5 ms·

Patent holders and genuine inventors can and will hold the development of technology back. Just look at the 3D printing market and its thriving ecosystem after

by kiba 6y ago

Patent holders and genuine inventors can and will hold the development of technology back. Just look at the 3D printing market and its thriving ecosystem after the patent on FDM printing expired. It is the open source community that's innovating, not the bigwig that started 3D printing in the first place.

mjevans 6y ago
There should be a compulsory license fee, and the total fees for any given device should be capped as well. It would actually be nice if there were a couple different schedules for such fees, and if one of those was based on the final sale cost. That would make "IP" a non-issue for no-charge free (as in beer, but also liberty) software.
- GeneralMayhem 6y ago
  Your second suggestion would be extremely exploitable, because you'd be allowing the licensee unilateral control over the price. Your competitor just came out with a cool new widget that's going to keep them in the black for years? Copy it, shove it on the market at near-zero price, and enjoy your uncontested market.
  - hakfoo 6y ago
    Aren't there already anti-dumping regulations for similar goals? I'd wonder if you'd see a lot of products sold "ready to assemble". The software is free, or some mandatory-license component costs pennies, but it's useless without the remaining bits to plug it into.
  - mjevans 6y ago
    Could you provide a hypothetical example of where this might exist? I'm having trouble envisioning how selling some form of hardware at an extreme markup is necessary if the compulsory license fee for being able to copy it is a PORTION of the sale (and not profit) price? That would ideally mean that someone else has decided to bring the product to market for more people, and that the actual inventors get rewarded for enriching society faster and more greatly in total.
    - GeneralMayhem 6y ago
      Along the lines of hakfoo's response below, this would naturally happen any time you're dealing with enhancements to a larger ecosystem (i.e. complementary goods) - the sale price of certain products can be profitably set to almost zero if they encourage buying more expensive, or at least higher-margin, things. A specific example: patentable improvements to consumer-grade inkjet printers might be disincentivized under this scheme, because the real money is in selling ink to locked-in buyers. I think there are some more fundamental problems with using sale price as the base of computation. What's "final" sale? Is it the price my company sells for wholesale? If I own my own vertically-integrated distribution network and sell direct to consumers, do I now owe the patent holder more per item? Am I incentivized to put my retail stores behind a shell company to bake the "final" sale price earlier in the pipeline? On that note, what's to stop me from doing so recursively? I could set up a "manufacturer" entity that produces the patented widget at a loss, paying the minimum licensing fee, and then an "assembler" entity that packages it into a meaningful product and actually makes all the profit. I suppose to some extent this is the same problem as deciding when to impose sales tax, so maybe the same regulation works there, but it feels trickier. That's also setting aside what I expect are deal-breaking practical problems having to do with components. Most actual products are not patented in their entirety. If you use a patented design that improves one component of a $400 machine, is the license fee based on a fraction of $400? Do I owe the patent holder more per unit if I assemble my product with a high-quality aluminum shell instead of a cheap plastic one? If I have to use 5 different patent ideas to make that machine, do I pay all 5 owners the same fraction? If not, then who decides the respective fee for each one? (As an example, a modern smartphone probably makes use of hundreds of patents - think about how many patented bits of circuitry there are just in the radio and modem.)
      - mjevans 6y ago
        Addressing the middle point (which you've labeled a fundamental problem)... I am not a patent lawyer (or even a lawyer generally). However I believe the stopping point is exhaustion. A license for X would be demanded when the first sale that uses X happens. If the IP is related to the formulation or formation of part of a capacitor then the payment for such is part of the price of that good and is not required or taken again at any other stage (other than in the price of the components already included in the BoM). Similarly, the price is reflected in the first transfer of the good, not in any final consumer sale of the unit.
- kiba 6y ago
  Exactly how would it apply to open hardware, in which the exact point of licensing is supposed to be zero-cost other than the sale of hardware?
- defnotashton2 6y ago
  Why force the model? No idea is original. You would have to pay all the way down which would never expire. You get paid for creating value that people can derive from your products.. Nothing more.
lopmotr 6y ago
There's obviously a balance to be made with incentivizing inventing though. Some inventions are expensive and nobody would do them without patent protection. Some are trivial though and it's those that are a problem. Perhaps whether you can get a patent should depend on how much time has passed from when the invention was possible (existence of necessary prior inventions/science/etc.) and when you invented it. If nobody else thought of it for 10 years, maybe it's worth a patent but if it's an immediate consequence of something else, then perhaps it's obvious and deserves no protection.
- mjevans 6y ago
  Cleanroom duplication of the invention should probably be strong grounds for invalidation of a given patent. (Since it would be obvious to an engineer skilled in the 'art' (science).)
- kiba 6y ago
  There's obviously a balance to be made with incentivizing inventing though. Some inventions are expensive and nobody would do them without patent protection. Some are trivial though and it's those that are a problem. That is quite an assumption, especially in assuming that the only way for governments to incentivize the development of technology is to give someone exclusive monopolies on those inventions. We could give them grants, reward money, whatever. There are other ways to incentivize invention without tramping on companies and inventors' abilities to build upon the work of each other. Not to mention that the development of 3D printers take hardware, which is quite expensive.
- TheDong 6y ago
  I question that it's obvious that we need to incentivize inventing through any form of IP law. Let's look at software. Some of the most notable pieces of software, from postgres, to linux, to redis, are available under open source copyright license. Those licenses are intentionally waiving copyright law. Inventions of those pieces of software happened with no expectation of IP. Let's look at academic research: research institutes and academic institutes are more interested in getting published, advancing the arts, and improving their own name in the field than they are with patents. A large chunk of ground-breaking research done in academia or research-labs is done with the primary goal of getting a paper published out of it, and whether there's a patent or not, it's not what motivated the research. Often, there is no patent. In fact, I think the open source software movement is the most obvious example of what happens when you don't have IP. The whole point of open source licenses is to defang copyright law (to use copyright law against itself). In the case of the Apache2 license, it also gives up patent rights. Within the open source software movement, innovation and profit are both common. Both happen in spite of the lack of IP protection. Why is that the case? Well, software developers who create great things and release it into the open source world often want to increase their talents, increase their recognition, or solve a problem they or others are facing. Those motivations all exist even without IP nor profit motives. Some of them do have a profit motive and create open source software in order to be hired or in order to sell support (or for some other more complex funding model). Those also don't need IP laws to help them. I admit, software is interesting. It can be argued to be an art in many ways, and it's much easier to accept that artists will continue producing art, even without financial or IP benefits. However, I think that it's likely other fields where this holds as well. I think that someone who has an idea to improve a part of a car will still wish to publish the idea to gain recognition, or negotiate with an auto company to try and implement the idea to gain both fortune and fame. I think the drug companies will still wish to produce and sell drugs, and their research employees will still attempt to find new and better drugs, even with the only motive being commercial profit, not IP + commercial profit. I think software provides ample evidence that you can profit off something even when IP is not in play. That the original inventor has enough of a headstart.

by kiba 6y ago

mjevans 6y ago

There should be a compulsory license fee, and the total fees for any given device should be capped as well. It would actually be nice if there were a couple different schedules for such fees, and if one of those was based on the final sale cost. That would make "IP" a non-issue for no-charge free (as in beer, but also liberty) software.

GeneralMayhem 6y ago
Your second suggestion would be extremely exploitable, because you'd be allowing the licensee unilateral control over the price. Your competitor just came out with a cool new widget that's going to keep them in the black for years? Copy it, shove it on the market at near-zero price, and enjoy your uncontested market.
- hakfoo 6y ago
  Aren't there already anti-dumping regulations for similar goals? I'd wonder if you'd see a lot of products sold "ready to assemble". The software is free, or some mandatory-license component costs pennies, but it's useless without the remaining bits to plug it into.
- mjevans 6y ago
  Could you provide a hypothetical example of where this might exist? I'm having trouble envisioning how selling some form of hardware at an extreme markup is necessary if the compulsory license fee for being able to copy it is a PORTION of the sale (and not profit) price? That would ideally mean that someone else has decided to bring the product to market for more people, and that the actual inventors get rewarded for enriching society faster and more greatly in total.
  - GeneralMayhem 6y ago
    Along the lines of hakfoo's response below, this would naturally happen any time you're dealing with enhancements to a larger ecosystem (i.e. complementary goods) - the sale price of certain products can be profitably set to almost zero if they encourage buying more expensive, or at least higher-margin, things. A specific example: patentable improvements to consumer-grade inkjet printers might be disincentivized under this scheme, because the real money is in selling ink to locked-in buyers. I think there are some more fundamental problems with using sale price as the base of computation. What's "final" sale? Is it the price my company sells for wholesale? If I own my own vertically-integrated distribution network and sell direct to consumers, do I now owe the patent holder more per item? Am I incentivized to put my retail stores behind a shell company to bake the "final" sale price earlier in the pipeline? On that note, what's to stop me from doing so recursively? I could set up a "manufacturer" entity that produces the patented widget at a loss, paying the minimum licensing fee, and then an "assembler" entity that packages it into a meaningful product and actually makes all the profit. I suppose to some extent this is the same problem as deciding when to impose sales tax, so maybe the same regulation works there, but it feels trickier. That's also setting aside what I expect are deal-breaking practical problems having to do with components. Most actual products are not patented in their entirety. If you use a patented design that improves one component of a $400 machine, is the license fee based on a fraction of $400? Do I owe the patent holder more per unit if I assemble my product with a high-quality aluminum shell instead of a cheap plastic one? If I have to use 5 different patent ideas to make that machine, do I pay all 5 owners the same fraction? If not, then who decides the respective fee for each one? (As an example, a modern smartphone probably makes use of hundreds of patents - think about how many patented bits of circuitry there are just in the radio and modem.)
    - mjevans 6y ago
      Addressing the middle point (which you've labeled a fundamental problem)... I am not a patent lawyer (or even a lawyer generally). However I believe the stopping point is exhaustion. A license for X would be demanded when the first sale that uses X happens. If the IP is related to the formulation or formation of part of a capacitor then the payment for such is part of the price of that good and is not required or taken again at any other stage (other than in the price of the components already included in the BoM). Similarly, the price is reflected in the first transfer of the good, not in any final consumer sale of the unit.
kiba 6y ago
Exactly how would it apply to open hardware, in which the exact point of licensing is supposed to be zero-cost other than the sale of hardware?
defnotashton2 6y ago
Why force the model? No idea is original. You would have to pay all the way down which would never expire. You get paid for creating value that people can derive from your products.. Nothing more.

lopmotr 6y ago

There's obviously a balance to be made with incentivizing inventing though. Some inventions are expensive and nobody would do them without patent protection. Some are trivial though and it's those that are a problem. Perhaps whether you can get a patent should depend on how much time has passed from when the invention was possible (existence of necessary prior inventions/science/etc.) and when you invented it. If nobody else thought of it for 10 years, maybe it's worth a patent but if it's an immediate consequence of something else, then perhaps it's obvious and deserves no protection.

mjevans 6y ago
Cleanroom duplication of the invention should probably be strong grounds for invalidation of a given patent. (Since it would be obvious to an engineer skilled in the 'art' (science).)
kiba 6y ago
There's obviously a balance to be made with incentivizing inventing though. Some inventions are expensive and nobody would do them without patent protection. Some are trivial though and it's those that are a problem. That is quite an assumption, especially in assuming that the only way for governments to incentivize the development of technology is to give someone exclusive monopolies on those inventions. We could give them grants, reward money, whatever. There are other ways to incentivize invention without tramping on companies and inventors' abilities to build upon the work of each other. Not to mention that the development of 3D printers take hardware, which is quite expensive.
TheDong 6y ago
I question that it's obvious that we need to incentivize inventing through any form of IP law. Let's look at software. Some of the most notable pieces of software, from postgres, to linux, to redis, are available under open source copyright license. Those licenses are intentionally waiving copyright law. Inventions of those pieces of software happened with no expectation of IP. Let's look at academic research: research institutes and academic institutes are more interested in getting published, advancing the arts, and improving their own name in the field than they are with patents. A large chunk of ground-breaking research done in academia or research-labs is done with the primary goal of getting a paper published out of it, and whether there's a patent or not, it's not what motivated the research. Often, there is no patent. In fact, I think the open source software movement is the most obvious example of what happens when you don't have IP. The whole point of open source licenses is to defang copyright law (to use copyright law against itself). In the case of the Apache2 license, it also gives up patent rights. Within the open source software movement, innovation and profit are both common. Both happen in spite of the lack of IP protection. Why is that the case? Well, software developers who create great things and release it into the open source world often want to increase their talents, increase their recognition, or solve a problem they or others are facing. Those motivations all exist even without IP nor profit motives. Some of them do have a profit motive and create open source software in order to be hired or in order to sell support (or for some other more complex funding model). Those also don't need IP laws to help them. I admit, software is interesting. It can be argued to be an art in many ways, and it's much easier to accept that artists will continue producing art, even without financial or IP benefits. However, I think that it's likely other fields where this holds as well. I think that someone who has an idea to improve a part of a car will still wish to publish the idea to gain recognition, or negotiate with an auto company to try and implement the idea to gain both fortune and fame. I think the drug companies will still wish to produce and sell drugs, and their research employees will still attempt to find new and better drugs, even with the only motive being commercial profit, not IP + commercial profit. I think software provides ample evidence that you can profit off something even when IP is not in play. That the original inventor has enough of a headstart.