7 ms·

Nathan Myhrvold’s Evil Genius

53 points by edw519 17y ago

tptacek 17y ago
You read this article and get the impression that Myhrvold hires people to sit around saying things like "laptop batteries that get 40 hours per charge!", which he writes down and files patents for. But from what I understand, from being involved in several patent filings, you can't just patent an idea. You have to patent an enablement of an idea. A patent that can't be used by someone skilled in the applicable arts to implement the patented concept isn't supposed to be defensible. Commenters on this post repeatedly argue that engineers do all the real, hard work, and that the ideas themselves are trivial. That's probably true. But all that hard work is also patentable; if I'm dumb enough to file for "40 hour batteries", and you file for the chemical process that makes 40-hour batteries work without melting through the floor, you win, right?
- frognibble 17y ago
  You probably win because your patent has broad claims covering all 40 hour batteries. It does not matter that I know how to make them and you don't.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    As I understand it --- as in, what I've managed to retain from multi-hour conversations with IP lawyers trying to sell me services --- that's not actually how it works. (a) if your broad claims and best-known-mode are insufficient to instruct someone as to how to build a battery, your patent won't matter, and (b) just because you patent a 40-hour-battery concept doesn't mean you've patented the concept of a 40-hour battery. Every aspect of battery design that you didn't document and claim in your patent is itself patentable. You can patent technology that you yourself cannot build because of other overlapping patents.
- raganwald 17y ago
  You and I both win provided neither of us tries to actually make the batteries. Instead, we wait for someone who does and sue them. If we try to make them, we discover that while you patented something about 40 hours and I patented something about chemistry, neither of us patented something about manufacturing them and a third troll sues us. The point of the article is that the only losers are the ones who try to do anything tangible that requires a collection of patented ideas to function.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    This implies that you can, sitting at a table with a pint, come up with the key patentable ideas for the 40 hour batteries. The odds rather favor the people building batteries in earnest, don't they?
    - CamperBob 17y ago
      In the modern patent business, the "odds" favor the first party to encounter a particular problem in their field of art. If you're lucky enough to encounter a problem first, you can patent the first obvious solution(s) that come to mind, and effectively own the field later. This is why nonobviousness was supposed to be a criterion for granting patents, and why we're all worse off now that the USPTO has effectively abandoned it.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        If the "non-obvious" battery implementation is better, you can build and patent it no matter what me and raganwald come up with at the pub.
        CamperBob 17y ago
        But if it relies on your patent as prior art, I still have to cough up the baksheesh.
    - raganwald 17y ago
      No, because this is not a case of A vs. B. It's A vs. all the Bs, Cs, Ds, &c patenting stuff. So sure, a company building a battery has a good chance of coming up with an enforceable patent. But given thousands of people trying to patent battery-ish ideas and many that aren't immediately related to batteries, the odds favour one of them coming up with something that receives a patent and is vaguely related to whatever the battery manufacturer is doing. Remember, a patent is a sword but not a shield. Just because you patent an idea and make something with that idea, you cannot assume that nobody else has a patent that applies to your "patented" idea. They may have patented some other part of the process for manufacturing your "invention" or they may have a patent for an underlying component of your process even though you have patented a novel way to apply their patented idea. Please let go of the idea that patenting something is a license to actually do something tangible with your idea. It is not: It is actually a license to interfere with other people doing something with your idea.
- CamperBob 17y ago
  But from what I understand, from being involved in several patent filings, you can't just patent an idea. Unfortunately, while that's how it was supposed to work, that's not how it does work. Amazon's "one-click" patent is an obvious case in point: they own the idea of executing an Internet shopping transaction with a single mouse click. No matter how divergent your implementation is from theirs (and to be fair to Amazon, Barnes & Nobles' implementation wasn't very divergent) they effectively own the core idea and, by extension, any work you put into it. It's utterly impossible to argue that this state of affairs encourages progress in the useful arts and sciences, or otherwise benefits society in any way.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    Amazon didn't just patent an idea. They patented an extremely effective embodiment of that idea. One-click wasn't a pint-glass-and-bar-napkin patent.
    - CamperBob 17y ago
      I have an extremely effective embodiment of brushing my teeth, but you don't see me running off to the patent office to keep other people from brushing my teeth that way. Of course, if I could brush my teeth on the Internet, I can see how that might be different.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        It sounds like you're trying to argue that one-click was as obvious as brushing your teeth. Amazon was far from the first company to take payments over the net --- I remember buying an RSA shirt by keying the ABA and account numbers off a check. But Amazon appears to have been the first company to actually publish an embodiment of one-click shopping. Why's that?
        CamperBob 17y ago
        Honestly, I don't know. It could be that smaller online retailers were afraid of the inevitable rise in returns, chargebacks, and other customer-service hassles that would accompany any measures that encourage impulse buying. I know I would be. While the idea of one-click ordering is obvious, it takes some nontrivial business infrastructure to make it safe and robust. You need to be able to consolidate separate orders placed within a brief timeframe, you need to allow your customers to view and edit their existing orders and fix accidental ones without human intervention... and probably most important, you need to be large and well-known enough to be trusted by your customers to retain the financial and personal information needed to execute one-click orders. The idea was indeed a ballsy one, and it took some real work on Amazon's part to make it happen successfully. But it was still an obvious idea, it wasn't the least bit creative, and it didn't deserve patent protection. Hard work on my part shouldn't, by itself, entitle me to stop you from doing the same.
- ajb 17y ago
  Software is different. For most commercial programs, it's obvious in advance whether they can be implemented or not. Okay, there are lots of academic computer scientists devising new, unobvious algorithms, but I think a relatively low proportion of businesses need new algorithms. Whereas all new medicines, to take the other extreme, require new science.
henryl 17y ago
I've considered becoming a patent lawyer for precisely this trend. It is a type of investment vehicle that will get much more notice in the future and subsequently make a few billionaires along the way.
- CamperBob 17y ago
  Why not just skip all those pesky law classes, and become a bank robber? You'll have the same net effect on society, and the women are better-looking.
  - mattmaroon 17y ago
    For most bank robbers, the "women" are the guys they share a cell with. I'll take the billionaire option over that.
  - henryl 17y ago
    While acknowledging your quip for what it is, I would argue that monetizing a portfolio of patents that were legally acquired (either 1st or 3rd party) while capturing profit due to inefficiencies in the system is no different than what a typical hedge fund manager does so I don't see the problem. Inventors are able to bring liquidity to their otherwise illiquid patents and LPs get a return.
    - CamperBob 17y ago
      While acknowledging your quip for what it is, I would argue that monetizing a portfolio of patents that were legally acquired (either 1st or 3rd party) while capturing profit due to inefficiencies in the system is no different than what a typical hedge fund manager does so I don't see the problem. Ideas are not fungible. Consequently they are not supposed to be treated as currency, as commodities, or otherwise as subjects for speculation, except to the extent that doing so "promotes progress in the useful arts and sciences," according to the US Constitution. When someone shows me how Myrhvold's efforts do that, I'll reconsider the argument.
    - ajb 17y ago
sfraser 17y ago
It seems so appropriate that this truly evil venture is headed up by someone coming from Microsoft.
- tptacek 17y ago
  Yeah, I mean, just look at all the evil Bill Gates has wrought upon the earth since he left.
bwd2 17y ago
One of the comments on the article suggests applying for a patent on the "patent troll" business model and then suing these guys. Fans of recursion will notice that you could then apply for a patent on the "patent on the 'patent troll'" business model, and then we're really off to the races.
- nomoresecrets 17y ago
  One day - just one day - I'd like to see a discussion about patents where someone doesn't suggest patenting something 'amusing' that already exists and has years of prior art.
ajb 17y ago
I do wonder whether Nathan Myhrvold really believes that patents are a good thing. There seem to be three possibilities: - Myhrvold really believes that patents make the world a better place. - Myhrvold is cynically extracting money from a broken system - Myhrvold wants to bring down the patent system; IV is intended to make the absurdity of the system as blatant as possible, and make money at the same time. I hope it's the last one.
- sriramk 17y ago
  First, I haven't met Nathan personally but from everything I see about him internal to Microsoft (from his time at the company) and his time outside, he is a very, very smart man. And quite rich. I think assigning simple labels like 'good' and 'evil' doesn't quite cut it. My opinion/guess (with zero inside knowledge) is that Nathan doesn't really care about the patent side of the equation much. He just wants to do interesting ideas and get people in the room to dream up of (and sometimes build) cool stuff. Some of their work around nuclear power is super interesting for example. The patents are just a revenue stream for them to continue doing this.
  - pchristensen 17y ago
    Complex indeed: http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_on_archeology_animal_photography_bbq.html http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_on_archeology_anima... "Nathan Myhrvold talks about a few of his latest fascinations -- animal photography, archeology, BBQ and generally being an eccentric genius multimillionaire."

53 points by edw519 17y ago

You read this article and get the impression that Myhrvold hires people to sit around saying things like "laptop batteries that get 40 hours per charge!", which he writes down and files patents for. But from what I understand, from being involved in several patent filings, you can't just patent an idea. You have to patent an enablement of an idea. A patent that can't be used by someone skilled in the applicable arts to implement the patented concept isn't supposed to be defensible. Commenters on this post repeatedly argue that engineers do all the real, hard work, and that the ideas themselves are trivial. That's probably true. But all that hard work is also patentable; if I'm dumb enough to file for "40 hour batteries", and you file for the chemical process that makes 40-hour batteries work without melting through the floor, you win, right?

frognibble 17y ago
You probably win because your patent has broad claims covering all 40 hour batteries. It does not matter that I know how to make them and you don't.
- tptacek 17y ago
  As I understand it --- as in, what I've managed to retain from multi-hour conversations with IP lawyers trying to sell me services --- that's not actually how it works. (a) if your broad claims and best-known-mode are insufficient to instruct someone as to how to build a battery, your patent won't matter, and (b) just because you patent a 40-hour-battery concept doesn't mean you've patented the concept of a 40-hour battery. Every aspect of battery design that you didn't document and claim in your patent is itself patentable. You can patent technology that you yourself cannot build because of other overlapping patents.
raganwald 17y ago
You and I both win provided neither of us tries to actually make the batteries. Instead, we wait for someone who does and sue them. If we try to make them, we discover that while you patented something about 40 hours and I patented something about chemistry, neither of us patented something about manufacturing them and a third troll sues us. The point of the article is that the only losers are the ones who try to do anything tangible that requires a collection of patented ideas to function.
- tptacek 17y ago
  This implies that you can, sitting at a table with a pint, come up with the key patentable ideas for the 40 hour batteries. The odds rather favor the people building batteries in earnest, don't they?
  - CamperBob 17y ago
    In the modern patent business, the "odds" favor the first party to encounter a particular problem in their field of art. If you're lucky enough to encounter a problem first, you can patent the first obvious solution(s) that come to mind, and effectively own the field later. This is why nonobviousness was supposed to be a criterion for granting patents, and why we're all worse off now that the USPTO has effectively abandoned it.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      If the "non-obvious" battery implementation is better, you can build and patent it no matter what me and raganwald come up with at the pub.
      - CamperBob 17y ago
        But if it relies on your patent as prior art, I still have to cough up the baksheesh.
  - raganwald 17y ago
    No, because this is not a case of A vs. B. It's A vs. all the Bs, Cs, Ds, &c patenting stuff. So sure, a company building a battery has a good chance of coming up with an enforceable patent. But given thousands of people trying to patent battery-ish ideas and many that aren't immediately related to batteries, the odds favour one of them coming up with something that receives a patent and is vaguely related to whatever the battery manufacturer is doing. Remember, a patent is a sword but not a shield. Just because you patent an idea and make something with that idea, you cannot assume that nobody else has a patent that applies to your "patented" idea. They may have patented some other part of the process for manufacturing your "invention" or they may have a patent for an underlying component of your process even though you have patented a novel way to apply their patented idea. Please let go of the idea that patenting something is a license to actually do something tangible with your idea. It is not: It is actually a license to interfere with other people doing something with your idea.
CamperBob 17y ago
But from what I understand, from being involved in several patent filings, you can't just patent an idea. Unfortunately, while that's how it was supposed to work, that's not how it does work. Amazon's "one-click" patent is an obvious case in point: they own the idea of executing an Internet shopping transaction with a single mouse click. No matter how divergent your implementation is from theirs (and to be fair to Amazon, Barnes & Nobles' implementation wasn't very divergent) they effectively own the core idea and, by extension, any work you put into it. It's utterly impossible to argue that this state of affairs encourages progress in the useful arts and sciences, or otherwise benefits society in any way.
- tptacek 17y ago
  Amazon didn't just patent an idea. They patented an extremely effective embodiment of that idea. One-click wasn't a pint-glass-and-bar-napkin patent.
  - CamperBob 17y ago
    I have an extremely effective embodiment of brushing my teeth, but you don't see me running off to the patent office to keep other people from brushing my teeth that way. Of course, if I could brush my teeth on the Internet, I can see how that might be different.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      It sounds like you're trying to argue that one-click was as obvious as brushing your teeth. Amazon was far from the first company to take payments over the net --- I remember buying an RSA shirt by keying the ABA and account numbers off a check. But Amazon appears to have been the first company to actually publish an embodiment of one-click shopping. Why's that?
      - CamperBob 17y ago
        Honestly, I don't know. It could be that smaller online retailers were afraid of the inevitable rise in returns, chargebacks, and other customer-service hassles that would accompany any measures that encourage impulse buying. I know I would be. While the idea of one-click ordering is obvious, it takes some nontrivial business infrastructure to make it safe and robust. You need to be able to consolidate separate orders placed within a brief timeframe, you need to allow your customers to view and edit their existing orders and fix accidental ones without human intervention... and probably most important, you need to be large and well-known enough to be trusted by your customers to retain the financial and personal information needed to execute one-click orders. The idea was indeed a ballsy one, and it took some real work on Amazon's part to make it happen successfully. But it was still an obvious idea, it wasn't the least bit creative, and it didn't deserve patent protection. Hard work on my part shouldn't, by itself, entitle me to stop you from doing the same.
ajb 17y ago
Software is different. For most commercial programs, it's obvious in advance whether they can be implemented or not. Okay, there are lots of academic computer scientists devising new, unobvious algorithms, but I think a relatively low proportion of businesses need new algorithms. Whereas all new medicines, to take the other extreme, require new science.

henryl 17y ago

I've considered becoming a patent lawyer for precisely this trend. It is a type of investment vehicle that will get much more notice in the future and subsequently make a few billionaires along the way.

CamperBob 17y ago
Why not just skip all those pesky law classes, and become a bank robber? You'll have the same net effect on society, and the women are better-looking.
- mattmaroon 17y ago
  For most bank robbers, the "women" are the guys they share a cell with. I'll take the billionaire option over that.
- henryl 17y ago
  While acknowledging your quip for what it is, I would argue that monetizing a portfolio of patents that were legally acquired (either 1st or 3rd party) while capturing profit due to inefficiencies in the system is no different than what a typical hedge fund manager does so I don't see the problem. Inventors are able to bring liquidity to their otherwise illiquid patents and LPs get a return.
  - CamperBob 17y ago
    While acknowledging your quip for what it is, I would argue that monetizing a portfolio of patents that were legally acquired (either 1st or 3rd party) while capturing profit due to inefficiencies in the system is no different than what a typical hedge fund manager does so I don't see the problem. Ideas are not fungible. Consequently they are not supposed to be treated as currency, as commodities, or otherwise as subjects for speculation, except to the extent that doing so "promotes progress in the useful arts and sciences," according to the US Constitution. When someone shows me how Myrhvold's efforts do that, I'll reconsider the argument.
  - ajb 17y ago

sfraser 17y ago

It seems so appropriate that this truly evil venture is headed up by someone coming from Microsoft.

tptacek 17y ago
Yeah, I mean, just look at all the evil Bill Gates has wrought upon the earth since he left.

bwd2 17y ago

One of the comments on the article suggests applying for a patent on the "patent troll" business model and then suing these guys. Fans of recursion will notice that you could then apply for a patent on the "patent on the 'patent troll'" business model, and then we're really off to the races.

nomoresecrets 17y ago
One day - just one day - I'd like to see a discussion about patents where someone doesn't suggest patenting something 'amusing' that already exists and has years of prior art.

ajb 17y ago

I do wonder whether Nathan Myhrvold really believes that patents are a good thing. There seem to be three possibilities: - Myhrvold really believes that patents make the world a better place. - Myhrvold is cynically extracting money from a broken system - Myhrvold wants to bring down the patent system; IV is intended to make the absurdity of the system as blatant as possible, and make money at the same time. I hope it's the last one.

sriramk 17y ago
First, I haven't met Nathan personally but from everything I see about him internal to Microsoft (from his time at the company) and his time outside, he is a very, very smart man. And quite rich. I think assigning simple labels like 'good' and 'evil' doesn't quite cut it. My opinion/guess (with zero inside knowledge) is that Nathan doesn't really care about the patent side of the equation much. He just wants to do interesting ideas and get people in the room to dream up of (and sometimes build) cool stuff. Some of their work around nuclear power is super interesting for example. The patents are just a revenue stream for them to continue doing this.
- pchristensen 17y ago
  Complex indeed: http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_on_archeology_animal_photography_bbq.html http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_on_archeology_anima... "Nathan Myhrvold talks about a few of his latest fascinations -- animal photography, archeology, BBQ and generally being an eccentric genius multimillionaire."