor not get rewarded for his work? The patent isn't a reward for his work, though. The patent is a reward for having an idea and filing for it. The inventor could just as easily spend years in the garage and come up with nothing patent-able, thereby obtaining no reward.
    - sliverstorm 11y ago
      The patent is the opportunity to be rewarded (paid) for your work, instead of ripped off. Sans patent, BigCo just takes your great idea.
- will_brown 11y ago
  Ideas may or may not be worthless, but they certainly are not patentable.
- saulrh 11y ago
  > The idea is worthless without execution. As someone who's spent a ton of time in research labs and has gone halfway through the patent process a couple times - no, no it isn't. A lot of people think this and fail to recognize how hard it is to come up with something legitimately new and verify that it works. Ideation and prototyping are fundamentally different skills than formalization and "execution" and demanding t the same person does both is wasting multiple separate talents.
  - gregmac 11y ago
    > fail to recognize how hard it is to come up with something legitimately new The vast majority of process and software patents seem to not actually be new though, and the patent system explicitly doesn't reward 'new' in the general sense, it rewards 'new to the patent system' (aka first to file) > and verify that it works. In most patent troll litigation, the holder of the patent hasn't verified or actually built anything. In my opinion, research labs should be rewarded for their work finding genuinely 'new' things. That includes benefiting from another entity building or developing what they found. It doesn't include sitting on the patent waiting for someone else to 'discover' or simply do the same thing, wait for them to profit for a few years, then sue.
    - saulrh 11y ago
      I agree with what you've said here: inventing things that are actually new is difficult and the people that don't invent things that are actually new shouldn't be rewarded. Patent trolls are a thing, and people patenting boring junk is also a thing. The things is, saying things like "only execution matters" goes too far in the other direction, and, like you said, cuts out research labs and similar endeavors.
  - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    > As someone who's spent a ton of time in research labs and has gone halfway through the patent process a couple times - no, no it isn't. "Worthless" is an exaggeration. The fair point is that implementing the idea (and all of the supporting infrastructure necessary to do it) is generally much more work than coming up with it to begin with. So you spend 250 hours to come up with an invention and somebody else spends the same 250 hours to come up with the same invention but also spends 5000 more hours to implement it and then the patent system says you can go to them and say "that's mine" and claim all the profits. That result is clearly an injustice.
- chrismcb 11y ago
  If it is a relatively trivial idea then it shouldn't be patentable
- imron 11y ago
  > The concept that someone who simply had a relatively trivial idea should be able to extract rent The solution to this is to not grant patents to trivial ideas.
techdragon 11y ago
I'm sure a network of experts in IP management would step up in such a hypothetical world, and these people would be more than happy to 'build the business' around patents on behalf of the inventors, in exchange for money of course. Pretty similar to the current system on the face of it. But the nuances may have some greater merit.
deciplex 11y ago
This. A good patent is a valuable thing and I can't get behind barring people from selling valuable things that they made or that they bought themselves. Whenever PatentTalk comes up we see a lot of Band-Aid solutions like this. Similarly with copyright issues. Instead of trying to hack around the shitty laws and regulations we have in place for this stuff, let's just fix the problem at its source. In the case of patents, this mostly means to quit handing out bogus patents, and making it much easier for a patent to be invalidated in the first place. Especially with the sort of patents floating around nowadays, not to mention the litigiousness, a patent like this being invalidated should not be 'big news' - it should be a routine occurrence.
serge2k 11y ago
Then they can license it out to a company.

modeless 11y ago

> Maybe they don't want to raise millions of dollars and spend years building a business But see, this is the valuable part! This is what we should be rewarding! The idea is worthless without execution. The concept that someone who simply had a relatively trivial idea should be able to extract rent from someone else who had the same idea but actually spent years executing on it and building a real business that benefits actual customers, taking on significant risk to do so, is repugnant.

CardenB 11y ago
If we ignored the value of the idea, then those with the means to scale up production quickly could easily steal ideas from those who are trying to find the means to scale up production.
golergka 11y ago
> But see, this is the valuable part! This is what we should be rewarding! The idea is worthless without execution. And that's exactly what the system that allows the transfer of patent rewards. If patents wouldn't be transferrable, than inventors and entrepreneurs would be forced to be both, instead of productively working together.
sbov 11y ago
There are several things that go into a product. Using your metric, if you chip away any one of them the other parts tend to become worthless. You wouldn't have a product without the ideas that go into it. You wouldn't have a product worth anything if you didn't have people selling & marketing it. In a vacuum each aspect is worthless. So programmers should be paid zero, just like inventors should be paid zero. Because unless you're going to build a business, what you just programmed is worthless.
chx 11y ago
My uncle have invented a new type of sprinkler. Literally think of bearded guy tinkering in his garage for years. I can't imagine why his idea would be worthless without execution. Instead, this is something I very firmly believe should be the focus of the patent system. He made some money on it and couldn't have without the patent system. Executing this idea is quite capital intensive as you'd need to build a factory and so forth. It's much more effective to just sell the rights to an existing manufacturer. Of course this is an idea resulting in an actual physical piece. If you mean that patents not resulting in such shouldn't be allowed ... then yes, I might agree.
- cm3 11y ago
  But he doesn't have to sell the patent. He only has to sell the rights to use.
  - Retric 11y ago
    That allows for patent trolls.
    - cm3 11y ago
      I should have written license rather than sell. And a license goes with restrictions. The other choice is to get a patent granted and license it to everyone for free with a do-no-evil-or-revoke clause.
    - serge2k 11y ago
      But not to nearly the same degree, since now you can't gather up IP from a bunch of places and then toss it to a company that's only purpose is suing.
      - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
        So instead you have a company that gathers up contracts with owners of IP from a bunch of places to get a "finder's fee" from anybody they negotiate a patent license with. It's no different at all. About the only thing you could even hope for is that the original inventor will have more of a conscience about how the patent is being licensed than the troll entity. But if that happens on a regular basis then then the troll entity will just start putting liquidated damages clauses in their license finding contracts with inventors that penalizes the inventor for pulling out after the troll entity has done work to find a license victim.
jamornh 11y ago
This isn't absolutely true, if ideas are worthless without execution then corporations would never spend millions and millions inside their R&D departments creating inventions which may or may not come to market. The assumption that ideas are always trivial isn't correct, sometimes the inventor spends years and years perfecting a design in his own garage, but doesn't have the means to bring it to market. Should the inventor not get rewarded for his work? Nothing is wrong with the final invention nor is it from the lack of trying to bring it to market, he just doesn't have the financing necessary to pull it off.
- hueving 11y ago
  But a society doesn't need to reward people for tinkering and failing to bring it to the wider population.
  - euyyn 11y ago
    Society isn't rewarding it, as it's not the government who buys the patent from the inventor. The patent system just lubricates a market that would still happen as long as NDAs are legal.
- CyberDildonics 11y ago
  > R&D departments creating inventions Those aren't ideas any more
- chongli 11y ago
  Should the inventor not get rewarded for his work? The patent isn't a reward for his work, though. The patent is a reward for having an idea and filing for it. The inventor could just as easily spend years in the garage and come up with nothing patent-able, thereby obtaining no reward.
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    The patent is the opportunity to be rewarded (paid) for your work, instead of ripped off. Sans patent, BigCo just takes your great idea.
will_brown 11y ago
Ideas may or may not be worthless, but they certainly are not patentable.
saulrh 11y ago
> The idea is worthless without execution. As someone who's spent a ton of time in research labs and has gone halfway through the patent process a couple times - no, no it isn't. A lot of people think this and fail to recognize how hard it is to come up with something legitimately new and verify that it works. Ideation and prototyping are fundamentally different skills than formalization and "execution" and demanding t the same person does both is wasting multiple separate talents.
- gregmac 11y ago
  > fail to recognize how hard it is to come up with something legitimately new The vast majority of process and software patents seem to not actually be new though, and the patent system explicitly doesn't reward 'new' in the general sense, it rewards 'new to the patent system' (aka first to file) > and verify that it works. In most patent troll litigation, the holder of the patent hasn't verified or actually built anything. In my opinion, research labs should be rewarded for their work finding genuinely 'new' things. That includes benefiting from another entity building or developing what they found. It doesn't include sitting on the patent waiting for someone else to 'discover' or simply do the same thing, wait for them to profit for a few years, then sue.
  - saulrh 11y ago
    I agree with what you've said here: inventing things that are actually new is difficult and the people that don't invent things that are actually new shouldn't be rewarded. Patent trolls are a thing, and people patenting boring junk is also a thing. The things is, saying things like "only execution matters" goes too far in the other direction, and, like you said, cuts out research labs and similar endeavors.
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  > As someone who's spent a ton of time in research labs and has gone halfway through the patent process a couple times - no, no it isn't. "Worthless" is an exaggeration. The fair point is that implementing the idea (and all of the supporting infrastructure necessary to do it) is generally much more work than coming up with it to begin with. So you spend 250 hours to come up with an invention and somebody else spends the same 250 hours to come up with the same invention but also spends 5000 more hours to implement it and then the patent system says you can go to them and say "that's mine" and claim all the profits. That result is clearly an injustice.
chrismcb 11y ago
If it is a relatively trivial idea then it shouldn't be patentable
imron 11y ago
> The concept that someone who simply had a relatively trivial idea should be able to extract rent The solution to this is to not grant patents to trivial ideas.

techdragon 11y ago

I'm sure a network of experts in IP management would step up in such a hypothetical world, and these people would be more than happy to 'build the business' around patents on behalf of the inventors, in exchange for money of course. Pretty similar to the current system on the face of it. But the nuances may have some greater merit.

deciplex 11y ago

This. A good patent is a valuable thing and I can't get behind barring people from selling valuable things that they made or that they bought themselves. Whenever PatentTalk comes up we see a lot of Band-Aid solutions like this. Similarly with copyright issues. Instead of trying to hack around the shitty laws and regulations we have in place for this stuff, let's just fix the problem at its source. In the case of patents, this mostly means to quit handing out bogus patents, and making it much easier for a patent to be invalidated in the first place. Especially with the sort of patents floating around nowadays, not to mention the litigiousness, a patent like this being invalidated should not be 'big news' - it should be a routine occurrence.

serge2k 11y ago

Then they can license it out to a company.