10 ms·

Obama Calls for Patent Reform to Topple Trolls

249 points by PhearTheCeal 14y ago

rednukleus 14y ago
The primary problem is not NPEs, it's trivial "inventions" such as one-click purchasing and slide-to-unlock. If the bar were much higher for patents, then NPEs would not be a problem. Having companies that licence out technology is a perfectly reasonable system, if the company has done significant research or purchased patents from people who have. A secondary market for significant inventions is probably a good thing; a secondary market for borderline obvious inventions is not.
- rayiner 14y ago
  I agree. The focus on NPE's is misguided. A secondary market in patents is a good thing. E.g. Northwestern invented the drug that became Lyrica. As a university, they have no business being in the medical products business. So they sold it to Pfizer. What if, instead, they had sold it to a holding company that licensed out the technology to drug companies? That holding company would be an NPE, but it's a perfectly valid one and serves an important market purpose. It's clear that the patent office can't tell an obvious invention apart from a non-obvious one, so I'm not sure if there is much to be gained in that direction either. I think there are a lot of collateral ways to attack the problem, though: 1) Reforms on how damages are calculated. If you neither sell a product nor license IP to third parties, there is no way you're losing any revenue from an infringement. You should not be awarded even "reasonable royalty" damages if you wouldn't have received any royalties in any case. 2) Reforms involving intent and copying. The economic heart of the patent system is unfair competition: I invent something and you copy it and undercut me in the market because you have no R&D costs. As you get further from this core justification, the less justifiable the regime becomes. A lot of troll litigation could be shut down quickly if patent infringement functioned similarly to copyright infringement in requiring direct copying. This, unlike the above reform, would be a fundamental change in the system, from "monopoly" to a more "unfair competition" grounds, but the fact of the matter is that independent invention is strongly probative of something that probably doesn't deserve patent protection, either for being obvious generally or for being obvious in the context of other advancements in technology.
  - jmj42 14y ago
    > As a university, they have no business being in the medical products business. Why? While this line of reasoning might carry some weight if Northwestern were a public university (though I'd still require some convincing), Northwestern is a private non-profit institution, with a highly ranked medical school and clinic. Supplementing their income with drug sales instead of higher tuition seem like a perfectly logical thing to do.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      Because it's a waste. Pfizer has the comparative advantage in marketing drugs, and NWU in researching them. Econ 101: both parties are better off trading.
      - betterunix 14y ago
        ...and how does the patent help this? It sounds you had researchers paid on a grant, and a drug company that sold the fruits of that research. I am not seeing the case for a patent here at all.
        tptacek 14y ago
        Your dislike of patents does not make NWU a better venue for drug marketing.
        RestlessMind 14y ago
        Here is a case for patent: a third company snoops in, replicates drugs and sells for higher profit / lower cost since they haven't invested in R&D. Sounds unfair to me and such behavior should be prevented. Patents is one solution. Do you have a better one?
        betterunix 14y ago
        So let me see if I understand you correctly: grant money pays for the research, one company swoops in and markets the drug, then a third company swoops in and markets it, and you think that is a problem?
- dhaivatpandya 14y ago
  But, defining the different between trivial and nontrivial inventions is something that is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. In fact, I would argue that trying to set in place a system to decide between trivial and nontrivial inventions is more or less a waste of time because there will always be inventions that sit on the fence.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    That's true of everything in law (and life, in general). That's not an insurmountable problem--just move the fence until things are mostly on the side you want them.
    - hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
      The problem is, if you don't know where the fence should be, how can you judge if the patent office is doing a good job?
      - rayiner 14y ago
        We don't need a closed-form solution for where the fence should be. It's an entirely empirical process. Are we happy with the outcomes? If not, move the fence further up until we are.
        hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
        ... and how you judge if the patent office is doing it's job, again? If you're not "happy with the outcomes", which direction do you push the fence? Without a goal set we get nowhere. What patent law should achieve is purposefully vague - it's the ultimate subversion of the legal system for capitalistic purposes. The state is supposed to give exclusive rights over "ideas", in effect granting the monopoly of anything to anyone. Then the patent office is handed over the hair ball of defining what are "ideas", which ideas are worth a patent (aka "trivial inventions", as if such thing exists), or even which ideas are original (a joke in itself). In my mind, we're asking the patent office to solve a philosophical problem, in the hopes they will sort out a logical conundrum caused by a vague law.
- monochromatic 14y ago
  This point is so important, and so rarely mentioned. Trolls are a good thing to the extent they create liquidity in the patent market. They are only a bad thing to the extent that the USPTO issues overbroad and/or obvious claims.
- j-g-faustus 14y ago
  NPEs [1] are not the problem as such, they are simply the ones most clearly illustrating the implications of the current patent system. PEs are encumbered by a number of other restrictions - their "cold war" type standoff against competitors, their need to maintain a mostly positive brand in the public eye, their need to minimize the risk of a catastrophic loss in a lawsuit. So they utilize only a fraction of the latent power of their patents. NPEs have no such restrictions. They have no competitors, no brand to maintain, no economic risk beyond what it costs to register a new shell company. So what we see from NPEs is what the patent system actually means. It's "pure patent system". By implication, the fix is to change the patent system. Preferably by abolishing software patents, at least. (I can't speak for other fields.) In the history of computing, I think Babbage's difference engine, von Neuman and some of the stuff from Xerox Parc in the 1970s probably deserved a patent or two. Apart from those, no. [1] Non-practicing entities, for those who don't know. (I had to look it up.)
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Trivial is perhaps the wrong word for them. A more accurate term might be "inevitable" (in the short-term). The reason why patents exist is to protect inventions which are difficult to come up with and which may not exist without patent protection. Pharmaceuticals are a good example, it takes a lot of research to design a new potential drug and even more painstaking research to prove that it works and is safe, if you can't guarantee some sort of market protection that gives the developer a chance to recoup their R&D costs then it's questionable whether or not you'd have as many new drugs. But on the other hand, if a patented invention is something that several other folks in the industry would have invented within the next 5 years regardless then patents start to become a drag on progress. It's telling when you see a burst of progress happen after a patent runs out, and that sort of thing happens all the time. The question is how do we strike the right balance. Unfortunately right now there are some very strong forces intent on keeping things very much off balance.
  - fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
    >Pharmaceuticals are a good example The pharmaceutical industry also provides us with plenty of opportunities to pick on them. Take a drug that's about to go off-patent, make a trivial change to their process, get a fast-track approval from FDA (because it's essentially the same), and a new patent (because it's new and improved!). Competitors play this game too, making copycat drugs which are very similar enough for marketing, but just different enough to deserve their own patent. I'm having a hard time sympathizing with any pharmaceutical company. Disclaimer, I'm almost done reading Goldacre's new book.
    - jonpeda 14y ago
      > deserve their own patent. What does this mean? If A is patented, A+B is covered by A's patent AND B's patent. The only way to avoid A is to use a non-patented yet critical invention. The inventor of A should have included any such thing as one of their patent claims.
- tcbawo 14y ago
  Imagine a tax system for IP modeled on real estate property taxes. To retain a patent, you would pay a tax based on assessed value. You could sell the patent, or enter it into the public domain. Failure to pay would result in forfeiture of the patent (ie. sold at auction, or entering into the public domain). This could create a self-funding process for patent regulation and monitoring, and a check against unhealthy patent proliferation. It would discourage patent trolls from sitting on patents, large companies from accumulating a "war chest" of patents, and encourage FRAND licensing.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  If you want USPTO to very thoroughly vet all incoming patents, then you will have to fund them a great deal more to employ a lot of skilled people to handle all that footwork.
te_platt 14y ago
The list of reforms linked to in the article is here https://defendinnovation.org/ https://defendinnovation.org/ Note - not Obama's list. I think #4 (no liability for independent invention) would effectively eliminate software patents by itself. I like what's there even if it seems unlikely to ever be implemented.
- JoshTriplett 14y ago
  > I think #4 (no liability for independent invention) would effectively eliminate software patents by itself. As long as it starts with a presumption of independent invention until proven otherwise by the patent holder, yes.
- monochromatic 14y ago
  Yeah, if independent invention is a defense, we're basically into something that looks a lot like copyright.
  - comicjk 14y ago
    Which allows interesting strategies. If you put a smart person in the right scenario with the right hints, he will reinvent whatever you want. You just have to keep him in the dark until the flash of brilliance, and you have a patented-idea farm. It might make a good movie.
    - InclinedPlane 14y ago
      Sort of. Not "whatever you want", but certainly a huge chunk of what has passed as patentable inventions in software. But some inventions truly are novel and difficult, even in software, though they are incredibly rare.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      He's not going to invent a new cancer drug or a cooling mechanism for jet turbine blades, unless you fund him with a few hundred million dollars while he's at it. Or even something like MP3 that uses psycho-acoustic models built on empirical testing.
dade_ 14y ago
Just wait for it, the Obama administration is going to be sued for infringing a patent for a process that protects people from patent trolls.
russell 14y ago
#1 Software patents should be for no more than 5 years. Perhaps that should be true of all trivial inventions. Drug companies, for example, tweak best sellers coming off patent protection by adding another compatible compound and getting another 20 years, although the original compound looses protection.
- monochromatic 14y ago
  There's a rule that'd be tough to administer if I've ever seen one.
- danielweber 14y ago
  Software patents that expire in 5 years could be very agreeable if the time it takes for them to be granted dropped from 3 years to around 6 months.
- homosaur 14y ago
  Software patents should not exist. Implementation is everything, ideas are easy. Copyright covers everything important.
bborud 14y ago
Patents cannot be reformed. The idea itself is dead. Let it go.
zmmmmm 14y ago
I think dropping the default length of software patents to 5 years would be a really good first start. As a concession, I would suggest even slightly lowering the barrier to entry for getting such a patent, and then retaining a tier at 20 years with a MUCH higher threshold for inventiveness. There would still be bad software patents, but I think this would greatly limit the damage from them. The incentive for trolls would be enormously reduced if they can only extort license fees for a few years, while the lower barrier to entry would make it much easier for small entrepreneurs to actually get patents without going through 20 rounds with the patent office. There needs to be a recognition that in software entire segments are born and die within 20 years (even within 10 years). 20 years protection on a simple idea is way too long, even if it is truly novel. This is not like drugs where it may take 10 years of trials before you can even get it on the market.
- jandrewrogers 14y ago
  Algorithms live much longer than 20 years and often require more than 5 years to bring to market. As a practical matter it takes about a decade for a new computer science concept to be fully integrated into software practice. I've been involved in quite a bit of hardcore algorithm R&D. In no case where material advancements were made was it possible to really bring it to market in five years from inception. Computer science has the same inertia for how things are done as any other industry. Altering the way things are done and getting uptake requires a surprising amount of time no matter how good the advancement. Which roughly matches most other patentable subject matters. I'm not saying algorithm patents need to be 20 years but most software engineers have no idea how long it actually takes to commercialize material algorithm advancements. It looks a lot more like industrial patents than most programmers seem to assume. And many algorithm patents have millions of dollars in R&D invested in them; I have been involved in several such examples.
  - jonpeda 14y ago
    If an invention is useless (ahead of its time) for 10 years, then you may as well keep it secret until the market is ready, and then publish.
ilaksh 14y ago
To me its obvious that software patents should actually be abolished entirely. If I am going to build a system and try to sell it, I sell it as a service with add-on support and make it open source. If I am buying a software system I usually expect the same thing. Or hope that I can sell it for a small fee or close source it and add copyright protection for a totally unique work. But generally I feel that if someone invents a software concept or set of concepts that works well enough, then everyone should adopt it. Patents are just going to make that impractical. The idea of everyone licensing whatever useful system gets invented isn't practical and doesn't work with open source.
dakimov 14y ago
Trolls? Like Apple Corp. that patented bounce back scrolling? The problem is not trolls, the problem is the deep mental retardation of the current US patent system. And it's not just a reform. All the issued patents must be revised and a lot of them must be revoked. The solution seems to be simple, isn't it: don't patent trivial things, and only patent the actual methods, not just ideas of them.
fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
There are so many problems with the patent system, it's hard to identify a primary problem. I'd say the worst thing about it is that it is simply non-functional for any individual or small business. Got a patent? Someone infringing? Sue them! Cost? Astronomical. Selling something? Patent Trolls trying to make a grab? Defend yourself in court! Cost? Astronomical. Those scenarios merely address outright abuse; but, the way patents are granted guarantees that those situations will also arise between parties who aren't trolls.
npsimons 14y ago
Good! Let's start with Intellectual Ventures.
datz 14y ago
Unfortunately, "Troll" has turned into a political term to prevent "undesirables" the government or society does not want to fund from starting businesses from the "Trolls" intellectual property which the "Troll" spent years of his or her life developing.
- datz 14y ago
  By classifying people we do not like (mannerisms, personality, misfits) as trolls, we can practice socialism and transfer their ideas and intellectual property to people we like better, people who have nicer smiles.
  - datz 14y ago
    The socialists insist that everyone has a label, a "place in life" and will transfer the "Troll's" ideas and intellectual property to people who are better politically and socially well positioned. This is a ploy that will ruin our society.
    - datz 14y ago
      People have to understand this is a career for many. Inventors spend months even years developing their ideas into inventions. We need strong IP in this country. Obama has forsaken us and has used false logic that non-inventors can get behind to destroy the incentive system for innovation in this country. He is taking baby steps, warming us up to pure socialism. Without strong IP, the United States of America will crumble and Obama will get his way - utter destruction of the potential for greatness we all strive for. Obama does not have the capacity to invent and does not understand invention. Use empathy and realize how important our inventors are and how important IP is to the future of this nation. IP is all that sets us apart from Greece.
    - datz 14y ago
      The founding fathers built an incentive-infallible system. Is Obama smarter than Madison? Is Obama smarter than Benjamin Franklin? What are his true intentions? Strong IP law made this country great. Strong IP law is vital in the information age and vital to the superior positioning of this great nation. Strong IP will be the driving force which will save humanity from extinction events. Keep IP strong. Keep America strong.

249 points by PhearTheCeal 14y ago

The primary problem is not NPEs, it's trivial "inventions" such as one-click purchasing and slide-to-unlock. If the bar were much higher for patents, then NPEs would not be a problem. Having companies that licence out technology is a perfectly reasonable system, if the company has done significant research or purchased patents from people who have. A secondary market for significant inventions is probably a good thing; a secondary market for borderline obvious inventions is not.

rayiner 14y ago
I agree. The focus on NPE's is misguided. A secondary market in patents is a good thing. E.g. Northwestern invented the drug that became Lyrica. As a university, they have no business being in the medical products business. So they sold it to Pfizer. What if, instead, they had sold it to a holding company that licensed out the technology to drug companies? That holding company would be an NPE, but it's a perfectly valid one and serves an important market purpose. It's clear that the patent office can't tell an obvious invention apart from a non-obvious one, so I'm not sure if there is much to be gained in that direction either. I think there are a lot of collateral ways to attack the problem, though: 1) Reforms on how damages are calculated. If you neither sell a product nor license IP to third parties, there is no way you're losing any revenue from an infringement. You should not be awarded even "reasonable royalty" damages if you wouldn't have received any royalties in any case. 2) Reforms involving intent and copying. The economic heart of the patent system is unfair competition: I invent something and you copy it and undercut me in the market because you have no R&D costs. As you get further from this core justification, the less justifiable the regime becomes. A lot of troll litigation could be shut down quickly if patent infringement functioned similarly to copyright infringement in requiring direct copying. This, unlike the above reform, would be a fundamental change in the system, from "monopoly" to a more "unfair competition" grounds, but the fact of the matter is that independent invention is strongly probative of something that probably doesn't deserve patent protection, either for being obvious generally or for being obvious in the context of other advancements in technology.
- jmj42 14y ago
  > As a university, they have no business being in the medical products business. Why? While this line of reasoning might carry some weight if Northwestern were a public university (though I'd still require some convincing), Northwestern is a private non-profit institution, with a highly ranked medical school and clinic. Supplementing their income with drug sales instead of higher tuition seem like a perfectly logical thing to do.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Because it's a waste. Pfizer has the comparative advantage in marketing drugs, and NWU in researching them. Econ 101: both parties are better off trading.
    - betterunix 14y ago
      ...and how does the patent help this? It sounds you had researchers paid on a grant, and a drug company that sold the fruits of that research. I am not seeing the case for a patent here at all.
      - tptacek 14y ago
        Your dislike of patents does not make NWU a better venue for drug marketing.
      - RestlessMind 14y ago
        Here is a case for patent: a third company snoops in, replicates drugs and sells for higher profit / lower cost since they haven't invested in R&D. Sounds unfair to me and such behavior should be prevented. Patents is one solution. Do you have a better one?
        betterunix 14y ago
        So let me see if I understand you correctly: grant money pays for the research, one company swoops in and markets the drug, then a third company swoops in and markets it, and you think that is a problem?
dhaivatpandya 14y ago
But, defining the different between trivial and nontrivial inventions is something that is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. In fact, I would argue that trying to set in place a system to decide between trivial and nontrivial inventions is more or less a waste of time because there will always be inventions that sit on the fence.
- rayiner 14y ago
  That's true of everything in law (and life, in general). That's not an insurmountable problem--just move the fence until things are mostly on the side you want them.
  - hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
    The problem is, if you don't know where the fence should be, how can you judge if the patent office is doing a good job?
    - rayiner 14y ago
      We don't need a closed-form solution for where the fence should be. It's an entirely empirical process. Are we happy with the outcomes? If not, move the fence further up until we are.
      - hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
        ... and how you judge if the patent office is doing it's job, again? If you're not "happy with the outcomes", which direction do you push the fence? Without a goal set we get nowhere. What patent law should achieve is purposefully vague - it's the ultimate subversion of the legal system for capitalistic purposes. The state is supposed to give exclusive rights over "ideas", in effect granting the monopoly of anything to anyone. Then the patent office is handed over the hair ball of defining what are "ideas", which ideas are worth a patent (aka "trivial inventions", as if such thing exists), or even which ideas are original (a joke in itself). In my mind, we're asking the patent office to solve a philosophical problem, in the hopes they will sort out a logical conundrum caused by a vague law.
monochromatic 14y ago
This point is so important, and so rarely mentioned. Trolls are a good thing to the extent they create liquidity in the patent market. They are only a bad thing to the extent that the USPTO issues overbroad and/or obvious claims.
j-g-faustus 14y ago
NPEs [1] are not the problem as such, they are simply the ones most clearly illustrating the implications of the current patent system. PEs are encumbered by a number of other restrictions - their "cold war" type standoff against competitors, their need to maintain a mostly positive brand in the public eye, their need to minimize the risk of a catastrophic loss in a lawsuit. So they utilize only a fraction of the latent power of their patents. NPEs have no such restrictions. They have no competitors, no brand to maintain, no economic risk beyond what it costs to register a new shell company. So what we see from NPEs is what the patent system actually means. It's "pure patent system". By implication, the fix is to change the patent system. Preferably by abolishing software patents, at least. (I can't speak for other fields.) In the history of computing, I think Babbage's difference engine, von Neuman and some of the stuff from Xerox Parc in the 1970s probably deserved a patent or two. Apart from those, no. [1] Non-practicing entities, for those who don't know. (I had to look it up.)
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Trivial is perhaps the wrong word for them. A more accurate term might be "inevitable" (in the short-term). The reason why patents exist is to protect inventions which are difficult to come up with and which may not exist without patent protection. Pharmaceuticals are a good example, it takes a lot of research to design a new potential drug and even more painstaking research to prove that it works and is safe, if you can't guarantee some sort of market protection that gives the developer a chance to recoup their R&D costs then it's questionable whether or not you'd have as many new drugs. But on the other hand, if a patented invention is something that several other folks in the industry would have invented within the next 5 years regardless then patents start to become a drag on progress. It's telling when you see a burst of progress happen after a patent runs out, and that sort of thing happens all the time. The question is how do we strike the right balance. Unfortunately right now there are some very strong forces intent on keeping things very much off balance.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
  >Pharmaceuticals are a good example The pharmaceutical industry also provides us with plenty of opportunities to pick on them. Take a drug that's about to go off-patent, make a trivial change to their process, get a fast-track approval from FDA (because it's essentially the same), and a new patent (because it's new and improved!). Competitors play this game too, making copycat drugs which are very similar enough for marketing, but just different enough to deserve their own patent. I'm having a hard time sympathizing with any pharmaceutical company. Disclaimer, I'm almost done reading Goldacre's new book.
  - jonpeda 14y ago
    > deserve their own patent. What does this mean? If A is patented, A+B is covered by A's patent AND B's patent. The only way to avoid A is to use a non-patented yet critical invention. The inventor of A should have included any such thing as one of their patent claims.
tcbawo 14y ago
Imagine a tax system for IP modeled on real estate property taxes. To retain a patent, you would pay a tax based on assessed value. You could sell the patent, or enter it into the public domain. Failure to pay would result in forfeiture of the patent (ie. sold at auction, or entering into the public domain). This could create a self-funding process for patent regulation and monitoring, and a check against unhealthy patent proliferation. It would discourage patent trolls from sitting on patents, large companies from accumulating a "war chest" of patents, and encourage FRAND licensing.
slurgfest 14y ago
If you want USPTO to very thoroughly vet all incoming patents, then you will have to fund them a great deal more to employ a lot of skilled people to handle all that footwork.

te_platt 14y ago

The list of reforms linked to in the article is here https://defendinnovation.org/ https://defendinnovation.org/ Note - not Obama's list. I think #4 (no liability for independent invention) would effectively eliminate software patents by itself. I like what's there even if it seems unlikely to ever be implemented.

JoshTriplett 14y ago
> I think #4 (no liability for independent invention) would effectively eliminate software patents by itself. As long as it starts with a presumption of independent invention until proven otherwise by the patent holder, yes.
monochromatic 14y ago
Yeah, if independent invention is a defense, we're basically into something that looks a lot like copyright.
- comicjk 14y ago
  Which allows interesting strategies. If you put a smart person in the right scenario with the right hints, he will reinvent whatever you want. You just have to keep him in the dark until the flash of brilliance, and you have a patented-idea farm. It might make a good movie.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    Sort of. Not "whatever you want", but certainly a huge chunk of what has passed as patentable inventions in software. But some inventions truly are novel and difficult, even in software, though they are incredibly rare.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    He's not going to invent a new cancer drug or a cooling mechanism for jet turbine blades, unless you fund him with a few hundred million dollars while he's at it. Or even something like MP3 that uses psycho-acoustic models built on empirical testing.

dade_ 14y ago

Just wait for it, the Obama administration is going to be sued for infringing a patent for a process that protects people from patent trolls.

russell 14y ago

#1 Software patents should be for no more than 5 years. Perhaps that should be true of all trivial inventions. Drug companies, for example, tweak best sellers coming off patent protection by adding another compatible compound and getting another 20 years, although the original compound looses protection.

monochromatic 14y ago
There's a rule that'd be tough to administer if I've ever seen one.
danielweber 14y ago
Software patents that expire in 5 years could be very agreeable if the time it takes for them to be granted dropped from 3 years to around 6 months.
homosaur 14y ago
Software patents should not exist. Implementation is everything, ideas are easy. Copyright covers everything important.

bborud 14y ago

Patents cannot be reformed. The idea itself is dead. Let it go.

zmmmmm 14y ago

I think dropping the default length of software patents to 5 years would be a really good first start. As a concession, I would suggest even slightly lowering the barrier to entry for getting such a patent, and then retaining a tier at 20 years with a MUCH higher threshold for inventiveness. There would still be bad software patents, but I think this would greatly limit the damage from them. The incentive for trolls would be enormously reduced if they can only extort license fees for a few years, while the lower barrier to entry would make it much easier for small entrepreneurs to actually get patents without going through 20 rounds with the patent office. There needs to be a recognition that in software entire segments are born and die within 20 years (even within 10 years). 20 years protection on a simple idea is way too long, even if it is truly novel. This is not like drugs where it may take 10 years of trials before you can even get it on the market.

jandrewrogers 14y ago
Algorithms live much longer than 20 years and often require more than 5 years to bring to market. As a practical matter it takes about a decade for a new computer science concept to be fully integrated into software practice. I've been involved in quite a bit of hardcore algorithm R&D. In no case where material advancements were made was it possible to really bring it to market in five years from inception. Computer science has the same inertia for how things are done as any other industry. Altering the way things are done and getting uptake requires a surprising amount of time no matter how good the advancement. Which roughly matches most other patentable subject matters. I'm not saying algorithm patents need to be 20 years but most software engineers have no idea how long it actually takes to commercialize material algorithm advancements. It looks a lot more like industrial patents than most programmers seem to assume. And many algorithm patents have millions of dollars in R&D invested in them; I have been involved in several such examples.
- jonpeda 14y ago
  If an invention is useless (ahead of its time) for 10 years, then you may as well keep it secret until the market is ready, and then publish.

ilaksh 14y ago

To me its obvious that software patents should actually be abolished entirely. If I am going to build a system and try to sell it, I sell it as a service with add-on support and make it open source. If I am buying a software system I usually expect the same thing. Or hope that I can sell it for a small fee or close source it and add copyright protection for a totally unique work. But generally I feel that if someone invents a software concept or set of concepts that works well enough, then everyone should adopt it. Patents are just going to make that impractical. The idea of everyone licensing whatever useful system gets invented isn't practical and doesn't work with open source.

dakimov 14y ago

Trolls? Like Apple Corp. that patented bounce back scrolling? The problem is not trolls, the problem is the deep mental retardation of the current US patent system. And it's not just a reform. All the issued patents must be revised and a lot of them must be revoked. The solution seems to be simple, isn't it: don't patent trivial things, and only patent the actual methods, not just ideas of them.

fnordfnordfnord 14y ago

There are so many problems with the patent system, it's hard to identify a primary problem. I'd say the worst thing about it is that it is simply non-functional for any individual or small business. Got a patent? Someone infringing? Sue them! Cost? Astronomical. Selling something? Patent Trolls trying to make a grab? Defend yourself in court! Cost? Astronomical. Those scenarios merely address outright abuse; but, the way patents are granted guarantees that those situations will also arise between parties who aren't trolls.

npsimons 14y ago

Good! Let's start with Intellectual Ventures.

datz 14y ago

Unfortunately, "Troll" has turned into a political term to prevent "undesirables" the government or society does not want to fund from starting businesses from the "Trolls" intellectual property which the "Troll" spent years of his or her life developing.

datz 14y ago
By classifying people we do not like (mannerisms, personality, misfits) as trolls, we can practice socialism and transfer their ideas and intellectual property to people we like better, people who have nicer smiles.
- datz 14y ago
  The socialists insist that everyone has a label, a "place in life" and will transfer the "Troll's" ideas and intellectual property to people who are better politically and socially well positioned. This is a ploy that will ruin our society.
  - datz 14y ago
    People have to understand this is a career for many. Inventors spend months even years developing their ideas into inventions. We need strong IP in this country. Obama has forsaken us and has used false logic that non-inventors can get behind to destroy the incentive system for innovation in this country. He is taking baby steps, warming us up to pure socialism. Without strong IP, the United States of America will crumble and Obama will get his way - utter destruction of the potential for greatness we all strive for. Obama does not have the capacity to invent and does not understand invention. Use empathy and realize how important our inventors are and how important IP is to the future of this nation. IP is all that sets us apart from Greece.
  - datz 14y ago
    The founding fathers built an incentive-infallible system. Is Obama smarter than Madison? Is Obama smarter than Benjamin Franklin? What are his true intentions? Strong IP law made this country great. Strong IP law is vital in the information age and vital to the superior positioning of this great nation. Strong IP will be the driving force which will save humanity from extinction events. Keep IP strong. Keep America strong.