141–150 of 222 posts
Can someone please ELI5: What tech did the patent cover?
Apparently by taking prior art (DNS, server,user interface), and packaging it into a single "product" (DNS software optimized for specific hardware) - You've created a new thing. INNOVATION!
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The first patents were not about innovation at all but essentially government guaranteed monopolies similar to guilds. > 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cov…
> Citation needed. * OECD: http://fs2.american.edu/wgp/www/park_lippoldt08.pdf * Via: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallphelps/2015/09/16/do-pa... A review of the literature: * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5664960/
Today, I would argue that given the limitations of the existing literature we still have essentially no credible empirical evidence on the seemingly simple question of whether stronger patent rights – either longer patent terms or broader patent rights – encourage research investments into developing new technologies. While researchers have recently begun to make progress on the more limited question of how patents on existing technologies affect follow-on innovation (Galasso and Schankerman, 2015; Sampat and Williams, 2015), evidence on the overall effects of patents on research investments are needed as one input into optimal patent policy design.
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The first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality. Let's stop being so absolutist about these topics. The problem here isn't that patents exist, intellectual property protection is critical to investment and research. The issue here is two fold: 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imita…
The idea of "intellectual property" is anti-productive as well as immoral. Open source software is a very good evidence of the utilitarian benefits of doing away with software patents. And IP is immoral because it's impossible to grant and secure "intellectual property" rights without violating physical property rights. Please read Stephen Kinsella's "Against Intellectual Property" for a good treatment of both the ut…
OSS doesn't exist to spite IP, it exists because of IP rights protect creators from others stealing their work.
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IANAL but the route to resolve this seems to be to challenge the patent on the grounds it should never have been granted and have it overturned, which it looks very much like it would be an easy argument to make, if not easy to achieve in practice.
The problem is the cost of doing this. If it gets overturned, the defendant shouldn’t be the one to bear the cost. I’d be happy with either 1) the patent owner or 2) the patent office, who didn’t do its job properly.
Your comment seems to relate more to unfairness in [lack of] awards of costs in USA legal proceedings.
If you sue me for something I didn't do then it shouldn't cost me anything; that seems reasonable whether the domain is IPR or any other aspect of life.
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The first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality. Let's stop being so absolutist about these topics. The problem here isn't that patents exist, intellectual property protection is critical to investment and research. The issue here is two fold: 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imita…
IMHO patents are useful for things where you spend a ton of money researching something, but the implementation is rather straightforward. Think of the secret Coke or Pepsi recipes, I would imagine very hard and expensive to develop but easy to produce once you know what to do. Compare that to something like AWS and the equation is basically flipped. Figuring out what to do is not that difficult compared to actually…
What patents give is a seat at the negotiation table. It is not by itself a business model.
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Which you mitigate by keeping an eye on competitors and avoiding overly saturated market spaces. This in turn incentives a broader research focus and also incentives publishing paper in saturated areas to make sure there's documented prior art. There's also an incentive for multiple smaller inventions spread over time. This all seems like a positive and not a negative for society as a whole.
I think it can be a positive as long as the threshold for what counts as an invention is high enough. If the threshold is too low then patents become an instrument for harassment and rent seeking, slowing down industrial progress. We have to find the right balance. If a large number of patents sound like a sad joke to most professionals in a field, then something has gone very wrong.
That presume that we have the ability to finetune patent laws as needed and also presume that world changing inventions are necessarily novel enough to professionals in a given field. It has often happened commonly enough that inventions will occur to several innovators at once as the next step. It is questionable that it would be fair to penalize an inventor just because another was first to file a patent, potentially driving these inventors out of the industry.
It is also pushing against the reality that people are always building on the works of others. Patents are by themselves monopolies. That is how they work. Thus, people had resorted to arrangements to avoid constant patent lawsuits, which had happened in the past.
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Yes, that's an interesting problem — the more capital you have to invest, conceptually, the more you can invest in talent and the faster you can research compared to smaller competitors. Great for the rate of technological advancement, not so great for fairness.
Now image if there weren't patents. The larger entities would simply wait for their smaller competitors, copy their products and then use their capital to more efficiently/cheaply manufacture/market them. edit: While also maintaining massive private documentation stores that further give them a moat. Patents are public so you at least know what someone did 20 years ago even if you're a one person shop. Without them y…
Patents are by themselves not a business model. They merely buy a seat at the negotiation table. Leverage is another matter entirely.
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The first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality. Let's stop being so absolutist about these topics. The problem here isn't that patents exist, intellectual property protection is critical to investment and research. The issue here is two fold: 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imita…
> The first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality. The last 600 years is a rounding error in the history of humans. Imagine if the different methods of lighting a fire were patented. Those humans also burned witches and imprisoned people for criticizing the church. We would have a better world if our goal was progress for all over profit for a few.
It is not easy to divide human progress into before and after. Technological progress very much depends on what has gone before. It accelerated when it reached a certain point of development.
I agree with you that patents are not a key cause of progress, and they often impede it by preventing people other than the patent holder further improving anything patented.
I also think they probably work pretty well for mechanical inventions, but they have been applied to everything - drugs, software, electronic devices, even business methods in some places.
The concept of intellectual property is antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia. It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it. The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.
The concept of human rights is also antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia.
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The problem is the cost of doing this. If it gets overturned, the defendant shouldn’t be the one to bear the cost. I’d be happy with either 1) the patent owner or 2) the patent office, who didn’t do its job properly.
The UK and USA patent offices, I understand, have procedures to file evidence showing a patent application is not valid - eg because of the 'invention' already being known. Your comment seems to relate more to unfairness in [lack of] awards of costs in USA legal proceedings. If you sue me for something I didn't do then it shouldn't cost me anything; that seems reasonable whether the domain is IPR or any other aspect…