6 ms·

"Patent trolls could be the end of Silicon Valley" says Tim O'Reilly

121 points by cjfont 15y ago

ltamake 15y ago
Well, patent trolls cause companies to spend more money on legal efforts than on innovating so I agree. insert rant about how broken the patent system is here
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- kiba 15y ago
  Broken? It's been broken for about 300 years! You can count James Watt as an example of using lawyers to sue people rather than spend time more innovating.
cynest 15y ago
The second paragraph is a direct quote from wikipedia. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tim_O%27Reilly&oldid=453563125 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tim_O%27Reilly&#38... The quote in question: >Tim has been active in this space and in 2001, O’Reilly was involved in a dispute with Amazon.com, leading a protest against Amazon’s one-click patent and, specifically, Amazon’s assertion of that patent against rival barnesandnoble.com. The protest ended with O’Reilly and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos visiting Washington D.C. to lobby for patent reform.
- sumukh1 15y ago
  Kind of ironic. And it's not like copyright trolls are limited to Silicon Valley. It's coming from content "creators" like the blog linked. If the quote that was stolen was originally from the AP the blog would have to pay $40. (See: http://mashable.com/2009/08/02/associated-press/ http://mashable.com/2009/08/02/associated-press/)
  - chc 15y ago
    Copyright trolls are almost wholly absent from Silicon Valley. They tend to be in Hollywood. Patents and copyrights are totally different things.
kevinalexbrown 15y ago
My biggest problem with patent-overload isn't Apple v. Google v. Amazon, and lost innovation, it's Big Company v. Samll Company (particularly the physical engineering kind), with large legal departments versus smaller ones. E.g. "please top infringing on our bs ethernet connector patent"
- iqster 15y ago
  One solution could be to give patent amnesty to small independent organizations - less than X million in revenue. That would at least have prevented LodSyS from going after small developers. The basis for this is recognition that a small entity would simply implode if they had to defend themselves in a court of law.
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    The problem is that the big companies would then infringe on the patent deliberately through a bunch of completely owned sub companies created solely for that purpose.
crag 15y ago
My problem with patent-overload is that it's turned into a protection scheme. Big company approaches me and my little company and says, "We think we have some patent issues". And I say, "Really? Unlikely, we wrote everything from scratch." And they reply, "How much money did you make last year?" And I ask, "What's the got to do with anything?" And they say, "do you know how much it will cost you to defend against our claims? So you can license for this sum now or pay 100 times that to your lawyers." Guess what I do? It's the same with patent trolls. Although they usually wait until you have a product to go after.
- atirip 15y ago
  So, the legal system is broken instead?
  - sunnydaynow 15y ago
    Yes. Like in most of Europe, whoever looses the case should have to pay BOTH sides legal fees.
    - finnw 15y ago
      That is just as easy to use for extortion. Suppose we have a dispute over who owes who $1000. You hire a $10000 lawyer. I hire a $100000 lawyer. Now although we both get the same ($1000) if we win, you stand to lose more than I do. So if we both have even chances of winning I can use that to pressure you to drop your case.
      - xentronium 15y ago
        Hopefully, "Courts will often reduce attorney’s fee awards they find to be unreasonable and excessive".
- 5hoom 15y ago
  Really, it's as if paying off your friendly neighbourhood patent troll will become just another ugly cost of doing business. Maybe they should set up an online patent-protection store where developers can setup an account to ease the friction (probably wouldn't have a one-click checkout though).
Qa8BBatwHxK8Pu 15y ago
It used to be "No matter how bright you are, you have to be the one who have. You have to be the establishment. (because they're the only one who's got the dough.)" Now it's "No matter how good your product is, you have to be the megacorp to abstract away the patent problem." We're getting there, we're on the right track, but it's no way sufficing.
InclinedPlane 15y ago
The system has always been defective to a significant degree. The difference today is that the information age makes it that much easier to abuse and run afoul of the system. It's certain that there have been many independent invention "patent violations" throughout recent history that flew under the radar of the legal system merely due to the difficulty of researching such things in an era of less pervasive communications. We've sped up the rpms on the centrifuge and the system is shaking itself apart.
zmmmmm 15y ago
Patent trolls are a symptom of the problem that the patent system misidentifies the risk involved in invention. The concept is to mitigate the risk of innovating by adding reward. But the reward in the patent system is associated to the conceptualization of the idea which (mostly) carries no risk. The risk comes when you try to invest in that idea to bring it to market. So patent trolls can capture all the reward but not have any of the risk. The only way to solve this is to limit the reward to match the risk: a patent owner should only be entitled to damages that are directly comparable to the revenue they themselves are making from the same invention in the same market. If a patent troll is doing nothing with an invention then it should fall into the public domain.
- netcan 15y ago
  Even that has issues. Say you invent X and start selling it locally. You're making a few $100k p/m and growing fast. The global market could be in the billions but your planning on growing one town at a time. Meanwhile, another company with resources uses your invention and decides to grow 10 cities at a time. They can be 10X bigger than you very fast. They're eating your lunch, even if you'd only have made a fraction of what they made in that period. That said, patents aren't supposed to be for inventors, they're supposed to be for society, to help stuff get invented and produced. Society benefits more from the larger company.
  - jonnathanson 15y ago
    "patents aren't supposed to be for inventors, they're supposed to be for society, to help stuff get invented and produced. Society benefits more from the larger company." It's both. The original vision for the patent system, as laid out in the Constitution, was "...to promote the progress of science and useful arts [thereby benefitting society as a whole], by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their writings and discoveries." The end-goal is, as you've stated, the benefit of society as effeced by innovation and discovery. An important implication in that goal is that society does not benefit, and maybe even hurts, from stagnation in the arts and sciences. The founders theorized that a society free from any patents or protections would lead to stagnation, because there would be no financial benefit to the inventors, and hence, fewer would get into the innovations game in the first place. In order for society to benefit from innovation, being an inventor needs to have some serious upside, so that more inventors keep inventing. There's nothing in the letter or spirit of the US patent system that claims the "larger company" or the "smaller company" in your example is better for society. Indeed, the patent system is mainly concerned with the startup/inventor at its seed stage. Where the startup or inventor goes from there is left open to the dynamics of the marketplace.
freejack 15y ago
The only thing keeping the trolls slightly at bay (such as it is) is that they are forced to do their own prosecution. I think its only a matter of time until the IP lobby wises up and start agitating to pass laws that make patent violations a criminal matter such as they have done with other forms of intellectual property, i.e. trademarks, etc. Over the years, many of the checks and balances have been eroded and much of modern IP law is a one-sided scam that doesn't work in favour of the market, competition or society as a whole.

121 points by cjfont 15y ago

Well, patent trolls cause companies to spend more money on legal efforts than on innovating so I agree. insert rant about how broken the patent system is here

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
kiba 15y ago
Broken? It's been broken for about 300 years! You can count James Watt as an example of using lawyers to sue people rather than spend time more innovating.

cynest 15y ago

The second paragraph is a direct quote from wikipedia. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tim_O%27Reilly&oldid=453563125 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tim_O%27Reilly&#38... The quote in question: >Tim has been active in this space and in 2001, O’Reilly was involved in a dispute with Amazon.com, leading a protest against Amazon’s one-click patent and, specifically, Amazon’s assertion of that patent against rival barnesandnoble.com. The protest ended with O’Reilly and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos visiting Washington D.C. to lobby for patent reform.

sumukh1 15y ago
Kind of ironic. And it's not like copyright trolls are limited to Silicon Valley. It's coming from content "creators" like the blog linked. If the quote that was stolen was originally from the AP the blog would have to pay $40. (See: http://mashable.com/2009/08/02/associated-press/ http://mashable.com/2009/08/02/associated-press/)
- chc 15y ago
  Copyright trolls are almost wholly absent from Silicon Valley. They tend to be in Hollywood. Patents and copyrights are totally different things.

kevinalexbrown 15y ago

My biggest problem with patent-overload isn't Apple v. Google v. Amazon, and lost innovation, it's Big Company v. Samll Company (particularly the physical engineering kind), with large legal departments versus smaller ones. E.g. "please top infringing on our bs ethernet connector patent"

iqster 15y ago
One solution could be to give patent amnesty to small independent organizations - less than X million in revenue. That would at least have prevented LodSyS from going after small developers. The basis for this is recognition that a small entity would simply implode if they had to defend themselves in a court of law.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  The problem is that the big companies would then infringe on the patent deliberately through a bunch of completely owned sub companies created solely for that purpose.

crag 15y ago

My problem with patent-overload is that it's turned into a protection scheme. Big company approaches me and my little company and says, "We think we have some patent issues". And I say, "Really? Unlikely, we wrote everything from scratch." And they reply, "How much money did you make last year?" And I ask, "What's the got to do with anything?" And they say, "do you know how much it will cost you to defend against our claims? So you can license for this sum now or pay 100 times that to your lawyers." Guess what I do? It's the same with patent trolls. Although they usually wait until you have a product to go after.

atirip 15y ago
So, the legal system is broken instead?
- sunnydaynow 15y ago
  Yes. Like in most of Europe, whoever looses the case should have to pay BOTH sides legal fees.
  - finnw 15y ago
    That is just as easy to use for extortion. Suppose we have a dispute over who owes who $1000. You hire a $10000 lawyer. I hire a $100000 lawyer. Now although we both get the same ($1000) if we win, you stand to lose more than I do. So if we both have even chances of winning I can use that to pressure you to drop your case.
    - xentronium 15y ago
      Hopefully, "Courts will often reduce attorney’s fee awards they find to be unreasonable and excessive".
5hoom 15y ago
Really, it's as if paying off your friendly neighbourhood patent troll will become just another ugly cost of doing business. Maybe they should set up an online patent-protection store where developers can setup an account to ease the friction (probably wouldn't have a one-click checkout though).

Qa8BBatwHxK8Pu 15y ago

It used to be "No matter how bright you are, you have to be the one who have. You have to be the establishment. (because they're the only one who's got the dough.)" Now it's "No matter how good your product is, you have to be the megacorp to abstract away the patent problem." We're getting there, we're on the right track, but it's no way sufficing.

InclinedPlane 15y ago

The system has always been defective to a significant degree. The difference today is that the information age makes it that much easier to abuse and run afoul of the system. It's certain that there have been many independent invention "patent violations" throughout recent history that flew under the radar of the legal system merely due to the difficulty of researching such things in an era of less pervasive communications. We've sped up the rpms on the centrifuge and the system is shaking itself apart.

zmmmmm 15y ago

Patent trolls are a symptom of the problem that the patent system misidentifies the risk involved in invention. The concept is to mitigate the risk of innovating by adding reward. But the reward in the patent system is associated to the conceptualization of the idea which (mostly) carries no risk. The risk comes when you try to invest in that idea to bring it to market. So patent trolls can capture all the reward but not have any of the risk. The only way to solve this is to limit the reward to match the risk: a patent owner should only be entitled to damages that are directly comparable to the revenue they themselves are making from the same invention in the same market. If a patent troll is doing nothing with an invention then it should fall into the public domain.

netcan 15y ago
Even that has issues. Say you invent X and start selling it locally. You're making a few $100k p/m and growing fast. The global market could be in the billions but your planning on growing one town at a time. Meanwhile, another company with resources uses your invention and decides to grow 10 cities at a time. They can be 10X bigger than you very fast. They're eating your lunch, even if you'd only have made a fraction of what they made in that period. That said, patents aren't supposed to be for inventors, they're supposed to be for society, to help stuff get invented and produced. Society benefits more from the larger company.
- jonnathanson 15y ago
  "patents aren't supposed to be for inventors, they're supposed to be for society, to help stuff get invented and produced. Society benefits more from the larger company." It's both. The original vision for the patent system, as laid out in the Constitution, was "...to promote the progress of science and useful arts [thereby benefitting society as a whole], by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their writings and discoveries." The end-goal is, as you've stated, the benefit of society as effeced by innovation and discovery. An important implication in that goal is that society does not benefit, and maybe even hurts, from stagnation in the arts and sciences. The founders theorized that a society free from any patents or protections would lead to stagnation, because there would be no financial benefit to the inventors, and hence, fewer would get into the innovations game in the first place. In order for society to benefit from innovation, being an inventor needs to have some serious upside, so that more inventors keep inventing. There's nothing in the letter or spirit of the US patent system that claims the "larger company" or the "smaller company" in your example is better for society. Indeed, the patent system is mainly concerned with the startup/inventor at its seed stage. Where the startup or inventor goes from there is left open to the dynamics of the marketplace.

freejack 15y ago

The only thing keeping the trolls slightly at bay (such as it is) is that they are forced to do their own prosecution. I think its only a matter of time until the IP lobby wises up and start agitating to pass laws that make patent violations a criminal matter such as they have done with other forms of intellectual property, i.e. trademarks, etc. Over the years, many of the checks and balances have been eroded and much of modern IP law is a one-sided scam that doesn't work in favour of the market, competition or society as a whole.