28 ms·
BlackBerry sells mobile patents to patent troll for $600M
- stuaxo 5y agoI read this as "sues patent troll for $600M" what a disaster.
- errantmind 5y agoThe patent system needs to go. Soon.
- StriverGuy 5y agoI would say it needs to be realigned to only allow productive companies to hold/protect patents.
- ectospheno 5y agoThat would mean only large companies would own patents. It would be the death of the independent inventor. No capital to make what you invented? Oh well…
- ntkachov 5y agoNot at all, Patent is there for protection. So if you invent something that requires capital, but are a non-practicing entity, you can't enforce your patent. So lets say a bunch of companies start to practice your patent, all of them now have incentive to buy your patent because if any of them own it, none of their competitors can use it anymore.
- pionar 5y agoIf you can't make what you invented, the whole world can't have your invention? That seems suboptimal for society.
- kspacewalk2 5y agoIf you can't make what you invented, you can find someone who can and license the invention to them. That seems optimal for society.
- tablespoon 5y ago>>> I would say it needs to be realigned to only allow productive companies to hold/protect patents. >> That would mean only large companies would own patents. It would be the death of the independent inventor. No capital to make what you invented? Oh well… > If you can't make what you invented, the whole world can't have your invention? That seems suboptimal for society. Right now, a small independent inventor can use their patent rights to secure capital to produce their invention. If only "productive companies" can hold patents, instead of investing in small inventors, they'd just freeze them out until they lose their rights (or use that threat as leverage to buy the patents for less than they're worth). The "whole world" won't get their invention, just the people rich enough to profit from it, and the inventor gets squat.
- cecilpl2 5y ago> instead of investing in small inventors, they'd just freeze them out until they lose their rights (or use that threat as leverage to buy the patents for less than they're worth). I'm trying to understand your point but it seems like you are saying that all people with sufficient capital would band together to prevent small inventors from getting funding for years?
- tablespoon 5y ago> I'm trying to understand your point but it seems like you are saying that all people with sufficient capital would band together to prevent small inventors from getting funding for years? Legal rights are often the only protections the little guy has. Take them away, and the big guys are better able to take advantage. The people with sufficient capital don't need to band together in a conspiracy, they just need to understand their advantage, and act accordingly. And I don't know where you're getting "for years" from. If a small inventor/"[un]productive company" can hold a patent "for years," you're basically describing the current patent system, and the ancestor comment becomes a meaningless suggestion. If the ancestor comment isn't a meaningless suggestion, someone "with sufficient capital" should be able to sue an inventor's patent into nonexistence for being held by an "[un]productive company," which would be strong leverage to demand a lower price. One of the biggest merits of the patent system is it gives independent small inventors a chance at seeing some success. A "reform" that undermines that is not a reform worth pursuing. Also a lot of "reforms" proposed by internet commenters aren't very thought through. Often they're just narrow things aimed to stop some specific thing that's in the front of their mind, with little consideration of collateral damage.
- mminer237 5y agoYou could always license it out.
- onion2k 5y agoThere would be no reason to buy the license because you'd lose in court if you weren't using it. Companies could just use it with no fear of you winning a case against them. You can't even just accept that the originating patent holder should be able to sue while anyone who buys the patent can't. Patent trolls would just hire the person who registered the patent or sue on their behalf. There is no elegant solution to the patent troll problem. If someone can sue, then trolls can sue.
- tim333 5y agoYou could make an exception for the inventor.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- achow 5y agoThe days of garage invention and patenting those are gone. Patent process itself is so expensive and laborious that many do not do it, and upon that to keep patent 'alive' there is an annual expenditure. I'm not sure whether today there are are many patents which are with small inventors and they are holding onto them till they gather enough funds to productionize them.
- dylan604 5y agoHow about modifiying to if you can prove "prior art" on an invention but did not have sufficient capitol to file for the protection or start up a business with the patent so that someone else is granted the patent later, the prior art owner is not subject to the patent? Not a perfect idea, but an idea to kick around on improving rather than just the blanket statments of "kill all patents" that are so trendy. Also, we don't have to say that all garage inventors are dead.
- samhw 5y agoThat's not a terrible idea. People likely underestimate how much of the legal system runs on - essentially - sensible human discretion in applying rules like that one.
- nradov 5y agoHave you ever watched Shark Tank?
- achow 5y agoYou realize that is highly dramatized and curated? Annually around 1.5-2 millions patents are granted. How many episodes of Shark Tank has run till now and what subset of the participants had patents on their inventions? And, how many of those inventors would not get any funding if there was no concept of patents.
- beefield 5y ago> That would mean only large companies would own patents. Wrong. If you applied a tax to IP that increases relatively fast over time (say doubles each year), you could "easily" select the parameters so, that it makes cheap to hold your patent for a while after the invention ( assuming you have some revenue at least on sight), while making it too expensive to hoard patents for nothing, and make keeping the patents closed unnecessarily long for even the largest corporations.
- pionar 5y agoWith trademark, it's use it or lose it, as it should be with patents. EDIT: I accidentally included copyright in this. It is not.
- jtbayly 5y agoHow is copyright use it or lose it?
- pionar 5y agoSorry, I should've left that out. Edited.
- iggldiggl 5y agoAlthough interestingly in the EU there is now a small use-it-or-lose-it element with sound recordings, where the copyright on sound recordings expires fifty years after the original recording, or seventy years after the first publication (or at least public playback) by the rightful owner. Cue a number of labels actually officially releasing a number of previously unpublished recordings in order to prevent the corresponding bootlegs of those recordings from falling into the public domain.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sirwhinesalot 5y agoPerhaps we could do something like: if a company is not actively using a patent themselves, they lose exclusive rights after a short period of time (3 years lets say). Even when sold, the time counts from when the patent was created, not bought. Should limit the extent of the damage caused by patent trolls.
- rPlayer6554 5y agoThis is a good idea in theory, but what stops a factory offering to produce one of anything for a few thousand dollars, just to meet the requirements of "making a product." If there are requirements for how many you produce, how does that affect small businesses or businesses that want to keep products exclusive?
- sirwhinesalot 5y agoGood point, too easy to work around. Shortening to half time as Robotbeat said might be the way to go.
- naniwaduni 5y agoThis would at least force them to establish an example of a product using their invention, which seems like it'd be a great boon.
- Robotbeat 5y agoI think in general we should just halve the time of patent protection, including the lead-up time where it hasn’t been finalized yet but still protected.
- yread 5y agoIs ARM productive? They're not making CPUs themselves...
- bmitc 5y agoDo patent trolls spend billions of dollars designing CPUs or whatever else they hold patents on?
- marcan_42 5y agoThey make CPU designs which they license out. That's copyrighted IP, and thus a product. If ARM stopped making CPU designs and decided to just live off of their ISA patents while doing little to no actual development, yeah, then they certainly shouldn't have the right to be milking that cow in perpetuity, in an ideal world.
- s1artibartfast 5y agoThey shouldn't have the right to sell their existing designs until the patent expires? This is the current system
- assbuttbuttass 5y agoYes, it's interesting that although patents were intended to allow huge corporations to suppress competition, now these huge corporations have to spend endless legal fees fighting patent trolls. Will it be enough to kill patents? Maybe
- toyg 5y ago> patents were intended to allow huge corporations to suppress competition Afaik, there weren't any "huge corporations" around when the patent system was first devised, only what today would look like mid-size national companies. There is a good chance the initial legislators thought they were actually protecting the little guys. Alas, good intentions tend to pave roads to very hot places...
- mminer237 5y agoThat would essentially end innovation. If you invented the new latest and greatest gadget/medicine/process, a mega-corporation with more resources than you will undercut you with the exact same product within the week. You can say patents relating to phones should be narrowed, but ending the patent system would be a hundred times more disastrous.
- Robotbeat 5y agoIn reality, the big corporations have huge “defensive patent” war chests which your innovation probably infringes on in some way if you were to try to bring it to market. The deck is stacked against the individual inventor more so now than in the past.
- namlem 5y agoI don't agree that we should eliminate parents, but it most certainly would not end innovation. China has very weak IP rights but there is still plenty of innovation.
- haxorito 5y agoNah just need overhaul and better control, start with taking legal actions against patent trolls on federal level. People will always look for ways to make money with very little effort
- NoboruWataya 5y ago> start with taking legal actions against patent trolls on federal level How would that work? So you are allowed to acquire legal rights, but if you try to enforce those rights, the federal government will take action against you? Seems like a bizarre and unnecessary trap to set. If you really want to stop this kind of thing surely the more logical thing to do would just be to say that patent rights are personal, ie, they cannot be sold to third parties. Of course, that would lead to a significant devaluation of intellectual property, which (so the theory goes) would result in less innovation.
- gdsdfe 5y agopatents do serve a purpose ... but I would reduce their 'impact' say a patent is only valid for 10 years and same patent can't be refiled twice.
- nradov 5y agoInventors are already prohibited from refiling the same patent twice.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoThe problem is that companies just lobby to extend how long they're valid for e.g. Disney. The entire system is fucked. I wish a bomb would just wipe out Congress sometimes.
- jordanpg 5y agoThis criticism is as misguided as "end all regulation." The specific problem that the US patent system enables is that patent rights can be assigned to anyone, just like any other property right. That is what allows NPEs to exploit this manifest economic inefficiency. Ending all patents very much throws the baby out with the bathwater. The federal government can and should intervene to reform the laws that allow this.
- namlem 5y agoWhat we need is a Harberger tax on patents.
- errantmind 5y agoPlease provide some evidence, other than your intuition, that the patent system is necessary and useful, over no patent system.
- ChrisLomont 5y agoWhich countries provide more innovation, those with strong patent laws protecting inventors, or those with lax or no patent laws, allowing anyone to just copy inventions without rewarding inventors?
- errantmind 5y agoYou tell me, bring some evidence.
- ChrisLomont 5y agoSome recent papers [1], look at figures at end of paper. Figure one shows the percent of inventions in various industries that would not have been developed without patent protection, and it's 60% for pharm, >35% for chem, and significant for machinery, electrical. This chart is from 1986, so tech didn't exist as it does now. Many other charts, some much more recent, show that without patent protection a lot of current invention would not get done. [2] is an interesting one, a recent paper studying the effect WWII had on innovation by making patents secret so enemies could not learn from them. The effect is that without patents making companies publish innovations, follow-on innovation was slowed significantly. So this provides evidence that patents add innovation by letting competitors learn more quickly. [3] - patents in the UK : "We find evidence pointing to a positive association between patenting and innovative performance measured as turnover due to innovation, but not between patenting and subsequent employment growth." [4] "We find that patent approvals help startups create jobs, grow their sales, innovate, and reward their investors. Exogenous delays in the patent examination process significantly reduce firm growth, job creation, and innovation, even when a firm’s patent application is eventually approved. Our results suggest that patents act as a catalyst that sets startups on a growth path by facilitating their access to capital. " [5] "Using unique data on all first-time applications filed at the U.S. Patent Office since 2001, we find that startups that win the patent “lottery” by drawing lenient examiners have, on average, 55% higher employment growth and 80% higher sales growth five years later. Patent winners also pursue more, and higher quality, follow-on innovation. Winning a first patent boosts a startup’s subsequent growth and innovation by facilitating access to funding from VCs, banks, and public investors." There's hundreds more papers - go to google scholar and search and learn about it. Now, as to your statement, "Please provide some evidence, other than your intuition, that the patent system is necessary and useful, over no patent system. reply". Do you have any good survey papers or wide scale evidence to support that a patent system isn't necessary and useful? Anecdotes, blog posts, stories about this or that company are not solid evidence, since those all ignore the totality of evidence. [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w25383 https://www.nber.org/papers/w25383 [2] https://www.nber.org/digest/jul19/wwii-policy-kept-patents-secret-slowed-innovation https://www.nber.org/digest/jul19/wwii-policy-kept-patents-s... [3] https://www.nber.org/papers/w19089 https://www.nber.org/papers/w19089 [4] https://www.nber.org/papers/w21959 https://www.nber.org/papers/w21959 [5] https://www.nber.org/papers/w23268 https://www.nber.org/papers/w23268
- ford_o 5y agoWhy not just limit patents to 3 years before they expire. In today's world this should be all you need to pay for the research and go from startup to established company.
- s1artibartfast 5y agoSome products take much longer to develop. A drug or medical device can easily take 10 years from concept/ip filing to hit market. Other products have slow uptake. If you make a novel product with growing users, Google shouldn't be able to clone it at 3 years and push it to a billion of their users.
- blakesterz 5y ago"BlackBerry's sale is to what could be considered a "Non-practicing entity," a company that doesn't earn revenue from product or services sales, but is more likely to do so through asset protection. Many refer to these sorts of entities as "patent trolls."" That looks pretty bad. Seems pretty obvious this is going to cost Apple & Google some serious money, even if it's just hiring more lawyers for the lawsuits from "Catapult IP Innovations".
- netsharc 5y agoSeems surprising that Apple/Google didn't just offer BlackBerry $610M to stop the bullshit. Maybe the freshly formed company is owned by some former RIM exec(s)...
- prepend 5y agoI’m guessing that it will not cost Apple and Google that much money or they would have just bought the patents outright. I expect that Apple and Google were already licensing any blackberry patents they needed/would be forced to use. This is big enough that Apple and Google’s operational risk group would have done a calculation to buy if the exposure was less than the sale price. The patent trolling is likely for smaller companies who can’t afford to fight the troll.
- troyvit 5y agoI'm worried about Linux phone operating systems at this point. They seem ripe for this sort of trolling.
- grej 5y agoGood question. What actually happens if an open source permissive license product is accused of violating a patent? There’s not exactly a company to sue.
- tsimionescu 5y agoThere is always a company, NGO or individual(s) that is distributing the code.
- Tsarbomb 5y agoI'd love to know if they floated any of these patents to Google, Apple, etc... and if those companies did the math and decided that litigation against a patent troll would cost less than what Blackberry was asking for.
- mrkramer 5y agoPatent trolls buy patents for $600m?! How the hell trolls amassed so much money? Are there investment banks and VCs which invest in patent trolls?
- sbarre 5y agoYes there are. Plenty of folks out there who want to make money from their money and don't care how. So funds get raised for this kind of venture pretty easily.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y agoThe ability to make money without contributing towards improving something is a cancer. If we don't cut it out things will get worse.
- dvtrn 5y agoHow long before greed is literally evolved out of our brains?
- mschuster91 5y agoWe're humans. We can dis-incentivize greed through legal frameworks - taxes on speculative assets or on patents that are not used or fairly licensed by the owners, for example.
- sbarre 5y agoThis is probably more complicated than it sounds. What consists of "not used" or "fairly licensed"? Who decides this, and how do those definitions evolve over time? Like most legal frameworks they would likely lag behind the reality of the times they are applied to... I'm all for trying to prevent abuses and patent trolls and the like, but it's not as easy to solve as it might seem.
- 5y ago
- jacquesm 5y agoWhat about the QNX IP?
- xekul 5y agoThe patents that were sold had to do with BlackBerry's legacy non-core business (mobile devices) and don't comprise their entire patent portfolio. They've specifically said that the patent sale won't affect their existing customers (such as QNX licensees).
- soco 5y agoQNX, that thing I received like 30 years ago in a magazine on a bootable floppy? With X Win of course...
- jacquesm 5y agoYes, precisely, that thing. It managed to pack more on the floppy than most other systems of the time on 50 floppies.
- haxorito 5y agoSelling patents to trolls, what can go wrong…
- tablespoon 5y ago> Selling patents to trolls, what can go wrong… Nothing that's Blackberry's owners' problem.
- jordanpg 5y agoA shame that Blackberry did not opt in to something like this: https://lotnet.com/how-we-protect-members/ https://lotnet.com/how-we-protect-members/ https://lotnet.com/members/ https://lotnet.com/members/
- kmeisthax 5y agoLotnet is fundamentally a poison pill agreement against members selling their patents to non-practicing entities. It only ever makes sense to join such an agreement if you are a net implementer of patents and don't anticipate needing to exit the industry any time soon. For a company like Blackberry, who hasn't designed a phone in years and coasted entirely on licensing and production deals with TCL, it makes zero sense to do this. If you own a lot of phone patents but aren't making any phones, you effectively already are a patent troll.
- dzonga 5y ago
- kmeisthax 5y ago...their crime is not being Apple in 2007?
- dzonga 5y agothey didn't need to be apple ? they didn't even need to be #1 yet now they don't exist. same as the nokia folks. one thing though I won't blame them for is short-terminism instilled in business schools.
- paxys 5y agoWhile we are at it, let's also jail all consumers who don't buy Blackberry products.
- TheMerovingian 5y agoDoes anyone know which patents? I'm curious since my name is on a number of them.
- 83dk20sldkl 5y agoI have to expect that many of these patents will expired soon. I mean, when is the last time Blackberry has done anything innovative?
- fartcannon 5y agoDoes the patent contain round corners or something?
- olivermarks 5y agoPatent trolls are like the herpes of the innovation world - they will infect smaller players and inhibit their ability to develop without flare ups of litigation
- birdyrooster 5y agothis comment made my herpes flare up, i want restitution
- dqpb 5y agoPatent trolls should be treated as a threat to national security.
- botanical 5y agoAfter generations of leadership change, can a company have the same values and vision of the previous leadership? I suppose on paper it's still BlackBerry. But selling patents of a company that was a leader in revolutionising the mobile sector to patent trolls only mean the trolls mean to aim higher in terms of litigation
- xorandor 5y agoThey're going to be going after somebody pretty soon to recoup that cost, probably had someone in mind before they concluded the deal. Hold on to your hats, incoming!
- horns4lyfe 5y agoDoes anyone here run or work for a parent troll? Do you look at yourself in the mirror every day and hate what you are, or is money your only guidepost in life?
- senectus1 5y agoI wonder if this includes their keyboard and Blackberry hub IP. two things that blackberry phone users love. (in my experience of the last 20 plus years)...
- chottocharaii 5y agoPatent trolls are not the problem. Don’t hate the player, hate the game