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This is the patent system working as intended. Protection for technology development. You may say it limits innovation. But it also protects smaller players fr

This is the patent system working as intended. Protection for technology development. You may say it limits innovation. But it also protects smaller players from investing in innovation, by de-risking that a big customer might copy them and destroy their business. Which is mostly this scenario. I think the bigger problem with the patent system is the patent trolls. Please someone solve that problem.

beambot 3y ago
Patents don't protect smaller players -- enforcement is cost-prohibitive. The only sector that could plausibly justify patents is biotech... but even there, the vast majority of early R&D is publicly-funded, and thus should negate protection. A Government-mandated monopoly on ideas may have made sense at some point, but it's antiquated today. Today they serve to stifle innovation, extract rent and act as yet another form of regulatory capture -- e.g. when they become standards. (Coming from someone who has 20+ patents to their name.)
- RachelF 3y ago
  In fact they have the opposite effect on smaller players. The big players all have a few thousand (junk) patents and they make deals with each other to exclude the smaller players, who can't afford to file thousands of patents to join the club.
  - slabity 3y ago
    Or worse, a small player developing something and then finding out after the fact that a junk patent prevents them from even selling the thing to begin with.
    - worthless-trash 3y ago
      See, this to me is the stupidest part of the whole system. Its essentially saying that 'first movers advantage' of an idea is something that can be protected for the life of a patent. You can be tripped over by patents you don't even know existed in unrelated fields, owned by people who didnt even work with the patent. So stupid.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Everyone always says this. In fact, I was in Google's patent litigation division, and I can tell you firsthand that there is WAY less of this than you think. A cross-licensing deal is incredibly hard to negotiate. So if you could back this up with some links, it'd be appreciated. Otherwise it's just an urban myth.
    - vvvvvvvvvvvv 3y ago
      they might mean an unspoken deal no to sue each other rather than a written one
      - AlbertCory 3y ago
        usually what I hear is "they've cross-licensed." That doesn't translate as "unspoken deal."
    - RachelF 3y ago
      It's not a myth, I've been involved in these sort of negotiations. The particular industry was maybe 10 years older than Google, but the number of patents, rather than their quality was the key factor.
      - AlbertCory 3y ago
        since I've been watching Mythbusters: this one is not "confirmed." It's "plausible." There are some, but it's nowhere near universal.
    - beambot 3y ago
      All from the first page of quick Google search... Google and Samsung sign global patent cross-license deal https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/google-and-samsung-sign-global-patent-cross-license-deal/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/google-and-samsung-s... Google and Tencent agree to cross-license patents https://www.ft.com/content/0a1b904d-77f9-3b48-885d-0c2693a6dc61 https://www.ft.com/content/0a1b904d-77f9-3b48-885d-0c2693a6d... SAP and Google Cozy Up With Wide-Reaching Patent Deal: The Potential Implications https://www.constellationr.com/blog-news/insights/sap-and-google-cozy-wide-reaching-patent-deal-potential-implications https://www.constellationr.com/blog-news/insights/sap-and-go... Google and Cisco Enter Into Patent Cross-Licensing Agreement https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2014/m02/google-and-cisco-enter-into-patent-cross-licensing-agreement.html https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2014/m02/go...
avidiax 3y ago
Unless I misunderstand, they are codifying their patents into open standards like 5G. So you can't implement 5G without their patents. Add that to encouraging complexity (10,000+ pages of spec to do something outwardly similar to WiFi), and they have a really effective moat around an "open" standard. The entire protocol space is somewhat arbitrary. This is a bit like patenting a strategy in a board game you created, and that everyone is required to play.
- amelius 3y ago
  I've been saying for years that patents and copyrights should be ruled out in communication protocols and communication formats, including file formats, file systems, languages, APIs and even fonts.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  Getting your patents into standards is the fundamental business model of many patent holders. Not just for big business either, I’m friends with a bunch of PhDs/researchers who all have patents in their respective fields, they all know that they’ll only get paid for the patents that end up in standards, and devote a non-trivial amount of effort to pursuing that outcome.
- scrlk 3y ago
  Are the 5G patents licenced under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms?
- lxgr 3y ago
  > they are codifying their patents into open standards like 5G. What do you mean by open standard? I don't think 5G is patent-free by any means, nor is 802.11/Wi-Fi for that matter! That's just how most hardware standards are developed, as far as I know. The best thing you can hope for is a consortium maintaining a FRAND patent pool, like for the MPEG family of codecs (and even there you can't be sure that there aren't any patent trolls lurking outside the pool).
amelius 3y ago
Patents are inherently a bad idea because stuff can be invented independently by many people. This has happened many times in history. Also, we don't need patents for innovation; just look at Open Source for a good example why. Stuff will be invented anyway, patents or no patents.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
We like to talk about the specific effects of the patent system (protects the little guy, etc), but we rarely talk about the cumulative effects of it. The more I look at the small innovators, they are all hungry to improve upon things the big companies are sitting on for 20+ years with a big moat to protect them, and I really get to thinking that in aggregate we are doing more harm than good. A response I hear is "then no one would invest" and I think that's false. The investment landscape would change from a small number of big investments to a larger number of smaller investments - investing in tooling to help you beat the competition next year, but not necessarily giving you a 10 year investment for your big dream. And I think that's fine - people still want to innovate and the market already rewards innovators. It is not clear to me that government mandated restrictions on innovation are a good idea at all, and none of the common talking points really engage with the facts as I see them. Take a look at FDM 3D printers. They went from $50k to $25k in the 13 years they were for sale and under patent protection, and then 10 years after patent protection ended they were $250 and sold by a wide variety of companies all over the world. How many of today's patented goods could be made for 100x cheaper without patents and what is the cumulative effect of manufacturing machinery, medical equipment, washing machines, computers, and more being 100x cheaper? Is our world really better without that?
- m4rtink 3y ago
  LCD drawing tablets were another victim - Wacom sitting on their EMR patents, selling only overpriced pro gear cost the world a couple generations of digital artists!
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  We have already run the experiment nearly 100 years ago shortly after WW2 (and prior to the Bahl Dole act) on what happens when people have idea requiring capital investments that aren't protected by risk mitigation IP. People don't invest because of first mover disadvantage in game theory.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Genuinely curious for my own research, can you give me more information? What exactly happened? What projects failed to gain investment? What projects subsequently were only funded due to IP restriction grants?
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
I'm really interested in the "does it limit innovation" question. Is this a case where Qualcomm is really innovating and coming up with novel ideas, or are they just some of the first people to encounter particular problems and are simply solving them in fairly obvious ways that would occur to anyone else who encountered those problems? And if it's the latter, is it that they are doing those investigations because of the potential for patents? Would the pace of innovation be slower if those incentives didn't exist, or would they be faster because everybody else independently figuring those things out later wouldn't need to pay Qualcomm for decades? Is there some sort form of technology economy scholarship that could answer those questions? If I had to guess, I'd guess that Qualcomm's patents over stuff like Wi-Fi and CDMA were probably more harmful than beneficial, but I'd love to know how one would analyze that.
ryandrake 3y ago
> You may say it limits innovation. But it also protects smaller players from investing in innovation, by de-risking that a big customer might copy them and destroy their business. Which is mostly this scenario. Who is the "smaller player" in this scenario? $150 billion QCOM?
p1necone 3y ago
> I think the bigger problem with the patent system is the patent trolls. This is almost a no true scotsman argument. The patent trolls are a direct result of incentives the patent system creates, getting rid of them necessarily involves seriously reforming the system.

beambot 3y ago

Patents don't protect smaller players -- enforcement is cost-prohibitive. The only sector that could plausibly justify patents is biotech... but even there, the vast majority of early R&D is publicly-funded, and thus should negate protection. A Government-mandated monopoly on ideas may have made sense at some point, but it's antiquated today. Today they serve to stifle innovation, extract rent and act as yet another form of regulatory capture -- e.g. when they become standards. (Coming from someone who has 20+ patents to their name.)

RachelF 3y ago
In fact they have the opposite effect on smaller players. The big players all have a few thousand (junk) patents and they make deals with each other to exclude the smaller players, who can't afford to file thousands of patents to join the club.
- slabity 3y ago
  Or worse, a small player developing something and then finding out after the fact that a junk patent prevents them from even selling the thing to begin with.
  - worthless-trash 3y ago
    See, this to me is the stupidest part of the whole system. Its essentially saying that 'first movers advantage' of an idea is something that can be protected for the life of a patent. You can be tripped over by patents you don't even know existed in unrelated fields, owned by people who didnt even work with the patent. So stupid.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Everyone always says this. In fact, I was in Google's patent litigation division, and I can tell you firsthand that there is WAY less of this than you think. A cross-licensing deal is incredibly hard to negotiate. So if you could back this up with some links, it'd be appreciated. Otherwise it's just an urban myth.
  - vvvvvvvvvvvv 3y ago
    they might mean an unspoken deal no to sue each other rather than a written one
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      usually what I hear is "they've cross-licensed." That doesn't translate as "unspoken deal."
  - RachelF 3y ago
    It's not a myth, I've been involved in these sort of negotiations. The particular industry was maybe 10 years older than Google, but the number of patents, rather than their quality was the key factor.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      since I've been watching Mythbusters: this one is not "confirmed." It's "plausible." There are some, but it's nowhere near universal.
  - beambot 3y ago
    All from the first page of quick Google search... Google and Samsung sign global patent cross-license deal https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/google-and-samsung-sign-global-patent-cross-license-deal/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/google-and-samsung-s... Google and Tencent agree to cross-license patents https://www.ft.com/content/0a1b904d-77f9-3b48-885d-0c2693a6dc61 https://www.ft.com/content/0a1b904d-77f9-3b48-885d-0c2693a6d... SAP and Google Cozy Up With Wide-Reaching Patent Deal: The Potential Implications https://www.constellationr.com/blog-news/insights/sap-and-google-cozy-wide-reaching-patent-deal-potential-implications https://www.constellationr.com/blog-news/insights/sap-and-go... Google and Cisco Enter Into Patent Cross-Licensing Agreement https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2014/m02/google-and-cisco-enter-into-patent-cross-licensing-agreement.html https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2014/m02/go...

avidiax 3y ago

Unless I misunderstand, they are codifying their patents into open standards like 5G. So you can't implement 5G without their patents. Add that to encouraging complexity (10,000+ pages of spec to do something outwardly similar to WiFi), and they have a really effective moat around an "open" standard. The entire protocol space is somewhat arbitrary. This is a bit like patenting a strategy in a board game you created, and that everyone is required to play.

amelius 3y ago
I've been saying for years that patents and copyrights should be ruled out in communication protocols and communication formats, including file formats, file systems, languages, APIs and even fonts.
AmericanChopper 3y ago
Getting your patents into standards is the fundamental business model of many patent holders. Not just for big business either, I’m friends with a bunch of PhDs/researchers who all have patents in their respective fields, they all know that they’ll only get paid for the patents that end up in standards, and devote a non-trivial amount of effort to pursuing that outcome.
scrlk 3y ago
Are the 5G patents licenced under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms?
lxgr 3y ago
> they are codifying their patents into open standards like 5G. What do you mean by open standard? I don't think 5G is patent-free by any means, nor is 802.11/Wi-Fi for that matter! That's just how most hardware standards are developed, as far as I know. The best thing you can hope for is a consortium maintaining a FRAND patent pool, like for the MPEG family of codecs (and even there you can't be sure that there aren't any patent trolls lurking outside the pool).

amelius 3y ago

Patents are inherently a bad idea because stuff can be invented independently by many people. This has happened many times in history. Also, we don't need patents for innovation; just look at Open Source for a good example why. Stuff will be invented anyway, patents or no patents.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

We like to talk about the specific effects of the patent system (protects the little guy, etc), but we rarely talk about the cumulative effects of it. The more I look at the small innovators, they are all hungry to improve upon things the big companies are sitting on for 20+ years with a big moat to protect them, and I really get to thinking that in aggregate we are doing more harm than good. A response I hear is "then no one would invest" and I think that's false. The investment landscape would change from a small number of big investments to a larger number of smaller investments - investing in tooling to help you beat the competition next year, but not necessarily giving you a 10 year investment for your big dream. And I think that's fine - people still want to innovate and the market already rewards innovators. It is not clear to me that government mandated restrictions on innovation are a good idea at all, and none of the common talking points really engage with the facts as I see them. Take a look at FDM 3D printers. They went from $50k to $25k in the 13 years they were for sale and under patent protection, and then 10 years after patent protection ended they were $250 and sold by a wide variety of companies all over the world. How many of today's patented goods could be made for 100x cheaper without patents and what is the cumulative effect of manufacturing machinery, medical equipment, washing machines, computers, and more being 100x cheaper? Is our world really better without that?

m4rtink 3y ago
LCD drawing tablets were another victim - Wacom sitting on their EMR patents, selling only overpriced pro gear cost the world a couple generations of digital artists!
mensetmanusman 3y ago
We have already run the experiment nearly 100 years ago shortly after WW2 (and prior to the Bahl Dole act) on what happens when people have idea requiring capital investments that aren't protected by risk mitigation IP. People don't invest because of first mover disadvantage in game theory.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Genuinely curious for my own research, can you give me more information? What exactly happened? What projects failed to gain investment? What projects subsequently were only funded due to IP restriction grants?

CobrastanJorji 3y ago

I'm really interested in the "does it limit innovation" question. Is this a case where Qualcomm is really innovating and coming up with novel ideas, or are they just some of the first people to encounter particular problems and are simply solving them in fairly obvious ways that would occur to anyone else who encountered those problems? And if it's the latter, is it that they are doing those investigations because of the potential for patents? Would the pace of innovation be slower if those incentives didn't exist, or would they be faster because everybody else independently figuring those things out later wouldn't need to pay Qualcomm for decades? Is there some sort form of technology economy scholarship that could answer those questions? If I had to guess, I'd guess that Qualcomm's patents over stuff like Wi-Fi and CDMA were probably more harmful than beneficial, but I'd love to know how one would analyze that.

ryandrake 3y ago

> You may say it limits innovation. But it also protects smaller players from investing in innovation, by de-risking that a big customer might copy them and destroy their business. Which is mostly this scenario. Who is the "smaller player" in this scenario? $150 billion QCOM?

p1necone 3y ago

> I think the bigger problem with the patent system is the patent trolls. This is almost a no true scotsman argument. The patent trolls are a direct result of incentives the patent system creates, getting rid of them necessarily involves seriously reforming the system.