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It would be interesting to introduce a stipulation that patents are enforcable only if the owners of the patent are doing meaningful R&D in the area related to

It would be interesting to introduce a stipulation that patents are enforcable only if the owners of the patent are doing meaningful R&D in the area related to the patent. As I understand it, the original purpose of patents is to encourage innovation. If no innovation is being done, the patent should have no power.

abraae 8y ago
I can't even imagine how one would legally define the concept of "meaningful r&d". Since many SV companies started out literally in a garage, it would be a very low barrier to clear.
- todd8 8y ago
  Yes, I think the problem isn’t patenting things without R&D but is patenting things that aren’t really novel, are obvious to someone skilled in the field, or are ideas where there is already existing prior art. While an employee at IBM we were instructed to submit ideas to our IP lawyers whenever they were novel and of possible commercial importance. A number of my ideas were patented, these were generally important ideas IBM wanted to protect, some were published to establish that IBM had already invented the idea to prevent subsequent inventors from preventing IBM from using the idea, and some were so outside of IBM’s business that they chose not to protect them. My point was that sometimes I would think of things that were closely related to my work (e.g. cookies), sometimes they were unrelated to a project I was waiting on but occurred to me because I was working in an area (low latency network encryption by using counter mode encryption), and sometimes I just saw a problem at work and thought of a novel solution (security cameras with fisheye optics and software dewarping of distorted image). In some cases I wasn’t doing R&D in the area, but the ideas were still original and not obvious and I believe they deserved patents or at least publication in IBM’s Invention disclosure journal to prevent other subsequent inventors from blocking IBM from using an idea with a bogus patent.

abraae 8y ago

I can't even imagine how one would legally define the concept of "meaningful r&d". Since many SV companies started out literally in a garage, it would be a very low barrier to clear.

todd8 8y ago
Yes, I think the problem isn’t patenting things without R&D but is patenting things that aren’t really novel, are obvious to someone skilled in the field, or are ideas where there is already existing prior art. While an employee at IBM we were instructed to submit ideas to our IP lawyers whenever they were novel and of possible commercial importance. A number of my ideas were patented, these were generally important ideas IBM wanted to protect, some were published to establish that IBM had already invented the idea to prevent subsequent inventors from preventing IBM from using the idea, and some were so outside of IBM’s business that they chose not to protect them. My point was that sometimes I would think of things that were closely related to my work (e.g. cookies), sometimes they were unrelated to a project I was waiting on but occurred to me because I was working in an area (low latency network encryption by using counter mode encryption), and sometimes I just saw a problem at work and thought of a novel solution (security cameras with fisheye optics and software dewarping of distorted image). In some cases I wasn’t doing R&D in the area, but the ideas were still original and not obvious and I believe they deserved patents or at least publication in IBM’s Invention disclosure journal to prevent other subsequent inventors from blocking IBM from using an idea with a bogus patent.