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There needs to be a "use it or lose it" doctrine/law around technological IP. I get all the arguments around creating a market for the patent rights, but it jus
by duped 3y ago
There needs to be a "use it or lose it" doctrine/law around technological IP. I get all the arguments around creating a market for the patent rights, but it just leads to these bottom feeders creating no value and increasing costs for the industry and consumers.
- lukan 3y agoThere are research companies who only do research and get money by licencing their patents. I mean, I really would like to live in a world without patents, but currently those companies do provide value, but cannot exist, without guarding their IP. Yet they would cease to exist, with your proposal.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoGreat point. And then if one of those companies sold a patent that wasn't immediately licensable to an IP firm for an immediate infusion of funds should the IP firm be considered a patent troll?
- lukan 3y agoMaybe the patent system could work, without the possibility of selling patents at all? Have not thought it out, but I know musicians also seldom profit of selling their IP to the major labels. But they are pushed into it.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoBased on the text of the IP clause of the US Constitution I have wondered whether selling or licensing of IP (or even assigning it to a corporation) is technically allowable. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8/clause-8/ https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8... : To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; "Exclusive Right" means exclusive right. And I don't think the definition has changed much since the US Constitution was written. https://www.etymonline.com/word/exclusive https://www.etymonline.com/word/exclusive I think it must at least be licensable, or authors couldn't sell copies of their works. But whether the IP rights can be sold is another question.
- freejazz 3y agoIt means the right is exclusively granted with them. I.e. no one besides the author gets to control the exclusive rights of a patent. By your logic, they can't even license it because "it's an exclusive right".
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoThey control the license according to the terms of a license. But once a patent is sold the author of it no longer has any right to it. Authors and inventors are mentioned with the same language in the clause. Since it has always been true that authors can basically only profit from their writings by selling copies or originals of their works (without selling the right to the copyrighted material itself) then some form of licensing is necessarily included in the clause for both copyright and patents. There may have been journalists at the time who wrote works for newspapers owned by others. If so, this would be a reason to include the right of selling all of the rights to one's writings or inventions in the clause. I genuinely don't know if this was the case though.
- freejazz 3y agoAuthors can license all of their rights away. They can sell their copyrights - I don't see your point...
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoI'm asking whether the laws which allow this are within scope of the US Constitution's clause on intellectual property rights. There are plenty of laws which have been ruled unconstitutional. But it takes someone making the complaint to a court for this to happen. Otherwise the legislature does whatever it wants. Currently a majority of the US Supreme court thinks that the status quo at the time of the writing of the US Constitution or its amendments has bearing as to the meaning of those texts. Thus I mentioned back then authors sold copies of their works while retaining all other rights as indicating that "licensing" is within this clause. Whether or not total sales of the rights to the work is within the purview of the clause is another question that I'm curious about.
- jonwachob91 3y agoIssuing a license is a form of "using it" in a use it or lose it scenario. Those are not patent troll companies. Patent troll companies file patents and then sit on the patent until they can sue another party for infringement, and never make an attempt to commercialize their patent. Another example of not using it in the use it or lose it scenario is Pfizer's acquisition of Esperion Therapeutics in 2004. Esperion was developing a competitor to Lipitor, so Pfizer purchased Esperion for $1.3BB and shelved the technology to prevent competition with their best selling drug. Had Pfizer "lost" their patent for failing to commercial Esperion's drug, that drug could have entered the market as a generic to compete with Lipitor and severely reduced the cost of statin drugs for consumers.
- lukan 3y agoThat is hard I think, as there are patents that are not licenced because no one wants to - but I think every holder of a patent must licence it to any party interested. So just "sitting on patents" is not really possible to my knowledge. (but I am really not an expert here)
- floating-io 3y agoIf I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, then I'm not sure where you got that idea. Patent holders are not required to license their patents last time I checked. You are simply required to acquire a license prior to using patented technology. If they don't want to license it, you're SOL. (edit: if you were speculating on what should be, and not what is, then my bad... :)
- lukan 3y ago"Patent holders are not required to license their patents last time I checked." That is apparently right and I learned it wrong (but it does seems wrong to me). edit: after reading the siblings answer, I apparently wrongly overgeneralized the way it works with patents in standards
- deleted 3y ago
- duped 3y agoWhy wouldn't they be able to exist? If you invent something, there's a work product. There is documentation, notes, blueprints, CAD files, software, etc. You can sell this and license it however you want. You can sue people that use it without a license. More importantly, you as the original author can use the IP as you see fit. All of that is what I would put under the category of "use it." If you stop licensing it, then you "lose it." Personally I don't think you should be able to sell the invention as an idea to another company that only relicenses it, but I get that there needs to be a market for IP itself.
- joshuaissac 3y ago> If you invent something, there's a work product. There is documentation, notes, blueprints, CAD files, software, etc. You can sell this and license it however you want. These would only be protected by copyright. So if you invent something but do not have the resources to create the implementation yourself (and therefore cannot patent the invention under the scheme proposed by GGP), but you licence the work products (documentation, software) to one or more companies who can then implement it, a larger, well-resourced competitor can just reimplement it without paying you as long as they did not need to use any of your documentation or software. So that reduces the value of your work products. But if the converse happened, e.g., your customer reimplements something invented by the large competitor, they can get sued, because the large company, being able to implement their invention, can therefore file a patent. So it amplifies the effect of having more resources. It would be fairer to treat the large company the same way, and only let them copyright the work products rather than patent the invention, putting them on the same level as a smaller inventor.
- solomatov 3y agoCould you give examples of such companies (I am really curious)?
- jandrewrogers 3y agoI am aware of a few orgs that license interesting software R&D often with engineering support, sometimes with an equity component. Another variant is the R&D holding company that creates separate companies to commercially exploit the R&D in different parts of the public or private sector. Most such R&D orgs are very low-profile, they usually don't have an internet presence. Many use few or no patents these days, those economics don't make sense unless the business is largely owned by lawyers, which creates a different kind of company (much closer to patent trolls). It is a bespoke kind of business, tailored to the specific technology and investment network of the people involved.
- joshuaissac 3y ago> Could you give examples of such companies One example is ARM, which licenses the processor designs they create, and do not build or sell the chips themselves.
- maxloh 3y agoARM for example.
- dosethree 3y agojust abolish the patent system entirely. at minimum, for software
- mistrial9 3y agocompare and contrast to industry practices today https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-patents.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-patents.en.html
- dosethree 3y agofantastic article
- declaredapple 3y agoI'm on board with this. It shouldn't exist for software, I'd be happy to see it go for hardware too. I'd be more on-board with the idea if non-software patents only had say a 5 year lifespan
- willvarfar 3y agoWhilst good intentioned, it might well work the other way: Dedicated patent trolls will trivially overcome any hurdles by cheaply doing just enough to legally demonstrate they are working on future commercial applications blah blah honest. Meanwhile, it likely puts up a prohibitive cost that will prevent the smallest genuine inventors from inventing?
- ryandrake 3y agoThat's the big problem with societies based on the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law. Human nature has repeatedly demonstrated that if the letter of the law is what matters, people will work night and day to technically comply with the letter of the law, so they can continue to do the bad thing legally. Whole cottage industries will spring up to guide businesses right up to that legal line and sell them the tools and techniques to ensure they barely don't cross it. In such a society, the rules need to be enormous and complex, much more than a 2 sentence HN post, to eliminate all the edge cases and loopholes everyone will naturally want to take advantage of.
- thelastgallon 3y agoPatents are property and we need taxes/fee on it. $500/year per patent, will ensure use it (if you think it is valuable) or lose it. This is no different from domain names, most people pay $10 - $100/year just to keep a domain name. Some domain names are used, most aren't. These taxes can fund free education or healthcare or defense.
- pwg 3y ago> Patents are property and we need taxes/fee on it. $500/year per patent Those 'taxes' already exist (at least in the US system). They are called "maintenance fees". See https://www.fr.com/insights/ip-law-essentials/everything-about-patent-maintenance-fees/ https://www.fr.com/insights/ip-law-essentials/everything-abo... Failing to pay the fee causes the patent to expire, and be unable to be used to sue someone. So these troll firms must also be paying these fees to be able to sue based on the patent.
- madsbuch 3y agoThis is interesting. So Oracle holding around 52000 patents pays around 23.000.000 USD a year in maintenance?
- robertlagrant 3y ago> These taxes can fund free education or healthcare or defense Why only those things?
- cft 3y agoThey will fake usage. Software parents should not exist
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agolaw of unintended consequences the moment you put an expiration date on patents due to lack of use, watch moneyed competitors sitting around waiting for your patent to expire instead of using yours to bring it to market
- yieldcrv 3y agothen you shouldn’t form the patent then as you would still just be increasing costs for the industry by existing and delaying things you could have just written about it on your blog and been the same place and been a net positive for society
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agoI'm not arguing that its OK to patent code or abstract ideas that are the basis for BS "catch all" patent infringement lawsuits or amazon 1-click buy nonsense. I'm talking is about real inventions. Television, radio, wheeled luggage, etc. I also think that code should be copyrighted, not patented. Patents use to mean something else, and I can see we are talking about different things.
- KptMarchewa 3y agoYou mean it would bring the price of licensing the patent down? I don't see the downside.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agoI'm not sure how small inventors could benefit from their creativity. What is at the core of this need to steal other people's ideas? HN is supposed to respect the rule of law and western respect for innovation and collecting the fruits of your labor. If someone won't give you a decent price, reverse engineer their work and come up with a creative alternative. I'm not arguing that its OK to patent code or abstract ideas that are the basis for BS "catch all" patent infringement lawsuits or amazon 1-click buy nonsense. I'm talking is about real inventions. Television, radio, wheeled luggage, etc. I also think that code should be copyrighted, but cannot be patented.
- berniedurfee 3y ago100% agree. Pretty sure the original idea of patents was to protect the inventor while they brought a product to market or licensed the patent to others to improve their products. Holding a patent without even attempting to bring the idea to market should invalidate the patent after some reasonable amount of time. The whole system as it is today needs a hard sanity check.
- freejazz 3y ago>Pretty sure the original idea of patents was to protect the inventor while they brought a product to market or licensed the patent to others to improve their products. It was to protect the inventor so that when they did take it to market, or license it, someone else couldn't just make a copy of the same thing and sell it for cheaper not having to recoup r&d costs. >Holding a patent without even attempting to bring the idea to market should invalidate the patent after some reasonable amount of time. Patents are already invalid after a certain amount of time. I'm not sure what you think a reasonable time to bring a new invention to market is, but it's not far off from what the limits on patents are already today anyway. By the way, where do you think these patents come from? They belong to companies that couldn't succeed in the market for various reasons. They go under and they sell their assets, which in these cases include any claims that could accrue to them by the short period of exclusivity granted to them for their invention.
- ummonk 3y agoSo if I invent something but don’t have the capital to manufacture it myself, I shouldn’t be able to make money from licensing it to companies?
- iamthirsty 3y agoWouldn't that be a "use it" situation?
- squeaky-clean 3y agoHow are patent trolls not "using it" then? If licensing the patent is using it, this suggestion does nothing to prevent trolling.
- declaredapple 3y ago> but don’t have the capital to manufacture it myself You're looking at 10k to file it, and then all it gives you is the ability to sue. If [insert company] violates it, you could easily be looking at 100k+ for litigation that you may or may not win. > So if I invent something My problem is you don't need to "invent" anything. You just need to be the first to file the paperwork (and have the cash to do so). "[sensor] on [smartwatch, glasses, goggles, belts, chairs, whatever]" and now nobody else can do it for 20 years. Even if it's blatantly obvious that an chair can sense if you're sitting in it to turn on the tv automatically.
- grishka 3y agoWould work even better if patents were non-transferable and only assignable to actual people, not companies or other entities.
- hcrean 3y agoWhat if Bob and Alice and Charlie all had a hand in developing invention X... suddenly we would find ourselves just redefining companies.
- grishka 3y agoThen you assign the patent to them collectively by listing them all as inventors. It's not redefining companies because it's still assigned to people, not an abstract entity that can arbitrarily change hands in the future.
- riazrizvi 3y agoWhile appealing to me as an entrepreneur, if I step back, I don't see how this law could work. Patent Law is the regulation of intellectual property, as such, the way property is regulated, informs the way intellectual property should be regulated. Would it be possible to pass a law that says you can't own a patch of land unless you develop it sufficiently for some public utility? You can't own it unless you build a house on it, or an office? What about all the rough land, that isn't close to a development yet, but is anticipated to be? If someone can tell me how a law like this has been shown to work, perhaps even in a limited case like densely populated zones, then I might be persuaded.
- hervature 3y ago> Would it be possible to pass a law that says you can't own a patch of land unless you develop it sufficiently for some public utility? This is exactly how mineral rights work. The federal law says you need to do $100 worth of development on every claim every year to maintain it [1]. This is not something new. [1] - https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-43/subtitle-B/chapter-II/subchapter-C/part-3836/subpart-A/section-3836.11 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-43/subtitle-B/chapter-II/...
- riazrizvi 3y agoAh okay, thanks. This is what I was looking for.
- shortsunblack 3y agoIntellectual property is not property. It's a misnomer. Property is inherently scarce and exclusive. IP is not exclusive. If I have an idea, and you have an idea, and we share those ideas -- we both have two ideas. What IP is, is an economic rent, a protectionist measure to a class of individuals. It's a tax on the productive economy and it reduces competition and thus inflates prices. It is enforced by the monopoly of violence that the state holds. The burden of proof for justifying this violence for this end is on the proponents, not the opponents. >You can't own it unless you build a house on it, or an office? What about all the rough land, that isn't close to a development yet, but is anticipated to be? If someone can tell me how a law like this has been shown to work, perhaps even in a limited case like densely populated zones, then I might be persuaded. And as for this, we already have this. It's called a land value tax. A tax that discourages unproductive land use.