This seems like as good a thread as any to mention one of my favorite unrealized enterprises: Patent Trolling for Good (PTG) The idea is simple: take the traditional model of a patent troll, but alter the settlement terms to create a cascade that ultimately ends or significantly reduces the exclusive ownership of facts (aka IP). Patent Trolling for Good acts like a traditional Patent Troll in that it takes any IP it…
The Case Against Patents (2013)
51–60 of 140 posts
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#52I never thought that the case for patents was to increase productivity. I always thought that their purpose was to eliminate trade secrets: people are going to invent stuff whether you want to or not, but without patents, they'll take the secrets to the grave. My favourite patent of all time is Michael Jackson's smooth criminal patent: https://mashable.com/2015/03/28/michael-jackson-shoe-patent/... This is the patent…
Suggesting that they’re “impossible to execute” correctly is a bit odd, as all US technology arose in the context of the patent system (the first Patent Act predates the Constitution).
You haven't given any evidence that it arose because of that system or in spite of it. There are plenty of examples going back to Singer sewing machines [1] and the Wright Brothers [2] that demonstrate that the surest way to delay the widespread deployment of any transformative technology by many years is to patent it.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1354849
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#53Meanwhile the Intellectual "Property" wants patents treated as real estate and the party of corporate interests is in power.
wants? this is the way it has been done for a long long time in the US (the first US patent grant was from George Washington in 1790), there is Property category where there is at least Real Property & Intellectual Property, patents which are in the Intellectual Property 'bucket' so to speak
There are multiple of forms of intellectual property beyond patents: copyright, trademarks, etc
This is the way the legal system has always worked, not an invention of a modern corporate interests, the ancient Greeks recognizes some forms of patent, the modern version is based around the implementations of Italy's patent system in the 1400s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law
no conspiracy here....but yes corporations do like to see a return on their significant research and development investments
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#54Sleep deprived from go live, I misread this as "The Case Against Patents."
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#55I never thought that the case for patents was to increase productivity. I always thought that their purpose was to eliminate trade secrets: people are going to invent stuff whether you want to or not, but without patents, they'll take the secrets to the grave. My favourite patent of all time is Michael Jackson's smooth criminal patent: https://mashable.com/2015/03/28/michael-jackson-shoe-patent/... This is the patent…
I mostly read patents about chemistry, materials, and electronics. I find a lot of older patents to be straightforward and informative. Occasionally I will run across a 21st century patent that is as readable, but they're a lot rarer now. If I had to estimate when the transition happened, I'd guess around the 1980s, maybe late 1970s. Weirdly, this is also about the time that academic publications appeared to decline in information-per-page and reproducibility-per-procedure.
The societal disclosure-value of the patent seems to be dropping off over time, both because reverse engineering has improved and because the body of a typical patent is becoming less informative about how to construct a useful embodiment of the patented invention.
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#56I never thought that the case for patents was to increase productivity. I always thought that their purpose was to eliminate trade secrets: people are going to invent stuff whether you want to or not, but without patents, they'll take the secrets to the grave. My favourite patent of all time is Michael Jackson's smooth criminal patent: https://mashable.com/2015/03/28/michael-jackson-shoe-patent/... This is the patent…
> I always thought that their purpose was to eliminate trade secrets: people are going to invent stuff whether you want to or not, but without patents, they'll take the secrets to the grave. Except that if you look at the history of inventions you'll notice that quite frequently several people invented the same thing independently at almost the same time (the phone for example). So the risk of losing a 'trade secrets…
Two people can hold the same (independently discovered) trade secret. If I slave away and re-discover the Coke recipe, I can keep it and use it as a trade secret. But if I intern at Coke and steal it, I can go to jail for trade secret theft.
A patent incents me to slave away and then requires me to teach the patent in exchange for a limited monopoly. Trade secret law only punishes me for stealing but incents me to keep secrets.
The trouble with trade secrets is that I have to be able to exploit my invention and still keep it a secret. I probably can't do that with the phone. So I wouldn't slave away working on that problem if the best protection I could get is a trade secret.
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#57This seems like as good a thread as any to mention one of my favorite unrealized enterprises: Patent Trolling for Good (PTG) The idea is simple: take the traditional model of a patent troll, but alter the settlement terms to create a cascade that ultimately ends or significantly reduces the exclusive ownership of facts (aka IP). Patent Trolling for Good acts like a traditional Patent Troll in that it takes any IP it…
It seems to me that a potential flaw with this plan is that mounting patent litigation costs money, so if everyone just joins the PTG to avoid expensive patent litigation defense, then the PTG would not have any income to sustain itself. Its continued survival would require that a significant percentage of cases end up with cash winnings instead of the target joining the PTG.
To be sustainable it can't be TOO effective.
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#58This seems like as good a thread as any to mention one of my favorite unrealized enterprises: Patent Trolling for Good (PTG) The idea is simple: take the traditional model of a patent troll, but alter the settlement terms to create a cascade that ultimately ends or significantly reduces the exclusive ownership of facts (aka IP). Patent Trolling for Good acts like a traditional Patent Troll in that it takes any IP it…
It seems to me that a potential flaw with this plan is that mounting patent litigation costs money, so if everyone just joins the PTG to avoid expensive patent litigation defense, then the PTG would not have any income to sustain itself. Its continued survival would require that a significant percentage of cases end up with cash winnings instead of the target joining the PTG. To be sustainable it can't be TOO effecti…
It would have to only allowing joining before a suit is launched or after all payments for misuse of its patents have been met.
Problem is, once it begins generating revenue, there is a chance it will want to continue doing so. The lawyers on staff don't want to get fired for lack of work, so there is a possibility it becomes a bad (or at least Chaotic Neutral) patent troll.
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#59Nice name drop
> We are grateful to the editors, the referees, and to Richard Stallman for a careful reading and comments.
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#60I never thought that the case for patents was to increase productivity. I always thought that their purpose was to eliminate trade secrets: people are going to invent stuff whether you want to or not, but without patents, they'll take the secrets to the grave. My favourite patent of all time is Michael Jackson's smooth criminal patent: https://mashable.com/2015/03/28/michael-jackson-shoe-patent/... This is the patent…
The decline of practical enforceability in some patent areas has created adverse incentives with respect to how you use the patent system, leading to much of the mess you see today. As a practical consequence, less R&D is being patented since disclosure is not adequately protected, and patents are instead used strategically to increase the cost of reverse engineering a trade secret. This leads to the large number of patents designed with enough specificity to deny competitors access to technology without enough critical implementation detail to replicate the technology from said patent.
Even trade secrets often only buy you a small amount of time these days before a competitor reverse engineers your technology, so increasingly elaborate (and often futile) measures are being taken to extract an advantage from R&D that justifies the investment in the first place before your competitors use it against you.
Especially in computer science, as much as many people complain about algorithm patents, an enormous amount of state-of-the-art research is being solely done as trade secrets now and will never be patented or published. I suspect many people that strongly favor banning computer science patents would not be happy with the reality that this drives advanced computer science research to never be published at all. There is no longer a viable path for recovering investment in computer science research that involves publishing it, which should be cause for concern. (People that want to monitor the advancement of AI tech should find this reality particularly distressing, as it severely hampers their efforts.)