EFF Outlines Plan to Fix the Broken Patent System

Why would Qualcomm bother making new designs if some other company will just rip off their design.

All it would do is further weaken the engineers role in society and favor the banker. Without IP, the only thing that matters is capital to build production facilities.

I'm not sold on ending the Federal Circuit. It would just lead to forum shopping and arbitraging circuit splits. That would only increase litigation due to uncertainty.

I'll have to read the EFFs white paper to see why they feel this way. But IMO the Fed circuit + SCOTUS keeping them honest really works.

I also question how much the SCOTUS keeps them honest when they blatently ignore SCOTUS decisions, and SCOTUS does not have the bandwidth to continuously overturn them.

Defining a software patent is not hard. A patent is a software patent if you can infringe it entirely with software. Software can't infringe a patent for a cholesterol drug or a light bulb, so those aren't software patents.

> I look at the tech industry, and see one where product companies rather than hard R&D companies make all the money. The folks at SRI who invented Siri get a small license fee, while Apple makes billions by wrapping it with a candy shell.

There is so much more to a modern smartphone than just Siri that the idea that SRI should be getting any significant fraction of the revenue is a little disingenuous. The "problem" with software is that you can have ten thousand discrete inventions that each individually would have been a revolution in 1995 but the market still expects you to package them all together and sell the device for around $600, and then sell a device with all the same software but less powerful hardware for $150. After the costs of hardware design, manufacturing, marketing, distribution, administration, etc., plus the cost of writing the software to actually implement tens of thousands of "inventions", you would be lucky to give each inventor a penny per device.

But the real problem is you can't accurately price the contribution each inventor makes. There are too many of them that are each worth such a small percentage of the total that spending any kind of significant resources to evaluate their individual value isn't cost effective. But if you can't price patents accurately then you don't have a functioning market, which is fundamentally why we end up with such poor quality patents in software -- if the bad ones go on the pile with the good ones and they all get a similar payout then it's a lot easier to collect rent by filing low quality patents than actually spending money on useful R&D.

> It's an industry where there is tremendous pressure to vertically integrate, because you can only justify R&D on basic technologies if you also control the product that gets sold to end-users.

I don't see what vertical integration has to do with it. Microsoft circa 2002 had every incentive to invest in operating systems R&D, and they did, but they didn't need to sell the hardware or control the market for third party applications to do it.

If you're actually selling software to users you're competing against the previous version of your own software as much as you are against competitors anyway. And the patent can't convince users to upgrade once they already have a version that implements it. If anything software patents are contributing to the vertical integration because a vendor that can establish a monopoly or otherwise strong market position using patents (and any combination of other tactics) can use it to leverage that market position into control of vertical markets.

If you want less vertical integration then what you want is more modular systems, open standards and free software. Which is the opposite of what software patents do.