44 ms·

Interesting idea, but it seems to give even more power to the big guys, who can easily afford to pay the fee.

• beagle3 14y ago
  > Interesting idea, but it seems to give even more power to the big guys, who can easily afford to pay the fee. The devil is in the details. For example: When filing taxes for year Y (which is usually done in Q2 or Q3 of year Y+1), you have to assign a value to each and every one of patents you own, and pay the tax accordingly. Let's say Microsoft has only 1000 patents. If they valued each at $1M, the fee would indeed be a rounding error. However, it would also be much less frightening to competitors: $1M if sued is not such a big deal for a company in business. But they have 10,000 patents; and if they wanted to value each at $100M (as seems to be the case for things that go to court), it's suddenly $10B/year. Even Microsoft cannot afford that. The end result would be that they would actually examine their patent portfolio yearly, and assign value only to valuable patents -- which is the whole point of this exercise. On the other hand, if you are a small guy, and have a $1M patent, then $10K is something you should be able to easily finance. If not, then your patent is not worth $1M - or you don't have the means to enforce it under the existing system anyway (it costs at least $100K, and some people estimate upwards of $500K, to bring a patent case to court with a chance of prevailing. If you can't finance that, your patent is already worthless).