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Not sure if the irony here was intentional but... > But there is no way in hell you can convince me that it’s beneficial for society to not share ideas. See,

Not sure if the irony here was intentional but... > But there is no way in hell you can convince me that it’s beneficial for society to not share ideas. See, this is what's broken with the patent system. Originally, patents were supposed to encourage idea sharing. The idea being that, if you couldn't protect your ideas, then you were likely to keep them a secret. Patents give you just enough protection that you can share them. You share them, and then if the idea is good, people pay you to use that idea in their own work... So, how about this: you can get patents, but licensing fees are regulated. Say, you take the average number of patents produced by a company in a field per year, divide the average expenses for those companies by that number, and divide that total by the number of companies in the field (that might be interested in licensing the patent), and that's your regulated patent fee. This would ensure that, for example, the pharmaceutical industry (where average cost per patent is something like $10 mil) would still be able to charge appropriately high fees to license patents. The software industry, on the other hand, where patents are handed out like candy, and the number of companies that could license your patent is huge, would end up with licensing fees of something like $10. I'd pay $10 for your software patent. That's probably all it's worth.

masklinn 14y ago
> That's probably all it's worth. Although probably not, unless the parent has all the code needed to implement whatever the patent covers in the language I'm using and correctly following the conventions and patterns of the language and platform. That could be worth $10.
- Swizec 14y ago
  Would you pay somebody $10 for a blogpost like that? There's a bunch of those around. Most don't even have ads or any revenue stream other than infamy.
gridspy 14y ago
That is a common misconception. Actually patents were an adaptation of an existing system where royalty would give monopolies away to companies they liked. No-one did any scientific tests at the time to ensure that they were a good idea in the first place. Now those who do retroactive studies are ignored.
- billswift 14y ago
  Actually most of the world, that has gotten rid of royalty, seems to be doing its best to bring back at least some of the trappings; for example, http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/presidential-transportation/ http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/presidential-transp...
- mistercow 14y ago
  >Actually patents were an adaptation of an existing system where royalty would give monopolies away to companies they liked. Do you have a historic reference for that? According to Wikipedia, the earliest known patent law was in Greece, 500 BC, and modern patents are said to have originated with a statute in Venice in 1474, but no mention is made of this being an adaptation of royalty favoring companies with monopolies (which obviously was a practice that extended long after 1474).
  - thronemonkey 14y ago
    I can back this up. I took a course last year from a guy who's one an expert on the history of IP law (http://www.adrianjohns.com/ http://www.adrianjohns.com/). The patent system in its modern form grew out of the statute of monopolies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Monopolies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Monopolies), which was intended to be used only in cases of new innovation, but royalty abused it by granting monopolies on common goods to favored merchants (who paid exorbitant fees for the privilege).
antninja 14y ago
> Originally, patents were supposed to encourage idea sharing. The original idea of Marxist communism was very humanitarian in its intentions. We know how dictatorial it turned out when it was implemented. Good political theories that turn bad typically didn't take all parameters of reality into consideration. They're utopias.
- gcb 14y ago
  Corruption is completely unrelated to the set of laws it corrupt. Communism, capitalism, patents... irrelevant. Saying that capitalism prevents corruption one infinitesimal part more than communism is just pointless and impossible to prove. Same with any system that tries to prevent copies of work. It will always get corrupted to make corrupts to profit from authentic innovation of others. I'd love to read the article writer expand on how he differentiate from copyright infringement and patent. What if trinity was providing a better print of his novel than he ever dreamed, and charging less?
- Arwill 14y ago
  Well no, the "class struggle" and "armed takeover of power by the proletariat" is the core of Marxism, not quite so peaceful. But this is irrelevant to the topic.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    You don't have to be a pacifist or a doormat to be a humanitarian.
- Retric 14y ago
  Arguably the US was much closer to Communism than Russia in the 50-60's. Unions effectively controlled the means of production through conflict 'strikes + other means' and redistributed more than the fair market value of their labor to the workers over the long term. Russia on the other hand was a de facto feudal system, with the party sharing power and privilege to a few at the expense of the peasants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_Coal_Wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_Coal_Wars
mtgx 14y ago
You still need to fix 2 other problems with software patents, otherwise it won't work. 1) shorten the software patent period to 3 years 2) dramatically decrease the vagueness and triviality of software patents somehow Otherwise, you end up like in the mobile industry, where something like 250,000 patents exist in any given phone, and I assume most of those are not enforced, but if they were regulated, and manufacturers were forced to pay for them by default, I could easily imagine patents costing more than the product itself. This is why you need to drastically reduce the number of patents as well.
- jballanc 14y ago
  Well, I think my system would actively incentivize the reduction in the number of patents. Fewer patents would lead to higher licensing fee per patent, so you'd have an incentive to only patent the stuff that really matters (since every patent has a base cost to acquire). Also, I'm not proposing that there be some sort of strict requirement that you must pay the licensing fee for all the patents you use. Obviously cross-licensing agreements and such would still be valid. What I'm trying to cure is the system the patent trolls currently operate under: Patent Troll - "I'm going to sue you for $1 mil for infringing my patent unless you pay my licensing fee." Startup Founder - "How much is your licensing fee?" Patent Troll - "Only $10,000" You have to keep in mind that most patent lawsuits never see judgement. They exist only to coerce alleged infringers into paying licensing fees. The problem is that the licensing fees are arbitrary. They are not reflective of any sort of market, but rather reflective of infringement-penalty * chance-of-judgment-against (well, I guess this is a perverse sort of market: a market of jury pools).
- einhverfr 14y ago
  Indeed. Also may I say "thank you" to the Supreme Court for their wonderful decision in Caraco v. Novo Nordisk, which more or less ends the usefulness of method-of-use patents for drugs.
- loceng 14y ago
  I thought 3-5 years would be a good enough length of time (leaning more to 5 years for physical applications). Though companies may still then hoard technology that isn't ready for the market yet, which would slow innovation. Longer patent times are perfectly fine if fees are regulated.
huhtenberg 14y ago
Patents were initially devised to let inventors to recoup their R&D expenses by giving them exclusivity on the market. And this - the R&D expense - should really be a defining factor in whether or not something is patentable. This way a 5 minute brain fart by a recent graduate won't be patentable, but a clever optimization technique that stems from several man-month of testing on a cluster of Crays will be.
- twentysix 14y ago
  That would tax an efficient use of resources. Its the innovative idea in the patent that should matter, not how much money you spent on figuring in out. Some might take less time and resources to figure out the same thing and basing everything on R&D expenses makes it completely unfair to them.
jedbrown 14y ago
A single product likely infringes on thousands of patents (a possibly dubious Google/RPX estimate was 250k patents for a smartphone), in which even $0.01/patent becomes unsustainable. Especially in software, chances are that you didn't learn about the ideas in the patent by reading the patent or observing products that use the patent, but rather on your own while solving a problem.
- jballanc 14y ago
  I guess I should clarify: there are different sorts of licenses. Some are per device or product sold. I was referring to an unlimited use license. The idea being (with the formula) that if your idea is good enough that every one of your competitors wants to use it, then they will effectively pay you for the full cost of discovery/development (at industry average R&D costs). So at $10 per patent, you'd pay $2.5 mil as a one-time fee. I'm curious how that would stack up to current litigation and other legal costs to fight/prevent patent litigation.
  - jedbrown 14y ago
    If an unlimited use license is $10, it's not worth the patent owner's time to write a letter asking for the license fee. My impression is that many of the ideas covered by software patents are independently "discovered" by each entity that happens to use them. The patent is now inhibiting innovation by dwelling on an old idea that is apparently not so novel after all.
    - jballanc 14y ago
      > If an unlimited use license is $10, it's not worth the patent owner's time to write a letter asking for the license fee. I guess that's kind of the point. Patents only inhibit innovation when they can be used as a cudgel to force inventors into paying exorbitant fees. If fees are inversely proportional to the proliferation of patents in an area, the natural incentive is to only patent that which is important.
flexie 14y ago
But why grant software patents at all? Software is already protected with copyrights as literary works. Copyright protection is not as broad as patent protection. It doesn't prevent competitors from writing a program with similar features but different source code, but it does protect against competitors copying the source code.
- jandrewrogers 14y ago
  All patents are granted copyright protection in this sense. After all, they are filed on paper and both the process and implementation are reducible to such. To give an example, chemical process patents are among the oldest and most venerable kinds of patents in existence and are essentially equivalent to computer algorithm patents (except involving molecules instead of bits). A new algorithm for efficiently producing a particular chemical is protected by patents. The implementation of that algorithm, such as in a chemical manufacturing plant, is protected by copyright. There are an infinite number of ways the abstract process can be reduced to practice, all of which are copyrightable. In practice, the implementation copyright and the process patent are separately valuable, are often sold separately, and protect different people. The patent protects the effort of the individual who developed the chemical process. The copyright protects the effort of the engineer who designed a way to efficiently uses that chemical process.

masklinn 14y ago

> That's probably all it's worth. Although probably not, unless the parent has all the code needed to implement whatever the patent covers in the language I'm using and correctly following the conventions and patterns of the language and platform. That could be worth $10.

Swizec 14y ago
Would you pay somebody $10 for a blogpost like that? There's a bunch of those around. Most don't even have ads or any revenue stream other than infamy.

gridspy 14y ago

That is a common misconception. Actually patents were an adaptation of an existing system where royalty would give monopolies away to companies they liked. No-one did any scientific tests at the time to ensure that they were a good idea in the first place. Now those who do retroactive studies are ignored.

billswift 14y ago
Actually most of the world, that has gotten rid of royalty, seems to be doing its best to bring back at least some of the trappings; for example, http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/presidential-transportation/ http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/presidential-transp...
mistercow 14y ago
>Actually patents were an adaptation of an existing system where royalty would give monopolies away to companies they liked. Do you have a historic reference for that? According to Wikipedia, the earliest known patent law was in Greece, 500 BC, and modern patents are said to have originated with a statute in Venice in 1474, but no mention is made of this being an adaptation of royalty favoring companies with monopolies (which obviously was a practice that extended long after 1474).
- thronemonkey 14y ago
  I can back this up. I took a course last year from a guy who's one an expert on the history of IP law (http://www.adrianjohns.com/ http://www.adrianjohns.com/). The patent system in its modern form grew out of the statute of monopolies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Monopolies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Monopolies), which was intended to be used only in cases of new innovation, but royalty abused it by granting monopolies on common goods to favored merchants (who paid exorbitant fees for the privilege).

antninja 14y ago

> Originally, patents were supposed to encourage idea sharing. The original idea of Marxist communism was very humanitarian in its intentions. We know how dictatorial it turned out when it was implemented. Good political theories that turn bad typically didn't take all parameters of reality into consideration. They're utopias.

gcb 14y ago
Corruption is completely unrelated to the set of laws it corrupt. Communism, capitalism, patents... irrelevant. Saying that capitalism prevents corruption one infinitesimal part more than communism is just pointless and impossible to prove. Same with any system that tries to prevent copies of work. It will always get corrupted to make corrupts to profit from authentic innovation of others. I'd love to read the article writer expand on how he differentiate from copyright infringement and patent. What if trinity was providing a better print of his novel than he ever dreamed, and charging less?
Arwill 14y ago
Well no, the "class struggle" and "armed takeover of power by the proletariat" is the core of Marxism, not quite so peaceful. But this is irrelevant to the topic.
- wpietri 14y ago
  You don't have to be a pacifist or a doormat to be a humanitarian.
Retric 14y ago
Arguably the US was much closer to Communism than Russia in the 50-60's. Unions effectively controlled the means of production through conflict 'strikes + other means' and redistributed more than the fair market value of their labor to the workers over the long term. Russia on the other hand was a de facto feudal system, with the party sharing power and privilege to a few at the expense of the peasants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_Coal_Wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_Coal_Wars

mtgx 14y ago

You still need to fix 2 other problems with software patents, otherwise it won't work. 1) shorten the software patent period to 3 years 2) dramatically decrease the vagueness and triviality of software patents somehow Otherwise, you end up like in the mobile industry, where something like 250,000 patents exist in any given phone, and I assume most of those are not enforced, but if they were regulated, and manufacturers were forced to pay for them by default, I could easily imagine patents costing more than the product itself. This is why you need to drastically reduce the number of patents as well.

jballanc 14y ago
Well, I think my system would actively incentivize the reduction in the number of patents. Fewer patents would lead to higher licensing fee per patent, so you'd have an incentive to only patent the stuff that really matters (since every patent has a base cost to acquire). Also, I'm not proposing that there be some sort of strict requirement that you must pay the licensing fee for all the patents you use. Obviously cross-licensing agreements and such would still be valid. What I'm trying to cure is the system the patent trolls currently operate under: Patent Troll - "I'm going to sue you for $1 mil for infringing my patent unless you pay my licensing fee." Startup Founder - "How much is your licensing fee?" Patent Troll - "Only $10,000" You have to keep in mind that most patent lawsuits never see judgement. They exist only to coerce alleged infringers into paying licensing fees. The problem is that the licensing fees are arbitrary. They are not reflective of any sort of market, but rather reflective of infringement-penalty * chance-of-judgment-against (well, I guess this is a perverse sort of market: a market of jury pools).
einhverfr 14y ago
Indeed. Also may I say "thank you" to the Supreme Court for their wonderful decision in Caraco v. Novo Nordisk, which more or less ends the usefulness of method-of-use patents for drugs.
loceng 14y ago
I thought 3-5 years would be a good enough length of time (leaning more to 5 years for physical applications). Though companies may still then hoard technology that isn't ready for the market yet, which would slow innovation. Longer patent times are perfectly fine if fees are regulated.

huhtenberg 14y ago

Patents were initially devised to let inventors to recoup their R&D expenses by giving them exclusivity on the market. And this - the R&D expense - should really be a defining factor in whether or not something is patentable. This way a 5 minute brain fart by a recent graduate won't be patentable, but a clever optimization technique that stems from several man-month of testing on a cluster of Crays will be.

twentysix 14y ago
That would tax an efficient use of resources. Its the innovative idea in the patent that should matter, not how much money you spent on figuring in out. Some might take less time and resources to figure out the same thing and basing everything on R&D expenses makes it completely unfair to them.

jedbrown 14y ago

A single product likely infringes on thousands of patents (a possibly dubious Google/RPX estimate was 250k patents for a smartphone), in which even $0.01/patent becomes unsustainable. Especially in software, chances are that you didn't learn about the ideas in the patent by reading the patent or observing products that use the patent, but rather on your own while solving a problem.

jballanc 14y ago
I guess I should clarify: there are different sorts of licenses. Some are per device or product sold. I was referring to an unlimited use license. The idea being (with the formula) that if your idea is good enough that every one of your competitors wants to use it, then they will effectively pay you for the full cost of discovery/development (at industry average R&D costs). So at $10 per patent, you'd pay $2.5 mil as a one-time fee. I'm curious how that would stack up to current litigation and other legal costs to fight/prevent patent litigation.
- jedbrown 14y ago
  If an unlimited use license is $10, it's not worth the patent owner's time to write a letter asking for the license fee. My impression is that many of the ideas covered by software patents are independently "discovered" by each entity that happens to use them. The patent is now inhibiting innovation by dwelling on an old idea that is apparently not so novel after all.
  - jballanc 14y ago
    > If an unlimited use license is $10, it's not worth the patent owner's time to write a letter asking for the license fee. I guess that's kind of the point. Patents only inhibit innovation when they can be used as a cudgel to force inventors into paying exorbitant fees. If fees are inversely proportional to the proliferation of patents in an area, the natural incentive is to only patent that which is important.

flexie 14y ago

But why grant software patents at all? Software is already protected with copyrights as literary works. Copyright protection is not as broad as patent protection. It doesn't prevent competitors from writing a program with similar features but different source code, but it does protect against competitors copying the source code.

jandrewrogers 14y ago
All patents are granted copyright protection in this sense. After all, they are filed on paper and both the process and implementation are reducible to such. To give an example, chemical process patents are among the oldest and most venerable kinds of patents in existence and are essentially equivalent to computer algorithm patents (except involving molecules instead of bits). A new algorithm for efficiently producing a particular chemical is protected by patents. The implementation of that algorithm, such as in a chemical manufacturing plant, is protected by copyright. There are an infinite number of ways the abstract process can be reduced to practice, all of which are copyrightable. In practice, the implementation copyright and the process patent are separately valuable, are often sold separately, and protect different people. The patent protects the effort of the individual who developed the chemical process. The copyright protects the effort of the engineer who designed a way to efficiently uses that chemical process.