There needs to be a "use it or lose it" doctrine/law around technological IP. I get all the arguments around creating a market for the patent rights, but it just leads to these bottom feeders creating no value and increasing costs for the industry and consumers.
Lots of patent hate in the first few comments.
If we take the position that an inventor should be able to try and get profit from their invention how can we protect that without patent system?
If we take the position that an inventor should be able to try and get profit from their invention
The premise is flawed, the conclusion can only be wrong.
Patents are an invention by the bourgeoisie to extend their control of the production of anything and extract as much money from it, but to make it acceptable they have the play the image of the "lone inventor in their garage". This inventor doesn't exist. No invention ever came out of nowhere, based on nothing more than hard work and selfless involvement. Nothing would be achievable without the help of society, past and present, without cooperation, and to close that off is to go against the very reason we as a species survive. We need shared creation of art, of technologies, of ideas, because this helps everyone. Look at Volvo giving away their rights on the 3-point security belt, or the penicillin being openly distributed; to favor individual wealth over collective well-being is borderline criminal.
Patents do not serve individuals, the individuals are not business people. Patents only serve companies which by definition steal the production of its workers for private profits.
Patents do not allow creation; patents prevent creation. Look at the history of steam machines and how many people were involved in all the subtle, incremental improvements. It's not just one guy suddenly finding out everything from scratch. One of them put a patent on his invention and froze the development of the steam machine for decades before allowing it to continue.
To continue your point, here is my proposal to replace intellectual property: Pay the inventor for their work, not the result of that work.
This has several advantages:
1. Inventors get paid to fail. Failure is a critical step in the process of invention.
2. Inventors get paid immediately. How can an inventor be expected to have time to invent something if their only means of income happens after the work of invention? Any person who is working should earn a living.
3. An inventor can quit. If you aren't getting anywhere on a project, then you can go do something else!
4. Another inventor can pick up where they left off. Fresh eyes bring new perspective.
You're proposing that the state pay a good wage to anyone who chooses to be a full time inventor, regardless of the results? Does that include paying for whatever facilities might be required?
Who said anything about the state?
All of these things are already paid for. Either that continues to happen, or invention just stops happening altogether. Obviously there is profit to be made from new ideas, so there should be plenty of incentive to invest in inventors.
Inventors could also collaborate and unionize. Many already do.
The premise is flawed, the conclusion can only be wrong.
That's the fallacy fallacy.
They went on to support their point. To ignore that is...the fallacy fallacy fallacy?
No, they went on to make specific claims essentially unrelated to that initial general claim.
No invention ever came out of nowhere, based on nothing more than hard work and selfless involvement
Straw man. No-one has suggested that the inventor invented something in a complete vacuum without support from society.
And yet that's exactly what the patent model claims: The invention is the fruit of a single mind who must get the entirety of money ever produced by the commercialization of the product. It is a glorification of individualism
The myth of patents is that some inventor working in their garage comes up with a genius invention, patents it, and then can leverage that patent-granted period of exclusivity into a thriving business. Hard work and smarts translating directly into rewards!
This is, of course, a myth.
It's not impossible for that to happen, theoretically, but the way the patent system actually works these days is that large companies patent anything they ever think of regardless of actual novelty, holding on to vast piles of patents as weapons of strategic deterrence. The megacorps exist in a state of patent detente -- unless someone is particularly blatant about a violation, it's better not to sue another corp because they'll just countersue with their own patent hoard. Then you'll both be stuck in years of litigation, working to get each other's patents invalidated, unsure of who is going to come out of it with a remaining claim.
When the tiny independent inventor appears, however, they don't have any of that patent-hoard protection. So it's easy for a big company in a vaguely related industry to squash them if they want to. Or wait until there's enough money being made that it's worth showing up and demanding fees. Sure, the company's patents may well be bogus and unrelated, but the tiny inventor can't afford to spend the next five years litigating that.
Board game rules fall under patents. It has an example of the garage process, patent, infringement, and win.
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2012/11/26/271633...
A company headed by a Colorado professor who invented a strategy board game has won a $1.6 million patent infringement verdict.
...
Innovention prevailed in a patent infringement against MGA, Wal-Mart Stores and Toys R Us. A federal court in New Orleans found that MGA’s Laser Battle game, sold through the two retailers, infringed on Innovention’s patent for Khet.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/16991/khet-laser-game
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7264242
---
Note the rarity of this happening that it makes the news compared to how often patents are thrown around in courts.
Board game rules fall under patents
Please supply evidence. All links in your comment relate to a patent to an invention where lasers are an essential part of the claims. I'm not convinced that rules alone would be patentable subject matter.
https://www.upcounsel.com/board-game-patents
https://patentpc.com/blog/example-of-how-a-board-game-is-pat...
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/493249/mythbusting-game-des...
https://www.theiplawblog.com/2019/04/articles/intellectual-p...
http://www.gamecabinet.com/info/PatentSearch.html
https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/93654/blue-and-gray-paten... (Blue and Gray) - this particular one is well known because Sid Sackson went trawling through patents and found it and wrote about it. From https://archive.org/details/gamutofgames0000sack/page/9/mode...
THE FILES OF PATENTS that have been granted are a fruitful hunting ground for forgotten games, although going through these files, as anyone who has ever been involved in a patent search well knows, is a time consuming job. Often the patented games are downright silly, such as a set of dominos made of rubber so that they can double as ink erasers (No. 729,489) or a sliding block puzzle with edible pieces so that a player who despairs of a solution can find consolation in gratifying his stomach (No. 1,274,294). Often the patents are repetitious: There are over a hundred variations of the well-known checkerboard and over a thousand different baseball games.
But often the patented games are a fascinating reflection of their time: races to the North Pole, war games to capture the Kaiser, automobile games, in the infancy of the automobile, and radio games for the crystal-set fanatic.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2026082A/en (Monopoly)
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en (Magic The Gathering)
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en (Magic The Gathering)
Thank you. I concede, this one is proof that an application that's essentially board game rules can be accepted. Whether rules not tied to a particular machine should be accepted is debatable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-or-transformation_test...?
It's not a myth!
My uncle is such a garage inventor, and has made a comfortable living for himself by licensing a number of different inventions.
One of the things he invented was the Zipit drain cleaner. It's a long piece of plastic with barbs on it. You shove it down your drain, pull it back out, and it pulls out a gigantic disgusting hairball that you had no idea was down there!
It's really quite remarkable, it works so much better than what people were using to unclog their drains before. It seems obvious in retrospect, so why weren't such products already on the market?
Unfortunately after seeing the success a competitor decided to copy it and, when my uncle tried to sue, the competitor got the patent invalided. Meanwhile my uncle lost much of his savings in legal fees.
https://usinventor.org/portfolio-items/34660/
In my (biased) opinion, this was a case of a legitimate, deserving patent. But all the junk patents and patent trolls, and the arms race you describe, have shifted expectations so much that the patent review board now tends to invalidate everything brought before them. So now the patent system doesn't even work for the people it's supposed to work for, since when a small inventor makes something actually worth patenting, a big company can just invalidate the patent.
With all that said, I do agree that software patents are pretty broken. If nothing else, the 20-year time limit is way too long, as technology moves much faster than that. We are constantly building the next layer on top of whatever was invented last decade, so last decade's inventions have either become foundational or have been discarded. Patenting an idea means it has to end up in the later category, as a proprietary idea cannot be made foundational; the industry must work around it. Meanwhile, the upfront investment cost in software ideas is much lower than other kinds of inventions, so there's no need for 20 years of royalties to incentivize it. I think software patents could make a lot more sense with something like a 3-year time limit. But I'm not really sure it's needed at all, as first-mover advantage seems sufficient to reward many software inventions.
(Disclosure/disclaimer: I work for Cloudflare, but obviously the above is personal opinions. I am proud of what Cloudflare has done with Project Jengo -- which I had no personal role in, I'm just an enigneer.)
patents were intended to protect the little-guy, the inventor (meaning a person), with an artificial monopoly so he could make money.
they weren't intended to be used by huge companies to help further their already impressive monopolistic empires. they collect them and use them as a kind of insurance or mutual-assued-destruction policy. microsoft won't sue ibm (and so on) because both have such a vast portfolio of garbage patents that they know they could tie each other up in litigation for 100 years, and they don't feel like paying for it.
then you get to the trolls. our government is actually enabling and encouraging a semi-legal form of extortion. the big companies can pay or pay to fight. it's a tax on everyone in the business though, even when winning. only the attorneys really win here.
it's obvious that the time and place for patents has come and gone.
- they don't do what they are intended, do much more harm than good.
- other comments are 100% correct, "software" (algorithms) and other similar areas like the one in TFA should never have existed in the first place.
- the pursuit of patent portfolios has created a surge of really bad patents. it's really been the entire life of the internet and modern computing. "one-click-patent", etc. and far worse. so why actually encourage more and lower quality patents?
- it does no good for an inventor to go get a patent, because even if the spiffy device is successful at market, the chinese will steal it with or without the little patent number engraving on the bottom. hell, they'll copy that too. if you find out who they are and sue them, they'll pop up as another company. if that's who you are competing against, why waste time and energy on anachronistic non-functioning armor.
- better option for an advantage from a unique software algorithm is to: be to market first and, if desired, keep it a trade secret.
- i think it'd be relatively easy to fix. first, allow the patent-holder to pick or easily challenge the venue (to kill east-texas) and second, allow awarding of attorney costs for the defendant, and force the plaintif to post a bond to prove they can pay them.
- but why bother? just abandon the whole system. it literally helps nobody.
patents were intended to protect the little-guy, the inventor (meaning a person), with an artificial monopoly so he could make money.
Did that actually broadly happened over the history of patents? It sounds intuitive enough that patent protect the little guys, it's another if it actually happened for any period of time.
I remember reading that the Wright brothers spending time and money suing other inventors and pioneers over their patents. Ultimately, they weren't very successful at building a business and fell behind. That capital spent on a lawyer could be spent on their business or improving their machines.
As I recall, the entire US aviation industry was locked up for decades in patent conflicts, and were as a result way behind the rest of the world (where US patents were not valid). The only thing which could fix this quagmire was a miracle, which actually did occur in the form of WW2, causing the US government to nationalize the entire thing, allowing people to actually innovate again, which the US air force desperately needed.
i think it did in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries. Colt for example. many old-west certainly had lots of individual or small companies patent gadgets. i think by the 20th century, it was already a big-business only thing. or was that just the economy in general? doesn't matter.
the Wrights are kind of a sad story, but one that HN readers should be familiar with. technical excellence and just flopped at the business side. they got far too wrapped up in secrecy, almost paranoia, and like you pointed out, it just delayed and eventually ruined them. strain from fighting basically killed Wilbur at 45 years old.
Granting intention over centuries-old institutions is a fools errand.
Whatever the people that created them intended, they were used at first to grant favors to well connected people (some times for good reasons, other times not), and then to enable industrial monopolies on planned economies.
That last one is the format that the modern version is based on.
kinda prickly? when i think we agree.
i brought up intention because it's a) historically true and b) to contrast with the complete opposite that they developed into. you get rid of something without acknowledging what it was intended for and looking at whether it's still helping or not. i don't think any of that is foolish.
If we take the position that an inventor
But most software patents aren't inventions; they're just brain farts with money behind them. They might not be trolls, but they went to the toilet, had some random idea I had 20000 times in my life already, but they patent it genuinely thinking it's anything original.
There are many none trolls, like the famous Amazon one-click buy one; everyone in web dev invented that in the 90s by themselves; they patented it. How is it worth protecting?
If you did invent and put the time and effort, how about selling your products; if someone else does it better, that's life. Especially in software; the pain is in the development and finishing, not the invention. The idea is absolutely worthless, outside this broken patent system.
had some random idea I had 20000 times in my life already,
Aren't patent systems already supposed to reject "inventions" that are common sense? Perhaps the problem is not the system itself but rather the humans who are approving these.
The parent system will accept pretty much anything if your lawyers ask them enough times. I've seen algorithms from the 80s patented today, with no real changes. The patent examiners have no idea what's novel or common sense, and just accept everything.
It is not reasonable to expect humans to assess the novelty or obviousness of software "inventions". Too many of them can be created too fast for any conceivable patent office to handle. The only solution is for Congress to write a law saying algorithms can't be patented. SCOTUS tentatively said it already, but nobody listens to them.
That’s definitely part of it: in the 90s you saw a ton of “on the internet” patents which looked a lot like the examiners not having had enough experience to say that something was either an obvious adaptation of an existing concept to the web or that the two systems had almost nothing in common other than using a computer (I remember a patent troll hitting a customer with a 1980s patent for cash registers connected to a minicomputer using a phone line, claiming it covered their web store). A younger generation of patent clerks hired with more experience seems to have helped there.
The other problem is funding: look at the patent examiner listings right now and think about how many people they’re going to be able to get with the federal pay scale having been prevented from keeping pace with the market for years:
https://www.usajobs.gov/Search/Results?l=&l=&a=CM56&hp=publi...
I have an invention that I think could change the world (a better toilet). I went to a patent attorney.
His advice: File a submarine patent, wait til someone else has the idea but is stupid enough to manufacture, sue him for low enough that he wants to settle.
Why not manufacture? He explained that the patent system is designed to help the incumbents. If you manufacture, the big players will make some minor change, file for a patent as an improvement to the original, and ignore you. If you go to court - who has more lawyers on call?
At some point, you may iterate on your original product. At that point they will sue you with the patent they have obtained for their improvement. It doesn't matter if you infringe, it doesn't matter anything. Guess who has more lawyers? If you are lucky, you can settle for just giving them your IP plus your legal fees.
Many many inventions and improvements have been created by small guys, but they don't go to market. Because if it will disrupt an existing big player they will be sued. For any reason under the sun. Because the legal system favors the side with the funds.
And that is even without considering the companies in China et all that will just copy your idea wholesale, at a fraction of the price, and are untouchable.
The patent system helps the incumbents, but does nothing for the little guy.
A better system would be to use the money currently spent on the patent system to give grants to anyone who comes up with a new idea. [And you can even perhaps have some way for the general public to weigh in.] The smaller the company, the more the grant available. With funds, you could actually try to develop a brand, and the competition across the board would help everyone.
I like this as a direction to push, even if there may be some details that are later discovered to require correction. Is any org pushing for this?
I'm not an expert on patetnts, but that seems backwards to me. If I get a patent for something, someone else can make a trivial change they call an improvement, admit their work is derivative, and get a patent for that without any cooperation or licensing from me?
And then if I iterate and get sued, even though I can show I hold the original patent it's not a slam dunk win for me in court?
Software patents are bogus. Under the law, algorithms cannot be patented but clever lawyers figured out ways of getting the USPTO to issue software patents despite the intent of the law.
Limiting the time of the protection would go a long way towards its acceptance. With the speed of technology today, 3-5 years seems reasonable. Anything beyond this is an overkill. This also discourages early filing (which now causes to mostly stifle related exploration) and encourages filing when the technology is ready for commercialization.
I also view the goal of the patent system as benefiting a society by encouraging the people to innovate. While somewhat similar to the current goals (rewarding the inventors) it is subtly different because its success and failure is determined not by the fairness to each inventor but by its statistical impact on innovation. If it tends to encourage innovation, even if in a few corner cases the time limits are too short for the inventor to reap the full reward, so be it. If it tends to stifle innovation by focusing on fully defending every inventor it needs to be repealed. My 2c.
Industrial secrets. WD40 was not patented, they did good anyway.
Wright brothers or James Watt were notoriously hard defending their patents, hindering progress and getting next to no significant profits. 3D printers only took off after key patents expired.
an inventor should be able to try and get profit from their invention
Well then, let the inventor try and get profit from their invention. An idea is never enough: it's the execution that matters, so let the inventor go forth and execute.
I'm not sure how much is current system effective today when biggest world producer's just can decide they are not going to respect that.
Software authors, like other authors, can protect their creations through copyright. That's as it should be.
Allowing patents on software is about as sensible as allowing JK Rowling to patent the concept of a storyline about a boy who was cursed at birth by an evil wizard, and must defeat said wizard in order to fulfil his destiny.
The easiest way to understand the issue is to consider cooking.
A chef can’t sit around and think up recipes and file thousands of patents. We explicitly agree in the law that it would be incredibly backwards negatively affect society if chefs got exclusivity on recipes and could sue home cooks for being creative. And chefs are still thinking up new recipes and using them in their restaurants because unique meals and flavors offer a competitive advantage. The reward is that you can keep your profits in our capitalist society. See Coca Cola and KFC. You have to use your knowledge in a novel invention to benefit.
In the same spirit, it’s not wanted to have people sit around and ideate about which instructions, and in what order, when fed to a processor machine, make it do useful things. Thousands of people program processors every day and we don’t want them getting sued because someone else figure out an efficient way to reverse a linked list. You have to run a software service that provides value and get people’s money that way.
Even if we concede that patents are useful in their intended purpose to protect actual manifest inventions, not just ideas (patent office is supposed to require a prototype invention to be registered with your patent), that’s certainly not what patent trolls are doing and that’s not how the majority of software patents work.
For the purpose of discussion, to get close conceptually to some sane type of sane SW patent scheme you’d have to 1. make a linked list reversing library, 2. register the complete prototype source code with the patent office, and 3. be actively maintaining and selling your linked list reversing library for your patent to even start to hold water. But even then you’re running up against problem that software is purely algorithms (just like recipes) and those aren’t even originally patent-able.
Apple can’t patent an “object oriented operating system” unless they’re offering that system in isolation and as a whole to consumers for use, which they’re not, but someone at the patent office got tricked into granting them a patent. Patents are supposed protect the inventors of complete products, not tiny building blocks of knowledge (algorithms). The “patent hate” is because despite the arguably good initial conditions, the patent system has been abused by greedy people who are not benefiting society in any way whatsoever. And you should be infuriated by that.
If we take the position that an inventor should be able to try and get profit from their invention how can we protect that without patent system?
What about: inventors should be able to try and get profit from their invention like anyone else.
Is that how patents are used today?
Software patents should not exist.
Ok I'll bite, why stop at software?
The point of the parent system is to prevent knowledge from being lost to humanity. It encourages disclosure on how unique and novel things work in return for a limited monopoly. If inventions were not patented then we can lose the ability to make them, which isn’t as insane sounding as you might expect.
Preserving this knowledge for the future of humanity is critical.
This is absolutely not the point of the patent system, otherwise there would be no provision for a monopoly over the commercial manufacturing of the invention.
Don't be deluded, the patent system serves as a weapon for bigger companies to block competition. That is their only goal.
> ...otherwise there would be no provision for a monopoly over the commercial manufacturing of the invention.
You should always be able to make your opponent's arguments at least as well as they do, as that is the first step to overcoming them.
The argument from patent proponents is that without the legal monopoly, they would rely on trade secret law instead, so they would do their best to ensure no one else understood what they do. They still do, within the confines of what disclosure is legally required to get a patent issued (I once had an engineer tell me that if he had not invented the thing being patented, he would have no idea what the patent application the lawyers wrote for it was describing), but at least there is a legal requirement.
Of course, there are important contexts where that argument is irrelevant, such as standards development. Trade secret law is no use there, because the value is in the network effects of the standard, not the invention. Yet we still have patent-riddled standards.
The argument from patent proponents is that without the legal monopoly, they would rely on trade secret law instead, so they would do their best to ensure no one else understood what they do.
Look at China, and the argument of "maybe it will be bad" turns out to be wrong. I'm not saying the system is perfect, far from it, but the idea that patents are a life-saving measure is utterly false. Companies live and die in both systems, but at least in China they get to share their improvements.
The premise is that a patent is necessary to have funds for continuing innovation, but that's just not understanding what capitalism is and how pervasive it is in our society. The reason individuals need money is precisely because of capitalism redistributing money to those who have the most already, not to the ones who need it the most, not to the ones making the most progress, or not to everyone in a fair manner allowing all of us to live without worrying about that aspect (yes, there is more than enough resources creation for all of us). The patent system only furthers this uneven distribution. Innovators do not calculate the amount they might be getting from their invention before setting about and coming up with something new; that is a lie that needs to disappear.
Patents are not making the society better.
Science journals exist.
OTOH, I’ve never, not once, ever, heard of someone reading through the patent database to learn how to do a thing. I’m sure someone has done such a thing, but that’s not the norm. The patent database is where you record that you were the first to claim to have done a thing. It’s not where you meaningfully explain how.
If you ever do a patent survey, you'll quickly discover that patents aren't written to preserve knowledge or disclose inventions. They're written to disclose as little as possible (or disclose everything except the thing that matters) as fodder for a legal defense.
That may have been the point hundreds of years ago. Today, it no longer serves that purpose, and is doing more harm than good.
Software is just fancy math being executed. Math can't or at least shouldn't be patentable e.g. imagine the absurdity that would ensue if you could patent a number not that that hasn't happened (HD DVD encryption). I'm aware every piece of IP or Copyright can be represented with a really big number (a mp4 file is really just a big number) but it's not the number that's the patentable aspect.
Hardware is just fancy physics. Medicine is just fancy chemistry.
Math, however, is uniquely identified in the law as non-patentable.
Patents fundamentally operate to allow the owner of protection to extract value from research and development investment. If you cannot protect your research and development, then competitor may extend upon your invention without the necessary capital or time investment — effectively making any kind of innovation risky and unattractive to business. There is no model where abolishing patents still grants protection for R&D.
The complaint is that software patents have been awarded and interpreted far too broadly, and coupled with the relatively low cost of R&D for software, have begun to stymied innovation in the same way patents intended to prevent.
Inventor profits by being ahead of competition. VisiCalc (first spreadsheet) was a killer app.
But they didn't innovate and were taken over by Lotus 1-2-3 four years later.
Lotus was great, graphs and all.
Same thing happened to the Lotus, Excel was just better. Lotus didn't innovate (e.g. IBM had first ever pivot tables and they made separate spreadsheet program for it instead off improving Lotus).
Inventors only profit if and when they release — Patents allow you to cover the cost of research and development even if a profitable product does not materialise or is not profitable at the time of release. R&D is essential for economic growth, so the promise/higher-chance of a successful return at some point in the future, I think, this is a reasonable trade-off.
Software patents do not provide the benefits other patents do. Name a piece of software that would likely not have been written if it wasn't able to be patent protected. Now compare that with other industries like pharmaceuticals, textiles, chemical processes, etc. Software is different because it's more straight forward engineering than explorative science. If an implementation is obvious to anyone with the prerequisite knowledge, it's not patentable and there's really not much, if anything, in the software realm that meets that criteria.
Software R&D has mostly not been patented for many years because algorithm patents are effectively unenforceable outside of narrow contexts, so it is largely futile. Computer science R&D is almost universally treated as trade secrets now, which have proven to be effective and defensible in many more cases.
The consequence of this is that the state-of-the-art in many areas of software are not in the public literature and there is no trivial way to learn it. Ubiquitous deployment in the cloud greatly limits the ability to reverse-engineer the underlying architectures, data structures, and algorithms. This is notionally the situation patents sought to avoid, but the practical unenforceability of algorithm patents has made it the default outcome regardless of whether there are patents on software.
Name a piece of software that would likely not have been written if it wasn't able to be patent protected.
That’s a fantastic argument against software patents. I can’t believe I’ve never thought about it in that way.
Having a time limited monopoly on new drugs seems required considering the costs involved in getting drugs through the regulatory framework.
Considering how much more is spent on marketing and executive salaries, maybe we don't?
Or the patent protection is contingent on limits to marketing and admin overhead
If someone invents something truly novel I think they deserve the first right to make money off it. The extra bonus of having them file a patent is that when it expires it becomes free public knowledge for everyone. The problem for software is that the duration of the patent is way too long for the pace of innovation in the world of software, to the point that a reasonable duration patent probably wouldn't even be worth filing for after the time it takes to process. In other fields it's not the existence of patents but the games and loopholes e.g. pharma companies coming up with a slight reformulation they can patent again and again. It's not novel at that point and should not be granted a patent.
What would be an example? Like you invent a new compression algorithm and nobody else should be able to use it for a year or two?
I agree with you, patents in general shouldn't exist
... and copyrights should last no longer than software patents.
Cloudflare is like Google early days. They could spend resources on things for the good of the all. In this case they’re spending millions when they could have settled for much cheaper. Thanks Cloudflare.
Hope they wouldn't end like google. But you are right. Thank you Cloudflare.
You either die a hero or you live long enough to become a villain.
i thought we already saw them enter their villain phase protecting hate groups that took years to turn around before banning kiwi farms and as of 2022, 440 of the most prominent misinformation websites in the world still with CloudFlare protection, it took a mass shooting to get them to stop protecting 8Chan, people shouldn't die before they take action.
Most of tech is firmly in their villain phase and has been for years, its dollars over everything. Even ycombinator backed Stripe supports hate groups as a payment processor see: https://www.splcenter.org/hate-and-tech
You got a point. Yesterday this post which was trending on hacker news mentioned that cloudflare was defending not revealing identity of people at court that were stalking and literally destroying someones live with swatting. I wouldn't say they are soulles corporation like google. Their attitude is somehow problematic yet admirable.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/swat...
CloudFlare will be much scarier than Google as a villain
May their future noble side quests be successful.
Newegg was famous for doing this as well. Glad to see Cloudflare keeping the "Don't be evil" concept alive.
Newegg's fall was so sad to see. From an top-notch seller of tech with an admirable legal team that made headlines, to yet another no-name online flea market.
So true. Thank goodness for Microcenter and B&H. Especially the latter still has a hand-curated product selection.
It probably wouldn't have been cheaper. The settlement would likely look like a fixed fee for previous use + yearly fee for X years before renegotiation, renegotiated y times before the patent expired.
It's likely that over the lifetime of the patent, the total cost would have been more than the cost to fight it, and as the a sibling pointed out, settling begets more suits + settlements. It adds up fast.
This isn't Cloudflare being "good," it's in their best interest to fight frivolous suits.
Why did none of the other companies listed in the article fight it, if this is the case?
Maybe Sable saw Cloudflare as a juicier target, since the other companies listed are all hardware manufactures and don't operate a large consumer business like Cloudflare (leading to very, very different usage numbers). Or maybe Cloudflare thought that they had a better chance at trial against hardware patents, since they don't make router hardware themselves.
I think this is just basic game theory.
If they settled the trolls would just keep coming.
If they fight the patent extortion then trolls are going to think twice before suing them, for fear of losing .
Sure it might well be in Cloudflare's self-interest, but it's still good they're doing it this way. If it was very obviously the best thing to do, other companies would do likewise. The fact that Cloudflare's approach appears novel suggests it's not just simple self-interest.
At the end of the day, this is a deep legislation issue, patents should not exist at all.
They are supposed to promote innovation, in practice, it's more about protecting guys who sitting and waiting for passive cash.
Once we give exclusive rights to all AI stuff to Nvidia, is the world going to be a better place ?
What would be with ChatGPT if Google actually had enforced (or enforces) patents on Transformers.
Is the world better since we have to pay a license to use the word "Smiley" and not "Emoji" ? (a >500M USD per year business btw).
I'm not so convinced of your argument yet. You point out some cases in which granting a patent will lead to reduced innovation, which I agree is bad. But how about innovations which might never have happened without the patent system in place?
I agree with you that patents a probably a net negative for innovation, but we need to come up with a stronger argument than monopolies are bad.
Can you provide some recent examples of where patents likely played a positive role in innovation?
Fifty years ago they paid for Xerox's PARC where WYSIWYG and GUI interfaces were first developed targeting a mass audience.
Probably every pharmaceutical patent.
In software? Um... <crickets>. (But you asked "where patents" and not "where software patents", so...)
Is the world better since we have to pay a license to use the word "Smiley" and not "Emoji" ? (a >500M USD per year business btw).
If this is true it would fall under copyright or trademark protections, not patents.
You are absolutely right, just a side & +/- related topic that made me upset and wanted to rant about :)
I second the abolishment of patents.
The reasons people are for/against patents are political. A rightist view would be that patents allow first-to-the-finish-line inventors to reap financial awards that lead to success and freedom. A leftist view would be that the opportunity cost of patents is an increased cost (analogous to a tax) on everyone else in the form of licensing fees and barred entry to markets as improvements in science and technology make patents more obvious than innovative.
If we don't reform the system by at least reducing patent durations to something reasonable like 3-5 years, then that will create an incentive to operate outside the market. People will just use open source and 3D printing to build their own stuff, rather than purchasing it from someone else. In other words, more patents = bigger black market and smaller market/profits for those operating legally.
It's not a good look anymore to favor policies which encourage corruption. Other examples of unintended consequences include the War on Drugs, the Citizens United decision, NAFTA, etc etc etc. We know better now and we can do better, rather than letting special interests dictate the manner in which we do business.
There is a general problem with excessive rent seeking in our entire economy and society. But I don't think having zero patent protection is the answer. Like most problems with society, there is no easy answer, just a continual fight against corruption, rent-seeking, nepotism, collusion, price fixing and all the other crappy human behaviors.
What would be required to get a court to order Sable pay the legal fees Cloudflare incurred?
Quite a bit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fe...
Versus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_fee... in much of the rest of the world.
Is this still true, considering how the Supreme Court has decided a similar case against patent trolls[1][2] in the past?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_Fitness,_LLC_v._ICON_He....
[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2014/04/29/patent-...
As the second link notes, that helps only in "the most egregious cases of misconduct".
In the opinion it says that it merely has to be "exceptional", I would think Cloudflare has a good chance at winning their case.
They ought to do so, if only to discourage patent trolls.
Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20140429231129/http://www.suprem...
Relevant part on page 10.
Courts only order that in cases the lawsuit is in bad faith by one party.
this is an excellent summary of how the system works.
Every month HN has a thread like this, and every month the usual suspects rant about how patents are fucked up, and there needs to be this, that, or the other. And nothing changes.
Ask your local candidates for Congress if they'll support removing patentability for software. That's how you solve this problem.
They won't.
The reason patents (and copyright) have gotten so bad is a mixture of corrupt lobbying activity and a quagmire of questionable international treaties.
Politics happen. Things that were previously unthinkable suddenly become thinkable.
It only seems "suddenly" because all the behind-the-scenes activity was going on when no one was looking.
Nice to see Cloudflare fighting the good fight, but patent trolls aren’t the only issue with software patents. A major issue that people talk about way less is well funded/large companies getting bullshit patents, and using them to sue their small startup competitors into the ground. It doesn’t even matter if they win - when a company with billions in the bank sues a company with millions in the bank, the small company is basically just screwed no matter what because they can’t afford the legal fees. It’s a cheap way for big, bloated, slow moving companies to eliminate fast moving, lean, disruptive competition.
A major source of this problem IMO is the granting of bullshit patents in the first place - patents that should never have been granted because they’re obvious and/or there was prior art. Patent clerks aren’t actually subject matter experts in the field, and there’s little incentive for them to deny bullshit patents. They maybe deny them once or twice, but dedicated companies just keep applying and eventually get them granted, because the applicant has a major incentive to get the bullshit patent, and the patent office has only minor incentives to deny bullshit patents. I think these incentives need to be fixed - for example, if company A sues company B over patent C, company B spends $10 million on their defence, and wins with the patent being deemed invalid, I think company B should get MAJOR financial rewards from BOTH company A and the patent office, on the order of 10x+ what they spent on their defence. The right incentives could keep the good parts of the patent system while eliminating the (currently pretty massive, out of control) downsides.
I think this is the main problem, not companies that do not implement the patents suing the ones that do.
There are so many bogus patents being granted. Prior art search done by patent clerks, from what I have read, can just be searching existing patents. So if something was invented long ago but never patented, then that might not even be caught in a search. And like you said, they may not be able to realise that the invention is actually obvious, because they are not subject matter experts.
There is another problem where the patent is valid but the defendant's product does not violate it. It is too expensive to litigate it court. Depending on the jurisdiction, the plaintiff may not even have to tell you exactly which patents they are alleging that you have violated, until they sue you.
Worth mentioning: Newegg is another company that doesn't blink and goes after patent trolls with a vengeance, at least they used to: https://www.newegg.com/insider/newegg-vs-patent-trolls-when-...
I don't believe they still do this & not sure their culture is the same. They were purchased by a company based out of China years ago. Lee Cheng I believe is responsible for a lot of that effort. He no longer works there.
The patents relied on by Sable were filed around the turn of the century, and they addressed the hardware-based router technology of the day.
At first I was wondering what routers existed back in 1900, then realized it was not that turn of the century. I think this is the first time I have see 'turn of the century' refer to 1999->2000.
Chicago Manual of Style has some good usage suggestions on this...
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/U...
A: Instead, write “at the beginning of the twentieth century,” or “at the end of the nineteenth century,” or “in the years around 1900.” “The turn of the century” is useful only when the context makes it obvious which turn you’re talking about.
Of course when talking routers I guess the context was clear.
FWIW I also defaulted to 1900 and think mentioning the millennium is far less ambiguous than the century.
No mention of Cloudflare’s own large portfolio of software patents.
Wonder when they’ll start enforcing their patent on CNAME flattening, for example:
https://patents.justia.com/patent/11159479
Edit; clarity
Why should there be a mention about their patents?
Doesn’t this just mean trolls will sue everyone except CF going forward?
Seems like a valiant stance but still short of what is needed something industry wide - something to invalidates this “business model” entirely
If you don’t enforce a patent as soon as you become aware of it, it becomes much harder to sue (similar to trademark I believe). I could be wrong, IANAL
"stop the trolls through prior art"
Use Alice instead.
Using prior art is a waste of time.
Reminds me of the patent troll from Silicon Valley
There's obviously inefficiency in the system - a big cost every time a decision involves lawyers and even more if there are juries.
So we should understand that we don't have a way to be perfect and think about where to balance the trade-offs.
We want to give people a chance to make money before they are wiped out by those that copy them but I don't think we have an interest in someone "cornering the market" indefinitely.
We could reduce their lifetime - that would cut a lot of decisions.
We could limit the amount of money a patent is allowed to return based on an estimate of what it cost to create plus a reasonable profit rather like a kickstarter campaign.
We could cancel software patents altogether.
It should go beyond invalidating patents. Patent abusers should be persecuted for racketeering. Because it's exactly what they are doing.
One of our outstanding engineers described what it’s like to create a new product
This is a good reminder to enthusiastically help out your legal team if your company is the target of trolls!
I had the opportunity to do it once. Our legal team was helpful, patient, and curious. The work was pretty annoying because you have to try to help them work out whether some bizarrely worded unrelated thing could possibly be construed to be part of our product.
In our case the troll went away as soon as we made it clear we were serious about taking it to court.
I cannot tell you how thankful I am for Cloudflare taking it as far as they can. The cost and risk must be considerable to them.
This is great. It’s very expensive to take these cases to trial. Cloudflare could have just settled and spent less.
Wasn't one of the key purposes of Patents to catalog inventions (not just to encourage their creation)?
Today we have Wikipedia and other free open databases for that.
Imagine I'm a small software company, and I can't fight a patent troll, and I don't want to pay them or go bankrupt in legal costs.
Can't I short-circuit that by just selling services elsewhere?
Aren't there companies that just refuse to abide or negotiate with patent trolls, out of spite, what happens then? Can a patent troll shut down a company? At some point, wouldn't that make the news? What are the risks? What allows patent trolls to have legitimacy?
I can understand that it's mostly a scam operation to extort money to those who want them to go away, but that can't always work.
I've heard it's mostly a few courts in Texas or elsewhere. Isn't it possible to just not interact with the states where those patent trolls are?
Somehow Sable reminds me of a wart. A big ugly wart with a few hairs and just as useless. It's not much of a problem but you would be better without it.
There needs to be a NATO of tech companies so that if a patent troll comes after one, none of them will settle with the troll and they will all collectively pay for defense. Otherwise the trolls will first pick off the smaller ones to fund its attack on the bigger ones.
Awesome job! Thank you cloudflare.
maybe this is the path to kill the trolls. tech companies could fund an insurance-like mutual scheme to defend instead of pay off the trolls and then drive them out of business. it can also research and invalidate their ridiculous patents.
This was a great write-up and getting a win like that in West Texas is no mean feat. Thanks for fighting for it Cloudflare.
@CloduFlare Sell Movie rights to this story to cover legal fees please! That would be so funny.
Patents are property and we need taxes/fee on it. $500/year per patent, will ensure use it (if you think it is valuable) or lose it. This is no different from domain names, most people pay $10 - $100/year just to keep a domain name. Some domain names are used, most aren't. These taxes can fund free education or healthcare or defense.
Not really.
Some patents are fantastically valuable to patent trolls. Some are not. A $500/year fee isn't going to deter a "company" of lawyers who are making millions soaking businesses with patents that should never have been granted.
If you want a scheme that actually does what you want, you'd need something like:
The owner of the patent chooses the fee that they pay per year. And anyone can pay that fee * the remaining years on the patent * some multiplier (probably in the 2-10 range) to prematurely end the patent.
So, if someone's got a patent on a hamster powered submarine, they can keep it for $1 per year (or whatever the minimum should be). And that's fine... because it isn't harming any one since no one wants to build such a thing.
But a patent that a troll is using to milk the industry with will need to have a pretty stiff fee or people won't play ball, they'll just buy out the troll.
Invalidity arguments and IPRs suddenly aren't things?
I'm sure that you're aware that when you go to court, the result is never certain. Bad ruling happen all the time.
The vast majority of these decisions are against the patent owners, which I'm sure you are aware of. Also, I wasn't the one who characterized something as a patent that "should never have been granted."
The troll can price their licenses slightly less than the presumed legal costs. Then most victims won't fight.
Presumption of validity is what makes patent trolling more lucrative than other forms of predatory litigation. You're guilty until proven innocent, because the law assumes that the patent office is generally doing the right thing.
It's just an evidentiary presumption that is trivially rebutted with any evidence.
So basically ending patents? If you invent something fantastic, say a way for a self driving car to perfectly sense its surroundings, Ford could just come in and pay whatever amount to invalidate your patent and prevent you from bringing your invention to market?
Not having a patent doesn’t _prevent_ you from bringing your invention to market, it just accelerates _someone_ bringing it to market, and that’s a net good for society if the invention is useful, no?
Patents are vital to bringing things to market. It lessens the risk associated with investors getting returns, which allows funding for development.
I get that people don't like patents because they sometimes get abused, but on the whole I think we wouldn't have a lot of the things we take for granted if they didn't exist.
I don't think that the patent should be allowed to be ended early; the fee is paid to keep the patent protection in place.
Maybe when you file the patent, you have to submit an anticipated value statement and you are taxed some % / year on that anticipated value. If somebody violates the patent, you can sue them for up to the amount you anticipated, but not more.
In the future you can amend the value claim, but you can only adjust it down.
That's awful for protecting innovation. You don't know the market value of each individual invention with that level of granularity.
Companies and researchers should be free to patent to protect themselves, but patent trolls with no clear technological development (no lab, no product, no licensing+developing) should be stopped.
It seems easy to me to draw a bounding box around these behaviors with a simple test. Perhaps like a Howey test [1], but for patent trolling.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_v._W._J._Howey_Co.
Those 'taxes' already exist (at least in the US system). They are called "maintenance fees".
See https://www.fr.com/insights/ip-law-essentials/everything-abo...
Failing to pay the fee causes the patent to expire, and be unable to be used to sue someone. So these troll firms must also be paying these fees to be able to sue based on the patent.
This is interesting. So Oracle holding around 52000 patents pays around 23.000.000 USD a year in maintenance?
Yes, having patents is expensive. Large corporations often file patents for defensive reasons, and for this they employ multiple patent lawyers full time.
Domain names pay per year because there's an ongoing service attached. There's no such thing for patent (besides fee to file)
Why punish patent holders because of patent trolls or garbage patents ?
Make it unprofitable to be a troll, and they will go away. Trolls need to be tagged , like pirates. There should be rules to make hunting for trolls profitable. For that, you need a "bounty". Here's my take:
In any patent dispute[1], the loser will pay as punitive damages (this is the "bounty") to the winner, the lower of (i) the winner's legal costs, OR the loser's legal costs x 2, plus (ii) loser must disclose the ultimate name of the beneficial owners (or material, if public) of the loser. EINs not allowed. The "trolls" are thus, branded.
The next lawsuit ensues. During research, it is found that one of the parties is a known troll that has lost 1 prior case. Now the damages, should troll lose, are 2X of any settlement OR punitive amount.
Should troll lose again, an extra 2x (total, 4x) gets applied on the punitive damage[1] to the troll and so on. If troll wins, his x is halved.
This does 3 things:
1- Incentivize public to seek out weak patents, or trolls, for a payout.
2- Makes Trolling much harder at scale.
3- Ensures huge companies face risks if they throw their weight around. Bigco can afford $$ penalties vs small fish, but cannot afford to be tagged a 2-4x troll. It makes them an attractive target for bigger fish looking for the 2X or 4X reward challenge of Bigco patent portfolio.
Erm, what service? A record in a database? How's that different from a patent office? I guess there's fancy registrar website...to do what...help me pay my recurring bill?
So TrollCo will just pay a different homeless person $100 to be the owner on paper for each of their patents?
Why only those things?
Appeal to emotion. Taxes go towards all publicly funded projects, but it’s easier to convince people that a new tax is a good thing when it goes towards these things that benefit everyone.
is it is always a bad idea to ear mark a tax for a specific purpose. Especially if you desire to use the tax as a punitive measure to reduce that which you deem bad for society, if it works now you need to come up with the money for the thing you funded elsewhere because all government programs are permanent
Look at smoking, all kind of things were funded on the back of smoking taxes, and when those punitive taxes worked to reduce smoking the revenue dried up but the budgets for for those programs did not so now the money had to come from somewhere else....
Using the tax code to punish or reward behavior is always bad
Isn't that pretty much the entire purpose of the tax code and why it's so complicated?
It's one of the tools the government has to shape behavior.
Actual tax revenue doesn't really matter since a permanent deficit and ever-growing debt is apparently fine.
Never used a fixed number for anything. Just tie it to a percentage of yearly revenue of the entity. This way you can ensure:
- small companies and private people can afford patents
- big corps do not get an advantage, in fact the bigger they get, the more expensive holding a patent becomes, ensuring they have to use those patents and not patent everything just because
- number of patents any single entity can hold is limited, unless they want to go in debt for holding patents
- there could still be a minimum yearly amount as proposed by you
Tie it to the expected value of the IP? If you think your idea is worth $1 billion, pay $10 million (1%) every year.
patent maintenance fees are already higher than that.
amusing opinions that remind me not to trust them
Another valuation/taxation scheme I've read about is: you can value your patent however you want, and it's taxed based on that value.
The kicker is: the values are public, and if anybody wants to buy it for something higher than the assigned value (or maybe some fixed percentage above the assigned value), you HAVE to sell. Of course, the buyer is then taxed at the higher value.
No, the fee should be exponential, to keep people from keeping technology out of the public domain longer than necessary.
For example, maybe the fee is $10000 for the first year. This doesn't come close to recouping the cost of a single enforcement action, but it makes sure that someone has some skin in the game. Then every year the cost gets 10x more expensive. Of course you are free to choose your own base and multiplier.
For someone to keep a patent for 5 years, the total cost would be $10k + $100k + $1M + $10M + $100M = $111110000. Maybe it's worth it for a patent like the light bulb. Probably not worth it for a drinking bird toy. But either way, the value decision is up to the patent holder, and the cost of the patent incentivizes rapid monetization rather than squatting.
We need a fair-valuation tax; patents taxed yearly on their declared value and mandatory sale of the patent to anyone willing to pay the declared value. Some kind of deferred tax schedule (maybe 5-10 years?) for R&D.
This is an interesting point of view. Reminds me in some sense of some of the ethical justifications behind land value tax or property taxes.
The intention of legally enforced ownership is primarily to encourage development - and not to incentivize speculation as we seem to be doing in many situations. It seems reasonable to tax such speculation.
I'm inclined to agree with you.
There are research companies who only do research and get money by licencing their patents. I mean, I really would like to live in a world without patents, but currently those companies do provide value, but cannot exist, without guarding their IP. Yet they would cease to exist, with your proposal.
Issuing a license is a form of "using it" in a use it or lose it scenario.
Those are not patent troll companies. Patent troll companies file patents and then sit on the patent until they can sue another party for infringement, and never make an attempt to commercialize their patent.
Another example of not using it in the use it or lose it scenario is Pfizer's acquisition of Esperion Therapeutics in 2004. Esperion was developing a competitor to Lipitor, so Pfizer purchased Esperion for $1.3BB and shelved the technology to prevent competition with their best selling drug. Had Pfizer "lost" their patent for failing to commercial Esperion's drug, that drug could have entered the market as a generic to compete with Lipitor and severely reduced the cost of statin drugs for consumers.
That is hard I think, as there are patents that are not licenced because no one wants to - but I think every holder of a patent must licence it to any party interested. So just "sitting on patents" is not really possible to my knowledge. (but I am really not an expert here)
If I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, then I'm not sure where you got that idea.
Patent holders are not required to license their patents last time I checked. You are simply required to acquire a license prior to using patented technology.
If they don't want to license it, you're SOL.
(edit: if you were speculating on what should be, and not what is, then my bad... :)
"Patent holders are not required to license their patents last time I checked."
That is apparently right and I learned it wrong (but it does seems wrong to me).
edit: after reading the siblings answer, I apparently wrongly overgeneralized the way it works with patents in standards
Only for patents used in standards - where the standard enforces FRAND/RAND/other licensing schemes to insure that 'standards-required' patents are available to all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...
This is Qualcomm's big business (and others), getting their patents into standards like 5G and then charging people a fair amount to use it - and they have to license it to everyone, even their arch nemesis. Or you just buy their chips.
For a patent of something you invented, but did not submit to become part of a standards-body, you absolutely can choose not to license it for any amount of money.
Many of the patents asserted by trolls were not actually filed by the trolls. Most often the troll company simply purchased the patent from the original owner (or, often, a bankruptcy court) and then they proceed to go about suing others using their newly acquired weapon.
Worse yet, the troll company was often created for the purpose of owning that specific group of patents. That limits the damage from a lawsuit gone wrong to just that group of patents, and not the many other patents owned by the hundreds of other similar troll companies that the same lawyer runs.
We really need a patent troll version of anti-SLAPP laws. To go past the shell company, and hit the people who run them.
What's your bargaining position when you lose a patent that might be useful for only a few companies if you don't issue a license?
If it's only useful to a few companies then it must be niche IP and therefore valuable.
Patent trolls will point to their prior victims as current licensees, proving successful commercialization.
Great point. And then if one of those companies sold a patent that wasn't immediately licensable to an IP firm for an immediate infusion of funds should the IP firm be considered a patent troll?
Maybe the patent system could work, without the possibility of selling patents at all? Have not thought it out, but I know musicians also seldom profit of selling their IP to the major labels. But they are pushed into it.
Based on the text of the IP clause of the US Constitution I have wondered whether selling or licensing of IP (or even assigning it to a corporation) is technically allowable.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
"Exclusive Right" means exclusive right. And I don't think the definition has changed much since the US Constitution was written.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/exclusive
I think it must at least be licensable, or authors couldn't sell copies of their works. But whether the IP rights can be sold is another question.
It means the right is exclusively granted with them. I.e. no one besides the author gets to control the exclusive rights of a patent. By your logic, they can't even license it because "it's an exclusive right".
They control the license according to the terms of a license. But once a patent is sold the author of it no longer has any right to it.
Authors and inventors are mentioned with the same language in the clause. Since it has always been true that authors can basically only profit from their writings by selling copies or originals of their works (without selling the right to the copyrighted material itself) then some form of licensing is necessarily included in the clause for both copyright and patents.
There may have been journalists at the time who wrote works for newspapers owned by others. If so, this would be a reason to include the right of selling all of the rights to one's writings or inventions in the clause. I genuinely don't know if this was the case though.
Authors can license all of their rights away. They can sell their copyrights - I don't see your point...
Could you give examples of such companies (I am really curious)?
One example is ARM, which licenses the processor designs they create, and do not build or sell the chips themselves.
I am aware of a few orgs that license interesting software R&D often with engineering support, sometimes with an equity component. Another variant is the R&D holding company that creates separate companies to commercially exploit the R&D in different parts of the public or private sector. Most such R&D orgs are very low-profile, they usually don't have an internet presence. Many use few or no patents these days, those economics don't make sense unless the business is largely owned by lawyers, which creates a different kind of company (much closer to patent trolls).
It is a bespoke kind of business, tailored to the specific technology and investment network of the people involved.
Why wouldn't they be able to exist?
If you invent something, there's a work product. There is documentation, notes, blueprints, CAD files, software, etc. You can sell this and license it however you want. You can sue people that use it without a license. More importantly, you as the original author can use the IP as you see fit.
All of that is what I would put under the category of "use it." If you stop licensing it, then you "lose it."
Personally I don't think you should be able to sell the invention as an idea to another company that only relicenses it, but I get that there needs to be a market for IP itself.
These would only be protected by copyright. So if you invent something but do not have the resources to create the implementation yourself (and therefore cannot patent the invention under the scheme proposed by GGP), but you licence the work products (documentation, software) to one or more companies who can then implement it, a larger, well-resourced competitor can just reimplement it without paying you as long as they did not need to use any of your documentation or software. So that reduces the value of your work products.
But if the converse happened, e.g., your customer reimplements something invented by the large competitor, they can get sued, because the large company, being able to implement their invention, can therefore file a patent.
It would be fairer to treat the large company the same way, and only let them copyright the work products rather than patent the invention, putting them on the same level as a smaller inventor.
law of unintended consequences
the moment you put an expiration date on patents due to lack of use, watch moneyed competitors sitting around waiting for your patent to expire instead of using yours to bring it to market
then you shouldn’t form the patent then as you would still just be increasing costs for the industry by existing and delaying things
you could have just written about it on your blog and been the same place and been a net positive for society
You mean it would bring the price of licensing the patent down? I don't see the downside.
Whilst good intentioned, it might well work the other way:
Dedicated patent trolls will trivially overcome any hurdles by cheaply doing just enough to legally demonstrate they are working on future commercial applications blah blah honest.
Meanwhile, it likely puts up a prohibitive cost that will prevent the smallest genuine inventors from inventing?
That's the big problem with societies based on the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law. Human nature has repeatedly demonstrated that if the letter of the law is what matters, people will work night and day to technically comply with the letter of the law, so they can continue to do the bad thing legally. Whole cottage industries will spring up to guide businesses right up to that legal line and sell them the tools and techniques to ensure they barely don't cross it.
In such a society, the rules need to be enormous and complex, much more than a 2 sentence HN post, to eliminate all the edge cases and loopholes everyone will naturally want to take advantage of.
just abolish the patent system entirely. at minimum, for software
compare and contrast to industry practices today
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-patents.en.html
They will fake usage. Software parents should not exist
100% agree.
Pretty sure the original idea of patents was to protect the inventor while they brought a product to market or licensed the patent to others to improve their products.
Holding a patent without even attempting to bring the idea to market should invalidate the patent after some reasonable amount of time.
The whole system as it is today needs a hard sanity check.