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The patent system needs to be changed in some way. When people talk about monopolies, they seem to rarely mention that the government enforces awful patents. An

The patent system needs to be changed in some way. When people talk about monopolies, they seem to rarely mention that the government enforces awful patents. And you don't even need to make the thing, just patent it! I'm not sure if it's fair to R&D costs to gut patents entirely, but I'd like to see them weakened considerably. Patent trolls should not exist. Glad to see justice in this case. Edit: Watched Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware, was interesting in regards to loose IP rights. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY

dcow 8y ago
Wasn’t there a time when you had to actually present a prototype of the thing you wanted to patent to the patent office? I think the patent system needs a little work, yes, but I think it’s often conflated with the bass ackwards copyright law in the US. Used together, the two give you the ability to perpetually remain the proprietor of your “invention” because your invention is only ever distributed as a licensed work. This is directly at odds with the purpose of the patent system in the first place. Patents are supposed to 1) reward inventors, during a limited, exclusive, window, for their inventions, and 2) reward society for curating good inventors by giving everyone access to the details of the invention immediately so our collective knowledge increases. It’s not meant to be used to build your corporate fortress. However, the patent into copyright strategy is how purely digital content behemoths survive. So good luck.
- thrmsforbfast 8y ago
  Shipping & Transit LLC had not only a prototype, but also a product: Jones developed this into a service called BusCall, which had some modest success. I think the actual solution is simply improved patent review. The patent system is broken because there are so many bad patents; if only truly innovative stuff was patented, I think a lot of the reasonable criticism would become a lot less reasonable. But without additional funding, improved scrutiny at filing time would also dramatically increase the cost of acquiring a patent, which is already expensive for individual inventors.
  - conistonwater 8y ago
    The FDA charges pharma companies for drug reviews (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd1774 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd1774), and it works but leads to an appearance of a conflict of interest. They could just make the filing fee equal to what it costs to do a review.
    - thrmsforbfast 8y ago
      Steko's comment might be a good place to continue that particular conversation. Such an approach would require careful design of incentive structures so that patents remain accessible without making the status quo of bullshit patents even worse.
lkrubner 8y ago
A free market can produce some positive outcomes wherever you have multiple entities competing with each other. For all other tasks, it is the best to have the government handle the situation. The moment you find yourself saying "The free market can only fix this problem if the government first grants a monopoly to one of the participants" then you are really saying "This situation would be better handled by the government." This especially covers most research, where it is best to have the government do it.
ryandrake 8y ago
Maybe some kind of change that preserves patent holders exclusive use of something they invented, without allowing them to extract royalties or licensing fees. Seems the former is the stated purpose of patents but the latter is how they get abused.
- icebraining 8y ago
  The common argument against that is that it would destroy honest patent holders, like individual inventors (who don't necessarily can or want to build a whole company to pursue a particular invention) and R&D focused organizations like labs and universities.
baybal2 8y ago
Patent == monopoly Monopoly == bad Prohibit patents
- thrmsforbfast 8y ago
  > Patent == monopoly For a very specific definition of monopoly (in particular, monopoly over use of a specific resource, not monopoly in the market sense). In that same sense of the word "monopoly", private property == monopoly.
  - baybal2 8y ago
    Can you sell your house 20 times while still living in it?
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      No,and you can't sell a patent 20 times and still own it. You can rent your house out an AirBnB 20 times while still living in it, and you can non-exclusively license your patent 20 times.
      - tracker1 8y ago
        I'm pretty sure if I gave 20 concurrent AirBnB renters non-exclusive use of my house, they'd be pretty pissed off.
        thrmsforbfast 8y ago
        That's called an apartment building. Or a large house with many bedrooms. Both happen all the time. In fact, just last weekend I let 20+ people into my house for a party. The notion of privately owned property didn't suddenly become absurd at the beginning of that party... "Exclusive right to use" is not unique to intellectual property, nor is the ability to scale a piece of private property from 1 user to N concurrent users.
Steko 8y ago
> The patent system needs to be changed in some way It needs a lot of changes. One simple but important fix would be to revert the 1991 budget change that made the USPTO run on fees instead of taxpayer funds. This dramatically increased the incentive to approve shit patents, something borne out in the pre-91 and post-91 data: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/these-experts-figured-out-why-so-many-bogus-patents-get-approved/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/these-experts-fi...
jcranmer 8y ago
> The patent system needs to be changed in some way. But is has. It's the changes in the patent system in the past decade that is forcing this patent troll to shut down. To wit: * The US changed from first-to-invent to first-to-file. This reduces opportunities for patent trolls to patent obvious stuff that other people invented. * Bilski and Alice have very firmly shut down the motherlode of crap arising from the State Street decision. Business method patents, and "do X on a computer" are quite invalid. * Inter partes review makes it easier to challenge patents, and SCOTUS last year upheld it as constitutional. * Venue shopping to get that one court that will always rule in favor of patents got a lot harder, as the TC Heartland case says you can only define the residence of the corporation as its place of incorporation. * Prior use defense: if you used a method before it was patent, you don't have to pay to license the patent. I think there are some other reforms that could be made (the big one is moving from one fixed term for all patent categories to varying it by industry), but life has gotten much harder for patent trolls.
- Theodores 8y ago
  > * Prior use defense: if you used a method before it was patent, you don't have to pay to license the patent. This is perhaps the best way to actually protect yourself in some business situations where enforcing the patent and getting it in the first place is going to require too much effort for the given use case. You can just post a sealed copy of the invention to your solicitor, then crack on with making the product. If someone beats you to market and wants to sue you for copying their patent then you should be covered nicely, you have hard evidence you have not stolen 'their' idea. You also don't have to publish for the world to see what your key invention is. If it is a manufacturing technique that is required to make an existing product more affordably then you can keep your invention secret that way.
  - kbutler 8y ago
    Even better: mail yourself a bunch of empty, unsealed envelopes, then put whatever you want in them a decade or two from now. Snopes describes the "poor man's copyright" as not useful in the US, "may" be some use in Britain: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/poor-mans-copyright/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/poor-mans-copyright/

dcow 8y ago

Wasn’t there a time when you had to actually present a prototype of the thing you wanted to patent to the patent office? I think the patent system needs a little work, yes, but I think it’s often conflated with the bass ackwards copyright law in the US. Used together, the two give you the ability to perpetually remain the proprietor of your “invention” because your invention is only ever distributed as a licensed work. This is directly at odds with the purpose of the patent system in the first place. Patents are supposed to 1) reward inventors, during a limited, exclusive, window, for their inventions, and 2) reward society for curating good inventors by giving everyone access to the details of the invention immediately so our collective knowledge increases. It’s not meant to be used to build your corporate fortress. However, the patent into copyright strategy is how purely digital content behemoths survive. So good luck.

thrmsforbfast 8y ago
Shipping & Transit LLC had not only a prototype, but also a product: Jones developed this into a service called BusCall, which had some modest success. I think the actual solution is simply improved patent review. The patent system is broken because there are so many bad patents; if only truly innovative stuff was patented, I think a lot of the reasonable criticism would become a lot less reasonable. But without additional funding, improved scrutiny at filing time would also dramatically increase the cost of acquiring a patent, which is already expensive for individual inventors.
- conistonwater 8y ago
  The FDA charges pharma companies for drug reviews (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd1774 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd1774), and it works but leads to an appearance of a conflict of interest. They could just make the filing fee equal to what it costs to do a review.
  - thrmsforbfast 8y ago
    Steko's comment might be a good place to continue that particular conversation. Such an approach would require careful design of incentive structures so that patents remain accessible without making the status quo of bullshit patents even worse.

lkrubner 8y ago

A free market can produce some positive outcomes wherever you have multiple entities competing with each other. For all other tasks, it is the best to have the government handle the situation. The moment you find yourself saying "The free market can only fix this problem if the government first grants a monopoly to one of the participants" then you are really saying "This situation would be better handled by the government." This especially covers most research, where it is best to have the government do it.

ryandrake 8y ago

Maybe some kind of change that preserves patent holders exclusive use of something they invented, without allowing them to extract royalties or licensing fees. Seems the former is the stated purpose of patents but the latter is how they get abused.

icebraining 8y ago
The common argument against that is that it would destroy honest patent holders, like individual inventors (who don't necessarily can or want to build a whole company to pursue a particular invention) and R&D focused organizations like labs and universities.

baybal2 8y ago

Patent == monopoly Monopoly == bad Prohibit patents

thrmsforbfast 8y ago
> Patent == monopoly For a very specific definition of monopoly (in particular, monopoly over use of a specific resource, not monopoly in the market sense). In that same sense of the word "monopoly", private property == monopoly.
- baybal2 8y ago
  Can you sell your house 20 times while still living in it?
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    No,and you can't sell a patent 20 times and still own it. You can rent your house out an AirBnB 20 times while still living in it, and you can non-exclusively license your patent 20 times.
    - tracker1 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure if I gave 20 concurrent AirBnB renters non-exclusive use of my house, they'd be pretty pissed off.
      - thrmsforbfast 8y ago
        That's called an apartment building. Or a large house with many bedrooms. Both happen all the time. In fact, just last weekend I let 20+ people into my house for a party. The notion of privately owned property didn't suddenly become absurd at the beginning of that party... "Exclusive right to use" is not unique to intellectual property, nor is the ability to scale a piece of private property from 1 user to N concurrent users.

Steko 8y ago

> The patent system needs to be changed in some way It needs a lot of changes. One simple but important fix would be to revert the 1991 budget change that made the USPTO run on fees instead of taxpayer funds. This dramatically increased the incentive to approve shit patents, something borne out in the pre-91 and post-91 data: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/these-experts-figured-out-why-so-many-bogus-patents-get-approved/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/these-experts-fi...

jcranmer 8y ago

> The patent system needs to be changed in some way. But is has. It's the changes in the patent system in the past decade that is forcing this patent troll to shut down. To wit: * The US changed from first-to-invent to first-to-file. This reduces opportunities for patent trolls to patent obvious stuff that other people invented. * Bilski and Alice have very firmly shut down the motherlode of crap arising from the State Street decision. Business method patents, and "do X on a computer" are quite invalid. * Inter partes review makes it easier to challenge patents, and SCOTUS last year upheld it as constitutional. * Venue shopping to get that one court that will always rule in favor of patents got a lot harder, as the TC Heartland case says you can only define the residence of the corporation as its place of incorporation. * Prior use defense: if you used a method before it was patent, you don't have to pay to license the patent. I think there are some other reforms that could be made (the big one is moving from one fixed term for all patent categories to varying it by industry), but life has gotten much harder for patent trolls.

Theodores 8y ago
> * Prior use defense: if you used a method before it was patent, you don't have to pay to license the patent. This is perhaps the best way to actually protect yourself in some business situations where enforcing the patent and getting it in the first place is going to require too much effort for the given use case. You can just post a sealed copy of the invention to your solicitor, then crack on with making the product. If someone beats you to market and wants to sue you for copying their patent then you should be covered nicely, you have hard evidence you have not stolen 'their' idea. You also don't have to publish for the world to see what your key invention is. If it is a manufacturing technique that is required to make an existing product more affordably then you can keep your invention secret that way.
- kbutler 8y ago
  Even better: mail yourself a bunch of empty, unsealed envelopes, then put whatever you want in them a decade or two from now. Snopes describes the "poor man's copyright" as not useful in the US, "may" be some use in Britain: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/poor-mans-copyright/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/poor-mans-copyright/