Every so often a patent troll story comes up on HN, and people like me bitch about how broken the system is and get group therapy from shouting into the wind on a web forum.
What can we actually do. How do we start fixing this problem?
>What can we actually do. How do we start fixing this problem?
Do the hard grunt work of getting enough of a broad base of political support for Congress to enact reform. Seriously, that's what it comes down to. And it's not some impossible thing even for a minority so long as it's focused. Precisely because majorities don't really pay much attention to such things and these days are fairly fixed, even a fraction of a percentage of the vote that always votes and will do so based on a single or very small set of issues can have an outsized impact.
In this case, the goal would probably be a few very targeted things. My nomination would be 1) Eliminate software and "business method" patents entirely, with the argument that software is already covered by copyright and vague ideas shouldn't be patentable, and 2) actually fund the USPTO to a much higher degree and give it more teeth so more patents can be taken down early.
I don't think it's an impossible dream. It's an issue that doesn't fit into typical polarization, since there are major business benefits both ways. There are easy outrageous examples of patents that will strike the average person as obviously wrong. It's something Congress can do without the slightest question. There will be economic interests against it, but there are ones for it as well. And the tide has been turning a bit on IP maximalism.
I've written my Senators at least, talking about some of the personal harms I've seen as a developer. I got replies. If nothing else, everyone should do that and not just post on the internet. They certainly are unlikely to immediately change their stances, but they absolutely pay attention to letters because so few write them. If they start seeing enough people concerned about an issue, they will if nothing else give it some much higher level attention. Unfortunately I don't know of any national advocacy/lobbying organizations devoted purely to patent reform. The EFF does some good work there, but they've got a wider umbrella of critical issues to fight as well. I donate what I can to them but it'd be nice if there was some place just for this too.
Still, I hope to see some progress in my lifetime on reigning them back in from when they were invented in court in the 80s.
Patents were made for a time before ubiquitous multinational corporations. If there are multiple sources of truth and markets for what is protected invention, then it greatly dilutes the power of that patent. This ends up hamstringing the countries most dependent on patenting to encourage innovation because we are still beholden to foreign interest who file their patents with the USPO or sell to an American troll. The US is the most fastidious in their preservation of patent law despite its many flaws and this is why we will lose out most in the global turning against protected invention.
All developing nations ignore international copyright, trademark, and patent IP rights. The US did it back in the late 19th century, other nations in the early 20th, Asian nations in the late 20th century. What is happening now is nothing new.
China is now starting to enforce IP rights because as they move up the industry maturity scale, the rights become more important.
IP rights only become relevant to developed nations, where manufacturing and other primary/secondary industries become less important than service industries.
There is no "global turning against protected invention".
There is "developing vs developed nations ongoing opposing interests".
Actually, there is pretty strong evidence that patents are counterproductive for pharmaceuticals. Before the harmonization of IP laws, pharmaceuticals had different eligibility for patenting in the US, Europe and Switzerland. The US had the strongest, Europe somewhat weaker and in Switzerland it was inelligible. The Swiss companies invested the most money into R&D and were generally the most successful. The US ones were the leas successful and did the least R&D and instead invested much more into lawyers and marketing.
Did the Swiss companies choose not to patent medication in other countries? It could just be that the market in Switzerland was small enough so that there was a gentleman's agreement not to copy the pharmaceutical.
The patent laws where you do the research doesn't matter as much as the patent laws where you're recouping the cost of your investment. And I assume those companies made 100x more money in the u.s. than Switzerland.
Really? Name some. The patent system started in 1790. The FDA didn't exist, thus no expensive trials and safety validation. Medicine was just a bunch of trial and error with no controls.
...opium and extracts for pain relief, cinchona bark for malaria, cloves and clove oil for oral pain relief, I could go on, but you could also Google this.
And the fact that a "patent medicine" is a synonym in history for "snake oil" shows how little scientific rigour patents brought to medicinal development, and how the patent system was initially co-opted to lend an air of legitimacy to quackery.
Penicillin and ether were not covered by patents. Pretty sure those were two of the greatest of all time.
On the patent side you have such modern marvels as OxyContin, which has arguably caused more loss of life than COVID-19.
Patented drugs are generally awful. The idea that it costs $1B to make a game changing drug is a lie. It costs $1T. The US taxpayer pays 99.9%, and the big pharma company spends a billion to generate some shitty subpar derivative that they can then get monopoly protection on and create an artificial racket supported by false marketing.
Average expected years left to live for a Covid death is about 11, prior to having any information on pre-existing conditions. Divide that by 2-3x once you are given pre-existing conditions.
The average Opiod death is 3x that by years alone, and more when going by expected healthspan.
> Patented drugs are generally awful. The idea that it costs $1B to make a game changing drug is a lie. It costs $1T. The US taxpayer pays 99.9%, and the big pharma company spends a billion to generate some shitty subpar derivative that they can then get monopoly protection on and create an artificial racket supported by false marketing.
This number is impossibly wrong. There were 48 new drugs brought to market in 2019. At an average cost of 1 trillion dollar per drug would mean the entire economy of both the U.S. and Europe were devoted to drug research which just isn't true.
> You still need patents. Healthcare is an obvious example, if we eliminated patents we'd have 0 new drugs pass FDA approval over the next decade.
That's only if you look at how the system is today and evaluate as it is today.
Software mostly doesn't have patents: theres no patent to an uber, to a paypal, to an amazon. You would have a different business model to fund medical innovation, for example, advance payments from prospective patients.
The patent's purpose is to incentivize innovation. Some industries need this (medical) others don't (software).
So if you got rid of patents innovation in some industries will be fine (software) and others will be wrecked (medical).
Patents are not the only way to incentivize innovation, and I think it'd be great to experiment with some other ways.
Socializing medicine is completely orthogonal to this issue. Unless you mean socializing drug discovery which would be a completely unproven way to develop drugs at scale.
It's funny, I've heard from biomed engineers that it's clear to them that patents don't work in the medical field, unlike how they're effective in the software field.
It feels like every field knows that they're a cash grab without a lot of benefits, but assumes there's some industry that they don't work in where they're needed.
Exactly this. I worked for a few years in big tech, and it was crystal clear that patents and copyrights were awful in tech. But I believed the lie that maybe in medicine, they were needed.
I spent a few years in medical research and realized that ohhhh shit, even worse in this industry.
The whole thing is a big lie.
End copyrights. End patents. The ideal length is zero. There is no case to be made to support them. We need to abolish them outright.
But why have them at all, especially if we’re going to shoot for arbitrary amounts of time?
I don’t buy that IP protections incentivize innovation anymore than they prevent it. The reality is that the gains from intellectual property are not distributed evenly, and corporate executives know this. If IP is making you millions of dollars, that is a very different situation from IP just “making you a living.”
Even if you are doing well as a small IP-based business, you’re still stuck paying a premium on everything you buy (thanks to the existence of IP monopolies), and you still have little recourse against IP violations from large corporations and anonymous pirates.
I just don’t get how this isn’t all an enormous waste of resources for anyone but the already rich, or a completely raw deal for people who mod games, remix music, repair electronics, etc etc.
One slight nit: it helps if you don't spread the big lie "intellectual property" (since it's an oxymoron). Someone here on HN told me about the term "imaginary property" which works great, because then you can still use the "IP" acronym.
So you write a letter and dont want it published by the recipient, you need to file? Or all software written in a company, file? What about confidential stuff, file?
Abolition of intellectual property does not mean abolition of privacy; original author will still have the right of initial publication, but once published, no privacy assumptions and no recirculation restrictions unless registered.
Though this is only one person's personal experience, to me this was an illuminating conversation on the state of medical device repair as a consequence of strong IP protections:
The problem is that there is no way to experiment with other ways of funding health care research, as the cost of doing so is set at highly entrenched monopoly prices. There is no reason for those with capital to consider alternatives when there is already so much money to be made in the existing system.
I too believe that medical innovation would be wrecked by the elimination of patents, but I think that is less to due some inevitable aspect of human nature, and more due to existing incentive structures that have been created by means of policy.
The coronavirus probably shows patents to be a thorny mechanism for innovation. Pfizer might have a vax patent but then can't freely make money of it. If there were no patents, but they were the best manufacturers, might have been easier to have a freer market on it.
Patents necessarily put more capital investments into patentable work than unpatentable work, but that doesnt mean it is more efficient. I understand the principle of patents, but eventually you end up in heavy interventionism, state funding, litigation, etc. Best to do away of all of that imo.
And how much of the expenditure goes anywhere useful? And remember that they're incentivized to report 15% of their revenue being spent on R&D for tax reasons.
That $100B is just for drugs that later got FDA approval, not the NIH grant budget.
If you’re going to make that argument, you also have to consider the opposite possibility: I’ve worked on (non-medical) projects with public funding in the past. One can only hope that my experience wasn’t representative for the amount waste of public money in the medical world.
I guess if you are a tech CTO, you don't beat them, you join them.
The sad part of Myhrvold's troll company is that it quickly spilled over into sectors other than software and "tech". Sectors that did not necessarily have the same knee-jerk negative reaction to the patent system (because despite its flaws, they depended on it).
Companies like Apple, AMZN, MSFT, have enough resources and money to change the system but it wouldn't benefit them in the end. A few hundred million might seem like a lot to us but it's trivial to them. Sure they will defend themselves, they've got a lot of Lawyers on payroll that need to do something to earn their salaries.
I can't imagine the carnage they could collectively unleash on the Judge, Jury, County, State, etc if they really wanted to? But it isn't worth the time, money or effort. At the end of the day it's just pay the "Parking Ticket" and move on.
Strategically, it is a barrier to entry for small competitors who can't afford the legal defense.
That doesn't mean that Apple and Google are intentionally trying to preserve the legal environment for patent trolls to operate, but on some level it still is in their interest.
How can we realistically boycott the companies that abuse patents? I suppose I could stop using Apple products, but most current software jobs require some form of smartphone for authentication, so I need an iPhone or Android phone, thus supporting Google or Samsung or LG or one of the other big megacorps that abuse the American patent system.
I feel like the only thing that could conceivably happen is to fight fire with fire, and start suing these companies and challenging these patents to a point where it's so expensive for them that they lobby congress to regulate it better. Even still, I have doubts that that would even work, since it's still probably more profitable for them to keep all their ridiculous patents than the loss in legal fees.
The megacorps are forced to file many patents for defensive purposes, either for protection against each other or the NPEs. Technical bulletins, disclosures, and scientific publications showing the obviousness of ridiculous NPE patents just don't seem to be enough. The juries must be receiving bad info on what to do.
Unfortunately, a patent portfolio doesn't protect against NPEs. A patent portfolio lets a company settle patent disputes with cross-licensing deals, or counter-sue with a "no you" argument.
An NPE doesn't have a product, so there's no reason to cross-license, and no way their product can violate any other patent.
Fascinating, thank you! I hadn't thought of that, but that's the kind of audacious (even outrageous) thing that while extremely unlikely to happen, it could. I like the way you think!
I always find "watch this documentary" to be pointless. If the person's already convinced that patent abuse is bad, they don't need to watch a 2 hour video to reconfirm their beliefs. If the person is sitting on the fence or not convinced, there are better ways to provide information to them than getting them to stare at a screen for 2 hours.
If that was the only solution presented I would agree, but in an online forum with several other answers someone providing an overly detailed source is handy. Most people may not be interested, but some might be.
I disagree with your general sentiment. The people here reading these comments may be on the fence. Maybe they're leaning one way or another. Maybe they need some more convincing. Someone who wants to learn more can benefit greatly from a documentary or a good article on the subject. And these comments don't just exist in this moment. They will be available in search for a long time to come.
So basically, neutrality nihilism? ie. "every source is biased so it doesn't matter whether I'm getting my climate change facts from the IPCC or InfoWars".
But this is different to conspiracy theorists. There is a range of reasonable, good faith positions to take on this issue (eg, some on this discussion advocate the abolishment of copyright - not just patents - which is a position many in the software industry would disagree with).
Collective action isn't going to help with trolls with the resources (and case) to go up against Apple, but should kill off a lot of the frivolous "it's cheaper to license than fight" patent licensing demands. If a troll knows a license demand issued to a particular company will meet with the entire industry pooling resources to invalidate the patent they're trying to individually claim royalties for, it suddenly becomes an unprofitable business model (or at least, very unprofitable to demand licenses from companies participating in the scheme). Fundable since "patent insurance" is already a thing companies budget for, and probably doesn't require any legal changes to work.
Think carefully about who you vote for. Get involved in the process- like anything unless you actually really care and have the means or can turn it into your means most likely you will move onto something else...
The problem is I'm pretty sure this needs to be fixed at the national legislative level. There are somewhere between few and no electable congressional candidates who actually care enough about patents to stand up to lobbying. And there are very few people outside the microcosm of the tech community who care enough about patent reform to prioritize it above other mainstream issues. So what's the practical game plan that doesn't take 20+ years?
You tie it to something strategic, even if it the relationship is loose.
We have a chip shortage right? And an American manufacturing crisis, right?
"We need to eliminate trolling waste and abuse for national security. In Asia they don't have this dysfunction and we're ceding ground to adversaries simply to make lawyering trolls rich!"
The patent problem is only the tip the iceberg, if you are unlucky or observant enough you will notice that several other things are broken like health care or housing.
All this points to larger problem that many thinkers are in denial, that is of humans themself. Humans in general are terribly flawed and that problem can be only marginally alleviated with laws, activism etc.
But they also won $500m+ from Samsung using the same system. Not to mention the defensive position it gives them. It seems like an overwhelmingly net positive for Apple.
Start adding a
"Patent troll advance recovery fee" line item to your bills (even if it is just a break-out of the total cost), even for minor items and SaaS transactions so people see the impact to their own wallet.
The patent problem is only the tip the iceberg, if you are unlucky or observant enough you will notice that several other things are broken like health care or housing. All this points to larger problem that many thinkers are in denial, that is of humans themself. Humans in general are terribly flawed and that cannot be fixed with laws.
> What do people turn to when the legal system fails them?
This doesn't mean anything. It's just cynicism masquerading as fatalism. We thankfully don't live in an absolutist monarchy. Laws can change, and in fact do change all the time. Election upsets happen all the time. But like a sibling comment said, no one wants to actually go out and do the grunt work.
Whining on Twitter is certainly easier than canvassing a neighborhood.
Big lies are labels spread widely without backing datasets. One thing everyone can do is start spreading a big truth (a label not widely shared but that fits a plethora of data far better): copyrights and patents are the opposite of property rights. One better description for IP is #imaginaryproperty. People who support them should be shamed. Because of IP bad medicine is encouraged, bad news is encouraged, bad inequity is encouraged, bad education is encouraged.
Equitable progress (and progress in general), is a fraction of what it could be.
Changing this one rule and shifting our energies from endlessly regurgitating old ideas to gardening great new ones will lead to a golden era of progress in area like healthcare, education, and equity.
#EndIp. #LiberateIdeas. Start sharing big truths and fight big lies. The people will pick up on it.
Don't work with/for companies that use patents. Don't consent to companies using your work to file patents. If they do anyway, publish prior art where possible.
Write down and publish as many things as possible to enable prior art searches. If an important case affects a field you've been working on for decades, actively help victims find prior art.
Consistently vote against IP maximalists wherever you have an opportunity. Don't have relationships with IP maximalists.
Remind the general public about how bad and stupid patents are when you have the opportunity.
Don't buy products that advertise using "patented technology" or "patent pending". If you have no choice, buy used.
If you are in control of a company's patent strategy, file lots of provisional patents then abandon them, so they show up in the database when patent examiners search for prior art.
Financially support victims of patent attacks and help them get as many patents invalidated as possible.
What can we actually do. How do we start fixing this problem?