Amazon Asks Congress to Curb Patent Abusers 243
theodp writes "As Amazon urged Congress to change the law to protect the e-tailler from patent abusers, Rep. Lamar Smith had a question: 'Could not Amazon.com be accused of being a troll for patenting the one-click?' Smith asked, a wry smile on his face." While it's nice to see to see tech companies behind such legislation, it would seem there's some pots calling the kettle black, so to speak.
Ok... (Score:5, Funny)
Amazon a troll ? (Score:4, Interesting)
If they use it to attract collaborators (Show me yours and I'll let you see mine
Re:Amazon a troll ? (Score:3, Insightful)
1) They already have used the "one-click" patent aggressively against Barnes & Noble.
2) Any patent, no matter how ridiculous, will be sold off as "intellectual property" at some future date (when the corporation bankrupts if not sooner). At that time, it's almost guaranteed to be used aggressively, because the only people who will buy it will be the ones who expect it to be worth money. Amazon's work to build a patent portfolio of stupid patents fores
Re:Amazon a troll ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Submarine-patents (Score:4, Informative)
+4 Insightful? You are confusing trademark and patents. Trademarks you have to defend and show a product for, patents have no such requirments.
Delaying patent-claims is what is called submarine patents, just lying there waiting for a certain practice to be adopted by the industry, then BAM! 5-10 years into the fray, you claim your royalties or first-born. Remember "Burn all GIF-day", yeah, that was a submarine patent.
Submarine patents are much worse and damaging to the economy and IT-industry than patent trolls, since it will hit like lightning, stifling current practice and standards. Forcing people to reinvent the wheel..
Re:Submarine-patents (Score:5, Informative)
I swear, Slashdot should stick to technology and leave the legal commentary to people who know better.
Re:Submarine-patents (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that, in fact, people (okay, more often corporations, which aren't people no matter what boneheaded decision the Supreme Court may have handed down 120 years ago) are still doing just that.
I swear, Slashdot should stick to technology and leave the legal commentary to people who know better.
Tell you what, the techies will stop bitching about the law when the lawyers stop trying to control the tech. Don't hold your breath.
Re:Submarine-patents (Score:3, Funny)
Tell you what, the techies will stop bitching about the law when the lawyers stop trying to control the tech. Don't hold your breath.
I'd take that a bit further and say that people will stop commenting on the law when it only applies to lawyers.
Re:Submarine-patents (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is that the doctrine of laches only applies to damages occurring prior to the initiation of legal action. Once a technology is suitably ingrained into... say a web browser... it is extremely difficult and costly to pull it out. Thus the patent troll still has the power to extort large sums of money from the company.
What the patent law needs is not the doctrine of laches. It needs an invalidation clause. If the company is aware of an infringing use of their patented technology for a certain
Re:Amazon a troll ? (Score:4, Informative)
Correct. If you can't use your patent to stop someone from doing what you patented, then you have no argument for trying to negotiate any deal with them based on that patent.
Also, if you don't enforce a violation of that patent as soon as you learn about it then you stand to lose any case you bring later.
You must be thinking of trademarks here. Those you have to defend vigorously when you become aware of infringement, but this is not true for patents at all.
The idea that patents can be used defensively is only valid if you are also willing to use them offensively.
'Willing' as in, use them to threaten and get others to comply? sure.
As anyone can tell who ever thought about this, this is called 'artificial barrier to entry' and is a really stupid idea if you also are striving for a 'free market' (that is, a market free of anti-competative influences, which is not at all the same as being able to do whatever the fuck you want)
At any rate, no you don't have to defend your patent from eery infringement, and no, not defending it in specific cases does not make you lose standing or such in cases where you do defend them.
A simple fix for patents (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:2)
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:2)
Re:Spinoff companies (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:2)
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:3, Insightful)
Government-granted monopolies are closer to communism than none...
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:4, Insightful)
And the problem with forcing large corporations to think carefully about what they'd like patent protection for, rather than throwing one at every concept that has the remotest shot of being patentable, is...?
Parent's idea is a great one-it won't do a thing to impact the "small inventors" we always hear about the patent system benefitting (and it generally doesn't), while taking a significant step to curb both patent trolls and those corporations who simply overpatent. It would also be a significant step against business-method and software patents, which is also sorely needed, the companies who pull those often have patents by the hundreds.
How about a rising annual patent fee? (Score:2, Interesting)
A patent needs to be renewed every year. Failure to renew and it lapses into public domain. There's a fee every renewal.
If you want to discourage holding onto patents for long periods of time, have the annual fee doubled every year. No one would hang on to patents for 20 years anymore.
Re:How about a rising annual patent fee? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How about a rising annual patent fee? (Score:2)
Re:How about a rising annual patent fee? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How about a rising annual patent fee? (Score:2)
What's to say that the current bullshit going on with corporations owning Pols won't influance what patents get bought out?
Re:How about a rising annual patent fee? (Score:3, Insightful)
They have an obligation to ensure this system of monopolies that they are running is run for the benefit of the people.
Re:How about a rising annual patent fee? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, they seem to think so. Or tell them to legalize gay marriage, since it isn't up to the government to protect the religious idea of marriage. Tell them to abandon the war on drugs, since it isn't their job to protect us from ourselves. There is a huge list of things that the government does that aren't on the short list of their responsibilities. And for almost all of them, they claim that they are for the public good. At least for this one, they
Re:How about a rising annual patent fee? (Score:2)
OT: Corruption (Score:4, Interesting)
I still think that the answer, therefore, is to make it 100% illegal for anyone to give or donate any amount of money to a politician or political party.
Campaign money would come out of taxes* and be equal by candidate, so it's no longer 'rich and/or corrupt(able) guy wins'. Major media (minimum size?) like TV, newspaper etc would be required to provide space where the candidates could 'post' their platform.
Is this perfect? Hell no, but I think it's a lot better than the overtly corrupt system that exists now.
*Don't forget, as a consumer you're already paying for the campaigns out of the profits which they get from you. And as a corporation gets bigger and more profitable, they push for more and stronger legislation to make them more profitable which they use to buy even stronger laws... this method is fairly perfected by the likes of the mpaa and riaa.
Re:How about a rising annual patent fee? (Score:2)
Re:How about a rising annual patent fee? (Score:2)
You must be either incredibly optimistic or incredibly naive...although today both seems to go hand-in-hand.
Congress couldn't figure out what to do with loan repayed by Chrysler in 1980s...and you are talking about a fictional amount payable by corpora
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:5, Insightful)
1.) Forbid "method patents". This would include software and business methods.
2.) Forbid "naturally occurring" patents. This would include genome sequences.
3.) Require a WORKING prototype before issuance.
Just those 3 would go a long way to eliminating patent trolls.
B.
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:4, Insightful)
This one can be bad.
You could have someone like Tesla, who conceived of the entire system of AC power generation and motors in his head, and who obviously could provide greatly detailed drawings and blueprints, and yet be unable to provide a "working prototype" because it would cost millions or billions to build. I think just banning software patents and business patents is good enough. And also fire judges who seem too stupid to throw out patents that are just goddamn obvious.
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:2)
First of all, what part of AC power generation and motors requires millions to demostrate? Toy motors are more than enough, and you can easily make a crappy AC motor by hand by winding wire yourself. It can be done by children in a school lab.
Second, if you lack the money to bring your product to market, what do you want the patent for? The point of a patent is to promote progress. If it's going to sit in a dusty drawer somewhere then it goes against the whole idea. And if you do have the money to de
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:2)
Second, if you lack the money to bring your product to market, what do you want the patent for?
To license to someone else to build, which can promote progress provided the invention isn't one of the trivial ones, which is, of course, unlikely.
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:2)
I mainly agree with points one and two but we need to provide some incentive for companies to research genomes. It costs huge amounts of money to find useful gene sequences and a company isn't going to do that if another company could just come along and use the results. Note, however, that I am not saying patenting the sequence is the right way to protect it.
As for number three again I mainly agree but we need some provision for inventions that can't currently have a working example built due to cost / c
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, you might kinda be able to get around it by creating a stub company just to hold the patent, but you'd still have to license it from them. Just have to make sure the license terms can't be discriminatory.
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:2)
Require that the patent upon issuance be actually used in half the life of the patent or the patent is invalidated. The whole idea behind this part is that the patent actually leads to a product.
B.
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:2)
See, you're missing the point of patents. They have f'all to do with directly leading to a product, and everything to do with providing ideas that lead to even better ideas. That whole "on teh shoulders of giants" thing.
Sure, there's little point if eventually come out of the patent system, it just makes little sense to expect a product out of each and every one.
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:2)
B.
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:2)
This is the kind of stuff that shows how intelligent and patriotic these ppl w
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:2)
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:2)
Re:A simple fix for patents (Score:2)
Except when your economy is based on (God I hate using this phrase but for lack of anything else...) "Intellectual property". The US has been moving farther and farther from manufacturing it's own goods for years (AKA globalization). When that happens all you have left to peddle is ideas. There was a piece here on
Result: trade secrets & industrial espionage (Score:3, Interesting)
Great idea! Then everybody will jealously guard every innovation as a trade secret and industrial espionage will surge.
If you think office security is a pain now imagine what it'll be like when the stakes are raised.
There are already problems with onerous non-competition clauses in high level employee contracts. With no patent protection, you could expect EVERY knowledge worker to have to sign a contract saying that if they quit, that they can't work in any, even vaguely, similar career.
Re:Result: trade secrets & industrial espionag (Score:3, Interesting)
Which in quite a few cases means not being able to sell a product that uses it.. sounds like a real good idea.....
and industrial espionage will surge.
Heh, as if that isn't happening already at a large scale...
If you think office security is a pain now imagine what it'll be like when the stakes are raised.
Most 'office security' serves the same purpose as airport security, its making sure they can say 'but we tried to prevent it
Re:Result: trade secrets & industrial espionag (Score:2)
At least now, a company has the option of whether to trade 20 years of protection, followed by a free-for-all, versus keeping the invention a trade secret and maybe being able to make money off of it for longer, but maybe having it reverse-engineered.
Most of them seem to choose the former (patents), and despite the
Re:Result: trade secrets & industrial espionag (Score:2)
Lamer Smith calling anybody else a troll? (Score:5, Insightful)
So Lamer Smith, the guy who pushed for DMCA2 in April this year, obviously knows there is a problem with this wry comment, but it takes a patent troll like Amazon to push the issue before Congress? The guy shouldn't have such a smug smile on his face.
Re:Lamer Smith calling anybody else a troll? (Score:5, Insightful)
B.
Mods on crack! (Score:3, Insightful)
Congress = governement = no loss of Blackberries. They're exempt from anything inconvenient, didn't you know.
Now, if you'd claimed that their friends with crackberries might have had to go cold turkey...well, now you might have a point.
Re:Lamer Smith calling anybody else a troll? (Score:2)
Our Tax Dollars At Work, People (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't it about time for some serious reform on patents and copyrights? How do we protect intellectual property without going absurd?
Thoughts?
Re:Our Tax Dollars At Work, People (Score:2)
Re:Our Tax Dollars At Work, People (Score:2)
The original idea behind patents was to encourage developers to publish their findings instead of making them secret so people don't copy instead of developing themselves. The idea was to give the patent holder the exclusive right for a limited period o
Re:Our Tax Dollars At Work, People (Score:2)
Frivilous is hard to determine, and we'd just choke up our court system on said term. However, the above quote is brilliant.
Re:Our Tax Dollars At Work, People (Score:5, Insightful)
How do we protect intellectual property without going absurd?
Here's a question for you: Is it not a bit absurd, in and of itself, to presume that ideas, a nonrival, infinitely replicatable good, can -ever- be considered or treated as property?
Re:Our Tax Dollars At Work, People (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Our Tax Dollars At Work, People (Score:3, Interesting)
Some stats that I picked up from Googling around (you might want to verify the numbers).
Average Yearly Salary worldwide: ~$5,000 US
85th percentile Yearly Salary in the world: $2,182 US
Average Yearly Salary in US: $29,000 US
Average Yearly Welfare Benefits for those on Welfare in the US: ~ $11,200
So the average salary in the US is nearly 6 times the average salary in the world. And more than 10 times the 85th percentile salary (the reason the average is so high is just because u
Patents are a double edged sword (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunatly its the speed of which patents go through approval, and legal proceedings related to patent infringment which seem to cause most of this problem, not the patenting themselves.
Spending years in court for a patent dispute seems so stupid, especially as when the cases end technology has progressed to such a point where the dispute becomes redundant.
Lawyers seem to be the people benefiting most from the patenting system, perhaps finding a way to move patents from the judicial system and having its own tribunal/mediation system devoid of corporate law??
This idea will probably get struck down, but idea's do needed to be made about it, we will only see innovation be stifled and small business unable to cope from the preassures of big business eventually.
who cares (Score:4, Interesting)
Patent trolls either exist or you get rid of the whole system.
Re:who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if you implement it in the most retarded way possible: big company determines what loser pays. Why do Americans always assume that's the only way to implement it?
In the UK we have loser pays and the courts recognise drowning someone in debt is not the solution, so the judge determines what the loser pays based on the loser's means. This can mean the winner scores a legal victory but still loses out financially, which is an incentive for the big company to settle out of court, which is no bad thing.
Re:who cares (Score:2)
But that leaves the legal bills you have to pay in the first place. A troll company that is rich enough to acquire patents can afford a lawsuit, but for the "small inventor" it's difficult but there is still a possiblity of losing nothing but time and court costs (self-representation). Add "loser pays" and there's even less incentive for the "small inventor" to go against a big company. Secondly, ideologically, "loser pays" assumes that the person suing has done something w
Re:who cares (Score:3, Informative)
Not necessarily. It also means "winner can collect lawyers fees" which is important if you are the "small inventor" and have just spent a lot of money convincing the court that you were, indeed, ripped off by $MEGACORP.
Personally, I like the concept of "loser pays" even if it has its own potential for abuse (think suits about excessive sums to drive up the lawyers fees).
Re:who cares (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:who cares (Score:2)
Re:who cares (Score:2)
I'm very much against software patents in their current form, where trivial patents run rampart. It should still be possible to patent unique algorithms, but not general ideas. So a new algorithm that displays progress bars in a way that uses less CPU or that sh
Re:who cares (Score:2)
Patent trolls either exist or you get rid of the whole system.
Thank you for putting it so clearly! We'll gladly take the second option, thanks!
Re:who cares (Score:2, Informative)
Patents as they are now are broken. But not by design, they're broken by implementation.
Re:who cares (Score:3, Interesting)
I call BS on this especially with method patents...
You are telling me that companies use the patent system for looking for new ideas?!?!? If they do that they are liable for willful infringement on anything they use. Most patent specialists advise their clients to NOT look at the patent office stuff for th
Patents don't have any meaning (Score:5, Insightful)
Try it sometime, I dare you..
Then we're back to the days when people hide their research to protect it
Research is rarely patented in the universities. Everybody gains from the shared knowledge, without patents. Patents stifles this process.
, and development progress grinds to a halt again where every company reinvents the wheel. Lots of unnecessarily wasted resources.
Everybody is reinventing the wheel already with closed source, and to avoid patent royalities. Now that is waste.
The cure is open standards, open science, open mathematics, open source, free software, etc.. etc.. Everybody benefits and gains value from open systems. Patents are not open systems, since it is based on fear, extortion and greed, rather than sharing a common good.
Re:Patents don't have any meaning (Score:2)
If you still truly can't figure out what is going on in the specification, you either aren't a person of skill in the relev
Re:who cares (Score:2)
Stop me, before I patent again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Abuse of my intellectual property (Score:5, Funny)
Your recent article ("Amazon Asks Congress to Curb Patent Abusers") is in clear violation of Patent #1805-J-9, "A Method For Comparing Hypocritical Actions Performed By Humans To Hypothetical Actions Performed By Articulate, Similarly Colored Kitchenware," which was recently awarded to Jacobw Incorporated. Please cease and desist your use of our patented metaphors, similes, and other rhetorical tropes.
Sincerely,
Jacobw Incorporated
Re:Abuse of my intellectual property (Score:3, Funny)
"A Method For Comparing Hypocritical Actions Performed By Humans To Hypothetical Actions Performed By Articulate, Similarly Colored Kitchenware ON A COMPUTER..."
Takes One to Know One (Score:2)
There's lots of English language folk wisdom that covers this: live by the sword, die by the sword. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. Creating a monster. No honor among thieves.
Why would committing abuse mean that you aren't an expert in it?
Re:Takes One to Know One (Score:2)
Think Eolas and IE, RIM and Blackberry (these were no nice guys at well), probably many more examples out there.
Apparently this bothers some enough to just make an end to this neverending story (even though the big ones have bigger legal departments and cash reserves to win from the lit
Fix the patent system altogether (Score:5, Interesting)
When you can get patents on trivial implementation, legal pitfalls open up to EVERY business. When you create a webpage (even for non-profit), even if you just write a simple program, you could already be facing terrible problems. Especially in the non-profit area, patents pose a serious threat.
Imagine Boyer-Moore being patented. Or any other "best" algorithm. If you're in the non-profit "market", you're out of biz. You cannot pay patent royalties. Same goes for small businesses. You simply cannot afford to pay for the patents you'd have to use to actually create sensible software.
Patents serve a purpose, allright. But the purpose has reversed. The idea behind patents was to give the developer an incentive to publish it, so others can build on it and learn from it, while still giving you the exclusive right to gain from it financially, so people have an incentive to invent AND publish.
It turned into the opposite. Patents currently harm development and progress. And this has to be remedied. Just patching certain implementations isn't going to solve the problem. The whole patent licensing system has to be redone to fix it.
software patents (!?) (Score:5, Interesting)
A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a government to an inventor or applicant for a limited amount of time (normally 20 years from the filing date)... Per the word's original definition, the theory of patent legislation is to induce the inventor to disclose knowledge for the advancement of society in exchange for a limited period of exclusivity. Since a patent grants the right to exclude others from practising the invention, it gives the owner a monopoly in the economic sense. There is an ongoing debate about whether the benefits of patents outweigh the costs, particularly with respect to software patents.
A patent, thus, is not meant as an inherent right for financial compensation for the inventor. A patent is a state-ordained monopoly, that excludes others of exploiting or using similar ideas, even when they have come up with those ideas independently by themselves, for a certain time-period. Now, this seems rather unfair (in copyright this is not the case), but apart from that, why does the state give a monopoly to someone, while we all know monopolies are generally not good for the economy, nor for the consumers? This is why: a patent is a monopoly, given by the state, because it (is supposed to) promote innovation. It follows that, if it doesn't achieve its goal of promoting innovation, it should not be granted, period.
Now, while to some extend this may apply to patents in general (as a study done in the 80ies by the Australian government has shown), seen the particular incremental nature of software, and the more intensive studies done on them, it has become ever more clear that softwarepatents DO NOT promote innovation, on the contrary. It logically follows there is no compelling reason in respect to 'stimulating innovation' to grant patents on software.
Some swpat-proponents point to the USA, and claim there the evidence is shown: "the USA has swpat, and look at all those big, mighty IT-corporations!" This, however, is a complete fallacy: they 'forget' to mention that all those big foreign IT-companies were founded and grew to the behemoths they are today, in the ABSENCE of softwarepatents (which, in the USA, only started in earnest after 1991). So, it is not "thanks to" softwarepatents, but rather the reverse. Actually, it could be argued that the IT-business in the USA bloomed, exactly because they weren't patents around, back then. And in fact, this is well known by anyone working in the business of IT, and exactly what a well-known USA CEO has said in the early 90ies, someone who can know it.
Bill Gates said it best, in one of his internal memos:
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."
Mind you, this has been said by one of the most prominent IT-CEO on the planet, acknowledging exactly what softwarepatents actually lead too. Not surprisingly, since swpat are allowed in the USA, his solution to the problem was "patenting as much as we can" so he could go for "patent exchanges with [other] large companies". Of course, Bill had the means to gather together a multi-million dollar software patent portfolio to defend his company (and thus did.) Most of the SME's (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises), let alone the individual developer, don't have such means and allowing swpat can only spell hardship for small businesses and open source software.
Even Bruce Chizen, chief executive of Adobe Systems Inc. and chairman of the Business Software Alliance, which is leading the charge for the technology industry in the USA, acknowledges that allowing software patents in the 1990s was a bad idea.
Contrary to the pro-swpat camp, it
Re:software patents (!?) (Score:2)
Re:software patents (!?) (Score:2)
Bingo, and this is why we need to stop talking like the free market can solve problems that arise in dealings with things protected by patents or copyrights.
So, if you are dealing in patent and copyright protected "it
Are they really a patent troll? (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate to argue in Amazon's defense, but does being a hypocrite actually make them wrong? Doesn't it more depend on whether they're...well...wrong or not? If Charles Manson called for stronger penalties for mass murderers, would he be wrong just because he's Charles Manson? If Ken Lay asked for stronger legal protections for stockholders, would he be wrong just because he's Ken Lay? If Darl McBride called for mandatory jail time for anyone who files a fraudulent lawsuit, would he be wrong just because he's Darl McBride? If Natalie Portman asked me to rub hot grits all over her sweaty, naked body, would....
Er, sorry, guess that last one didn't make much sense, but I needed something to get the image of Ken Lay and Darl McBride out of my mind!
(Natalie--call me!)
Re:Are they really a patent troll? (Score:2, Interesting)
They aren't asking everyone else to be nice, while they are being mean. They are asking for a rule, that would force everyone, that is including themselves, to play nice. There's no hypocricy in that, because right now they are bound by different rules and they have to behave according to these rules.
Wavelets, anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wavelets, anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
Don't be mistaken (Score:2)
patents (Score:2, Interesting)
Sensible rules (Score:5, Insightful)
Once a patent is applied for, the applicant has a cooling off period in which to decide whether to go through the whole process or to talk to other people about licensing (this helps small inventors)
The holder of a patent MUST either manufacture themselves or license manufacturing rights to any second parties on the same terms. The penalties for patent infringement shall be limited to legal costs plus the average current licensing rate for the goods sold to date. (If there are NO goods currently employing the patent, the licensing rate will be zero.)
Mathematical algorithms, natural laws and anything which has been created by a natural process (e.g. DNA sequences) cannot be patentable.
It shall not be possible to patent any business process simply because it is carried on in a different medium (e.g. one click is basically walking into shop, handing over money, receiving goods in exchange, and should not be patentable simply because it is computer implemented.)
Basically, the European patent system before the US and Microsoft started lobbying and threatening in order to try and break it.
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm kind of confused as to how this negates the fact it should be fixed.
Also the extraneous comment about him smiling concerns me. He is overly pleased with himself for having the observational powers of a 10 year old child.
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
Nobody said it does. The only point was that almost everybody involved has some egg on their face.
Don't read too much into the smile. Try watching some of the committees on C-SPAN some time. After a couple hours, you'll find yourself smiling at even the slightest hint of irony or
The solution is: (Score:5, Funny)
How about a cost of research sharing model? (Score:3, Interesting)
One way of looking at patents is as a means of protecting the original inventor's investment in the idea so that first movers are not unduly penalized for having made the effort and taken the risk only to have it stolen by someone else who doesn't have to bear the costs of coming up with the invention.
If the original inventor wants to get rich off an idea, they should still have to have be competitive producers of the implementation of that idea and bear the risk that someone out there can do it more profitably than they can, but not have the handicap of competing with those who didn't have to bear the invention process costs.
First mover advantage and invention cost sharing aught to be enough for an inventor to succeed. there's no reason to give them a monopoly that provides no incentive to be efficient or innovate any further. History is rife with examples of patented innovations that stagnated for 17 years. Then, only after the patent expired, an explosion of new innovations moved the field forward.
To explain the idea further... imaging it costs $100 to invent some patentable idea. Then, if some other company wanted to produce a product or service that used the idea. They could do that, by paying $51 to the inventor for a license. If a third producer joined in they would pay, $25.50 to both the original inventor AND the second company. So each gets just a little more than half of what they had to invest in the first place. A fourth producer would pay $12.25 to each of the first three and so-on.
This system would not lock anybody out and would share the cost of the innovation with a tiny advantage to those who jump aboard first to encourage investment in research.
Re:How about a cost of research sharing model? (Score:2)
I'm for compulsory licensing of patents where the patent holder is not actively producing the patented product in commercial quantities. The fees should be small (pennies).
Re:How about a cost of research sharing model? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the least of the problems with this idea. Besides, Cabals, consortiums and other arangements have been around and functioning well for centuries, so the idea is older than and far more stable than socialism. They're actually so successful, that many countries have laws to limit the practice.
Besides, I don't think the idea is socialist at all. The licensees are still quality, service and price competitors and simply have to
Hmmm (Score:2)
nice rep (Score:4, Funny)
He showed both familiarity with Amazon's sordid patent past and managed to use the word troll during a session of congress!
I'm impressed. Wish I was his constituent...
"Patent Troll" (Score:2, Insightful)
Amazon Asks Congress to Club Patent Abusers (Score:4, Funny)
BigCo and the Patent Troll (Score:2, Interesting)