About patent trolls
Posted by WWJGD 8 years, 4 months ago to Legislation
I left this community nearly three years ago when khalling started defending patent trolls. I've come back only to post when something pertinent to that topic comes up on the intar-webs.
This is one of those occasions.
Patent trolls are are no John Galt or Hank Reardon: they have innovated NOTHING. They have produced NOTHING. They are Peter Keating: a man whose career consisted of stealing other people's ideas, and taking credit for them in the public eye.
This is the best article to come along in a long time regarding these filthy, slimy creatures. I hope you will read it.
This is one of those occasions.
Patent trolls are are no John Galt or Hank Reardon: they have innovated NOTHING. They have produced NOTHING. They are Peter Keating: a man whose career consisted of stealing other people's ideas, and taking credit for them in the public eye.
This is the best article to come along in a long time regarding these filthy, slimy creatures. I hope you will read it.
Are there abuses? There are abuses of everything in this world. Maybe it's not the patent aggregators that are the problem--maybe it's a judicial system that needs some thought.
Instead the patents are held by patent trolls who sue companies claiming that their independently created products infringe on the vague language of the patent. Faced with fighting a multi-million dollar battle and being at risk they pay the troll and go on with the product that they designed.
They do this even if they believe the patent is flawed because they cannot afford the risk.
They may spend days writing them and months arguing over the specifics. But patent examiners have only a fraction of existing art available to determine if the 'invention' is actually new. The vast bulk of our work is trade secret.
The majority of software related patents I've read would be of little help to anyone who actually wanted to develop code to perform the task.
And, just possibly, an EE with a master in Physics and a law degree does not make one a software specialist.
However one of the benefits you are touting for patents is that they get the data out into the world so that people can use it rather than keeping it as a trade secret. What I am saying is that the format of patents, the broad scope that they attempt to claim and the lack of implementation specificity all make them virtually useless as resources to practitioners. We would have to have patent attorneys check for possible conflicts on every algorithm.
While this might make sense if you developed a new algorithm every few months, it does not if you develop them several times a day.
When this debate reignited I went looking for random samples and looked at the patents granted on December 1. Alphabetically the fourth one down was US 9,203,428 B2 GENERATING DATA PATTERN INFORMATION.
I started reading. It has a drawing of how it works that could represent almost any algorithmic processing of data ever designed.
Moving into the claims I've spent an hour or so trying to figure out what the 'invention' actually is and am just beginning to get a glimmer. Of course if I wanted to do this for my application this would be useless as a paradigm. I'd have to invent my own mechanism for summarizing the data -- but they could probably sue me for infringement and I certainly wouldn't be able to tell if I had infringed their patent.
Phrases like claim 24:
"24. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 16, wherein, for at least one element of the first code, at least one element value in the set encodes a data value computed from one or more values occurring in a field or combination of fields of a first record and one or more values occurring in a field or combination of fields of a set of one or more records including at least a second record different from the first record."
Are pretty opaque. Lord help the designer trying to actually design from this -- and far worse someone who is browsing to see if this covers the algorithm he just wrote.
I'm not sure what "anti life life people" are so I can't really say much about that. I will say that as near as I can tell from other comments we almost completely agree on most issues. Our only point of disagreement is that I think that software inventors rights should be protected by copyright and not by patent. You think that patent's should be used. We both want to protect inventors rights. I am an inventor I want my rights protected -- including my right to invent new things.
I got involved in this site because Jan was having a great time. In general I do too -- except for this one issue. I was attracted to this thread because the poster indicated he had been driven from this site years ago by you specifically. I wanted him to be aware that many people on the site did not approve of patent trolls. In fact pretty much anyone on the site who is a software developer is against patenting software algorithms. We, who are the people you are trying to protect are adamant that it does more harm to innovation than good.
Another system to manipulate, another government sanctioned monopoly.
I'm not saying that intellectual property shouldn't be protected, but perhaps our current system goes overboard and protects for an excessive time frame.
I'm by no means an expert on this topic, but what would be the drawback of limiting protection to 5 year terms?
This may also help combat the issue WWJGD brings up.
My problem with patents is that while you have to actually copy someone else's work to violate their copyright you can innocently violate a patent by creating the work yourself only to later find out that the scope of a patent can be interpreted to cover what you did.
The Halling's will tell you that it's impossible for someone to independently invent an idea and that you must actually be stealing the idea from the one who patented it. If the patent office were truly only patenting ideas that had a spark of genius and not simply the work of a skilled practitioner that might be the case, but they are patenting rather obvious solutions to common problems.
I site abandonware as my example, I know of several games that are no longer supported, that may be marketable in an updated format.
I can see why your long term project would require protection, but does a project that you abandoned 8 years ago? Or would it make better sense that after a certain time of inactivity would a conversion to public domain be appropriate?
My questions were by no means intended to create any conflict, and those who disagree are certainly welcome to do so, but I will not accept name calling for simply questioning a system that appears to be broken. Down votes or not...
(Copy / Paste, directly from my blog)
____
Art is Shareware
(Now I know that every artist who has talent, (or thinks they have), is going to disagree with me.)
The world is full of people who create beauty, all looking for an audience, writers, poets, composers, painters… Everyone thinks they are special, their creations are sacred, and… For the most part they are, they’re a part of us, we pour our souls into them, we bleed, cry, and make love to them.
However, we must come to terms with the fact that once we became a digital world, all creative works became shareware, no longer will your song, poem, or painting have any intrinsic value of it’s own. This happened by virtue of the fact that once it became possible for someone to digitally copy our works at a particular quality level, the thing that gave it value, disappeared…
What is that thing we lost ? Scarcity…
The digital revolution not only opened up the creative process to many new participants, but it also allowed for near perfect duplication of existing works. It has become imperative that we artists rethink our hopes & dreams of riches based on our existing art. We need to focus more on performance based income, merchandising, & licensing royalties.
For example, I’m a musician… (I use the term loosely)
It is unrealistic for me to expect to make a living writing and recording music strictly for public consumption. I can try everything to keep my recording from being copied, but once I’ve sold 1 copy or 1 cd, it’s over. It’s on rapidshare, megaupload, or dumped in some torrent somewhere. My assets are now being publicly distributed…
I need a paradigm shift… My music is no longer the product.
The new mindset is that my music is the advertising for my live performance, my t-shirts, or coffee mugs, unless of course it is used in a money making venture such as a movie, video game, etc…
It is all free for personal use, but must be licensed for any for-profit use. The same goes for your art…
Reference the Creative Commons by NC-ND license.
With IP I can sell it to you and keep it which leads many to believe that IP should be free for everyone. As someone who makes a living for myself and a couple dozen families via IP, I have a strong interest in protecting IP.
I view the open source movement and wonder at the economics of it. It seems to imply that software should either be generated by students or perhaps by McDonald's workers as their evening entertainment. This is not the way to generate robust software.
But there is is a time component. We protect IP but only for a specified period of time, you cannot continue to sell it forever. This reflects the balance between the desire for the inventor to profit from his creation and for subsequent inventors to be able to create using what has come before.
I think that, in general, these times may be too long. Of course the time you need to be profitable varies based on what you have to invest to bring the product to market. If you invent a new drug it will take you years and millions of investment to get it approved (another issue!). If you write a new menu with a cool algorithm in your software application you can have it in the marketplace almost immediately. In the drug case having an exclusive use for years may be required. In the software environment having a few months advantage while your competitor develops their own version of the cool algorithm is probably sufficient incentive to develop the algorithm. Software is an industry where time is measured in months, not years.
But Dagny did attempt to get it working, and seemed prepared to market it even without the original inventors presence.
I admit, I don't understand the topic well. I believe I stated that in my post, I also stated that intellectual property should be protected.
I do question however, whether the system currently in place is effective, and whether the time frame of that protection makes sense.
Whether the system is effective seems to be questionable at best. An effective system wouldn't be so easily trollable.
Thank you for your response, perhaps a little less zeal next time.
Framing is nothing but a rehash of Platos 'forms' and Socrates or others before him 'universals.'
Even the outcome is the same..totalitarianism with the likes of Soros as the Big Daddy figure.
Nothing original which fits their ideal of everyone owns everything except Lakoffs reputedly a millionaire from speeches and consulting. Question is does he pay taxes or is it all banked with good buddy Soros offshore?
Somewhere I read a story depicting the outcome of government required patent infringement. Someone invents the perfect cure for all virus's and cancers. Markets them outside the US for the cost of a current flu shot. The USA ends up being the only country in the world that does not benefit so everyone hits the north and south borders....starting with the Congress and key government figures. The word gets out and they get ousted. Little bit of fiction but thanks to government and tort lawyers a fair look at the future. PS In the story the testing had been done but the inventor was smart enough not to apply for any sort of patent as he would have to give up how it works.
Instead he went elsewhere....and the cure cost the price of a flu shot plus transportation to and from.
I rather liked that little story.....
2. Is the patent system effective? NO because it does NOT protect the rights of inventors well. It allows trolls like GOOGLE to infinitely challenge a patent's validity over and over again. When property rights are not secure under the law, then you end up with disputes all the time. It lessens the value. so that is the deal. The value is already lessened. and you have helped and supported that objective. good day, sir!
Enough of the pissing contest.
I would love to hear what rational people have to say about the specific issues mentioned in the article.
Some patent claims clearly have merit, some have little merit, and some have no merit at all. The legitimacy of a given patent exists along a continuum, even though a court decision regarding a patent’s merits is likely to be binary – either a patent is legitimate and is being infringed, or it isn’t.
The extent to which a person or company is a “patent troll” likewise exists along a continuum. Some patent owners may be out to collect license fees on patents that they know to be weak, while others may think their patent claims are stronger and more legitimate than they really are. There are no clear dividing lines between trolls, semi-trolls and non-trolls. Thus the concept is not especially useful when attempting to create a political-legal system that upholds the rights of both sides in patent disputes.