Patents

[Cogman]

Patents in the tech industry need to DIAF, or at very least see major reform. Once upon a time, patents were invented to protect the little guy from big industry coming in an stealing his idea. They were meant as a safe guard to encourage competition.

Now, patents do no such thing. They prevent companies from starting up in the first place. Nobody can make "The next Intel" or AMD, it is impossible, in the CPU market, just about every concept is patented. If you even tried, you would be sued up to wazoo and taken out of business.

Heck, even starting a memory business, or some other minor electronic manufacturing business is pretty much impossible because just about everything is patented.

Whats worse, its just about impossible to find out what is and isn't patented. The are billions of patents out there, covering everything under the sun. Many of them are vague, some even cover prior art, and yet they are approved at an alarming rate.


So what is the benefits for killing off patents.
1. You kill off patent trolling companies (rambus)
2. You create the possibility for more competition. No more expensive legal teams just to make sure that the product you are putting out doesn't violate 500 patents.
3. Competition in the industry will become more fierce (good for the consumer) as everything you do could be done by the competition, so you had better move quick.
4. Inspires innovation, you must keep innovating to stay on top, and you have to do it quickly.

What are the downsides?
1. The little guy can't stave off intel from stealing his idea (in the unlikely event that he comes up with a new idea that intel, or one of the 5 billion other companies, hasn't already patented)

 

[Gibson486]

ahem....Mathworks....

 

[Cogman]

ahem....Mathworks....

Not familiar with the Mathworks story, care to elaborate?

 

[PsiStar]

My take on patents is that it is the means to make public an idea that is considered unique. AKA a form of intellectual property. "Make public" being the operative term. So if the idea is really good, it is kept secret ... also a form of IP.

The problem with going public is that word smything is not very good. It is very much like writing a software program for user interfaces; you know that there will be screw ups, mis-entries, etc. and you try to take due diligence to handle errors ... but they still happen and that is in a language considerably *less* robust than any human language. And in English/english for instance, innuendo, intent, context, yadda yadda yadda ... changes. And, that is if you are perfect at the time in the statement of the invention.

I have worked in groups where we would study competitors' new patents & intentionally think of statements that allowed us to work around it and/or create new patents "binding" up the competitors'.

Then there is always prior art. A little slip of the description can allow prior art to be "found". Of course, you don't make that public (another kind of IP). If the competitor starts writing nasty grams to you about patent infringement, you can inform them of the prior art ... not telling them explicitly of course ... they have to work to defend their own patent.

This can also be a bluff. It all depends on how much they are willing to spend on legal fees. No one really tries to invalidate a patent as that costs big $$, any "why"? If the patent holder stops bothering you, but other competition does not know ... to bad for them.

Poker? Anyone?

And I am just the f'n engineer. Imagine the fun an actual patent attorney has. Of course a patent attorney is not the inventor & the inventor must convey enough information to that atty so that a reasonably competent patent application can be written.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yep I agree fully. Patents in concept were maybe a good idea, but they are WAY too abused and actually LIMIT innovation.

The worse is software patents, that is the biggest pile of crap ever. If one wants to make a new piece of software, it takes tons of research to make sure all the concepts are not patented, and if they are, well that software can't even be released. It's stupid really. Thankfully here in Canada software patents do not exist (at least that's what I last heard, someone correct me if I'm wrong). So I would most likely be allowed to release my own software here in Canada, but not in the states, if it infringes on a patent. In that case I just host the server in Canada,and if someone from the states downloads it then it's not really my problem.

I think the way it needs to work is patents should only last like a year max. It would at least give the originator of the idea a head start, but a year later the idea would be open to everyone.

 

[CycloWizard]

As PsiStar mentioned indirectly, owning a patent on something does not give you some magical hold over the patent's contents. Instead, it is essentially a public declaration of the invention. In return for this declaration, you are granted the right to prosecute violators of that patent or license the patent's contents. Many recent patents are garbage, but this is probably an inevitable result of rapid increases in technology: patent clerks cannot keep up with every field of inquiry in the depth required to know whether a patent has any value, really represents something new, or whatever else. I think the rules need to be changed dramatically, though I'm not sure how.

 

[Cogman]

As PsiStar mentioned indirectly, owning a patent on something does not give you some magical hold over the patent's contents. Instead, it is essentially a public declaration of the invention. In return for this declaration, you are granted the right to prosecute violators of that patent or license the patent's contents. Many recent patents are garbage, but this is probably an inevitable result of rapid increases in technology: patent clerks cannot keep up with every field of inquiry in the depth required to know whether a patent has any value, really represents something new, or whatever else. I think the rules need to be changed dramatically, though I'm not sure how.

Perhaps if patents worked more as they were intended to work, I might be more in favor of them. However, the current state of them is just a mess. It is a giant word game to see who can write the most all encompassing patent out there. At best, they don't work, at worst, they hurt competition.

Get rid of them and stop wasting money on them, that's what I would love to see.

 

[rockyct]

Patents are very useful and needed, but there needs to be some reform on how they are given and how long they last. There are some truly BS patents out there, especially in the software world. Maybe have software patents last only three years, then it turns into a more limited patent with much smaller royalties. Like if Apple somehow keeps their multi-touch software patents, this June they would be in a limited patent phase where they would only get like 20 cents a device if a company used the tech.

 

[CanOWorms]

They prevent companies from starting up in the first place.

You usually cannot get funding for a start-up without securing patents.

Heck, even starting a memory business, or some other minor electronic manufacturing business is pretty much impossible because just about everything is patented.

There are tons of start-ups in the semiconductor industry, even in the memory area.

 

[Bignate603]

I work for a relatively large company, if we couldn't protect our new ideas we couldn't afford to do any development. We'd do all the work and then someone would just copy it.

 

[Cogman]

You usually cannot get funding for a start-up without securing patents.

That has more to do with the fact that patents are here now, and less to do with a set investment strategy.

There are tons of start-ups in the semiconductor industry, even in the memory area.

Perhaps its just where I live, but I couldn't name a single startup semi-conductor company within a 100 miles.

I work for a relatively large company, if we couldn't protect our new ideas we couldn't afford to do any development. We'd do all the work and then someone would just copy it.

This was never the intent of patents. They were supposed to prevent large companies from stealing ideas from the little guy, not the other way around. If you are a large company, chances are pretty good that people will buy from you rather then the small startup knockoff.

 

[CanOWorms]

That has more to do with the fact that patents are here now, and less to do with a set investment strategy.

Patents are the initial step of an investment strategy. You have to protect your investment.

Perhaps its just where I live, but I couldn't name a single startup semi-conductor company within a 100 miles.

That's likely the situation. The semiconductor industry is concentrated in only a few locations. Plus, most people are not at a level to know many semiconductor companies beyond the computer nerd popularized Intel, nVidia, AMD type companies. There is so much more to the semiconductor industry than processors and memory.

This was never the intent of patents. They were supposed to prevent large companies from stealing ideas from the little guy, not the other way around. If you are a large company, chances are pretty good that people will buy from you rather then the small startup knockoff.

No, it wasn't. There weren't too many large corporations in the 1790s developing technological products in the United States. The intention of the Patent Act was to promote the technical arts via disclosure.

 

[Ruptga]

To the contrary, if we did away with patents entirely there would be little incentive to innovate in areas that have high R&D costs. Why would you spend half a billion designing a new processor core when you could let someone else do it for you and rip them off? Sure your product would be a few months late to the party, but you could be selling high quality product for low quality price and still be making a killing off of every unit sold (because you don't have all that R&D expense to recoup).

The ripoff companies would make a killing, and whoever was stupid enough to invest into R&D would go bankrupt. Even if they tried raising their prices to ridiculous levels in order to recover R&D costs before they could be ripped off, almost nobody would buy from them because they'd know a ripoff was just a few months away. I mean, would you buy an i7 now for $5000 when you could buy one in six months for $50?

 

[lord_emperor]

Things just need to enter public domain faster, a lot faster.

 

[Bignate603]

This was never the intent of patents. They were supposed to prevent large companies from stealing ideas from the little guy, not the other way around. If you are a large company, chances are pretty good that people will buy from you rather then the small startup knockoff.

Hardly. The purpose of patents are to protect the person or group doing the work to come up with the idea so they can actually reap the reward. While a big company may have an advantage over a start up there are other big companies that they compete against that could take the idea and run with it. If our competitors could just take whatever they wanted two things would happen.

1. The incentive for innovation would be diminished
2. When we did find something we wouldn't tell anyone how we did it. One purpose of a patent is to force the inventor to say how they did it to further the knowledge that's out there. Everything would become trade secrets.

 

[PsiStar]

I have done my own share of reverse engineering. As a result, I try think of ways to obfuscate my own designs either by process and/or choices of materials ... just to pick 2.

The catch phrases "multi-domain" and "multi-physics" have not come about simply because some software developer was trying to make their code more realistic. The driving market is that patents utilizing multiple disciplines are far more difficult to get around. The products do not need to cost more to produce, but the designers need a broader education and be creative as well ... not necessarily seen in all locales in the world.

Software patents ... I do not think are much different than I posted earlier. There is a lot of bullying in the business world, so be it. In other words just because a patent exists, does not mean that it is enforceable. Many do not understand that. It may be that a patent is being infringed upon, but to what extent, what is the value of the damages ... is it worth it to go after in other words. In contrast, just because it appears that there are obvious loopholes around a patent does not mean that the holder with deep pockets won't press "enforcement".

As far as patents protecting the small guy. I don't know about that ... just how many antennas can I use in my life? Thinking about the patents issued to IBM that I see posted in the local paper. The biggest deterrent for the individual is that filing a patent costs $15K to $20K.