Look. The 'problem' with patent trolls is two fold: (1) The legal system permits them to shake down companies in ridiculous ways, and (2) The patent system grants obscene patents.
The solution is to attack those two problems. Not to attack the concept of patents themselves nor NPEs.
If the anti-patent-troll efforts were focused upon those two points specifically, meaningful reform would be much easier to achieve; fewer special interests would be aligned against the changes.
It's not realistic to expect patents to be granted more intelligently. We are by definition, in the hypothetical best case (all honest actors), talking about the absolute bleeding edge of technology, where you are going to need real experts to be able to discern what is "real innovation" and what isn't. I don't even consider myself capable of analyzing patents except for in an incredibly narrow slice of computer science where I've worked for 10 years, so I'm not sure where you expect to find these generalists who will one day be looking at AI algorithms and the next day be judging graphics code. The only alternative would be to literally have an expert from every subfield. Even if you had infinite funds to fill this magical patent office, why would such experts take this boring job (unless their goal is to work on physics on the side ;) )? As it stand today btw, most patent clerks being hired are engineers straight out of college, and I imagine they aren't exactly the top of their class. No one dreams of being a patent clerk.
This is all exacerbated by the fact that the patent agency is a government agency, where there really isn't anything incentivizing them to get better. And yet on the other side you have lawyers who are 100% incentivized to create the most convoluted patents to actively confuse (the already ill-equipped) patent clerks and juries.
I also agree with the statement "if we could just grant the right patents then this wouldn't be a problem". I just don't see any reasonable way to increase the fidelity of patent grants, nor a reasonable fallback system for when a bad patent DOES inevitably get granted (trial by jury for discerning innovation is probably the worst method).
1000 years ago you could be a mathematician, poet, and biologist. Today, you have to go to school for 5 years to get a PhD in an incredibly focused subfield. 100 years ago the patents you were dealing with were "machine that makes light". Now its methods of improving graphics performance when running on this super specific kind of computer architecture. It might have been reasonable for an outsider to make a judgement call before, but I seriously don't think it is anymore.
Patents are morally reprehensible in principle, the result in practice is therefore inevitable. There is no middle road or way around this: patents must be abolished.
Let's take the intent of patents at face value, ignoring the perverse incentives and broken review process that may jeopardize their utility even in the private sector. Patents claim to benefit the public by providing incentive to (a) invest in research that may be easily "scooped" by competitors and (b) disseminate information about inventions so that others can benefit. I do not find either compelling in the case of universities. The vast majority of research at universities occurs regardless of possible royalties because it is externally-funded and researchers compete for grant funding and prestige. Publishing a significant result first garners citations and prestige (and likely helps fund future proposals), directly benefitting both the researcher and their institution. Similarly, researchers publish important innovations because publications are literally the currency of academia.
You're assuming too much about academia and the people in it. We're not all automatons driven by the need to write papers. Plenty of people (eg grad students) are willing to commercialise research work given the opportunity.
Also, please don't assume that whatever can get published in a Nature paper is ready for mainstream use. It can take years of further R&D (that's not paper-worthy) to actually create something for the market. Dis-incentivising that process would be detrimental in the long term.
Note: my comments relate to science-based patents, not software ones (I don't really understand those).
Edit: If the problem is with the Patent system, that's where a solution must be found. Identify and deal with the actual problem, not the symptoms.
You are assuming everyone is working at a well-funded research institutions. There are smaller universities where research grants are necessary and patents are also a way to keep someone for promotion. When you go to some scientific /engineering conference, you'd find many people holding one or more patents. This is almost a competition and a ranking system. The more patents you have, the prouder you feel. Anyone can conduct a research, with or without research grant, but patent is not. When you have a patent along with a published paper, people look at this product very different - this is good - otherwise someone else would have already done it.
I'm not sure if this is surprising to people who are familiar with how universities often take the work of graduate students and make it closed and try to profit off of it. It is a huge problem that universities are forcing software in particular to be closed source just so they can profit off of their researchers/grad students.
I was a grad. student for three years. I am not sure it is a "take the work of graduate students and make it closed" kind of deal. It is more like you are an employee of the University and your work belongs to your employer. Also, at least at UT, the grant system was designed to be protective of the rights of the Grad. student/researcher so that his/her work could be monetized later if need be.
1. The universities do have a legitimate right to the work of grad students. They provide the facilities and the environment for this work to happen. And this is not just paying the electric bills and some of the stipends. It includes teaching the right courses, inviting leading researchers to speak thereby enabling the creation of new knowledge, helping conduct research conferences and so forth. It's only fair that they earn some money off the work that the grad students and faculty do.
2. Universities have a strong incentive to monetize their intellectual property. This is why they will almost always licence the IP back to the inventors for reasonable terms if the inventors want to start a company with their work. Just owning IP isn't very useful to universities, they want to earn royalties.
3. It's the current climate of academic funding being extremely hard to find that is forcing universities to look for newer revenue streams. If you are frustrated with their behavior, at least a part of the blame goes to our anti-intellectual Zeitgeist which regards academic teaching and research with extreme mistrust.
being a former College Librarian I totally agree with the statement. it was so frustrating to hear the aggression and fear of Open Source. when it came to copyright librarians are the biggest defenders. I never understood why.
also these academia patents probably had public money funding then also.
> also these academia patents probably had public money funding then also.
Yes, but does that mean that all things that made from public funding should not be monetized? Is it a requirement that a road constructed out of taxpayer money should not have a toll?
Entirely anecdotal, but I once had a professor invite a person from our University's patent office to come and explain some things about intellectual property to us. I was disgusted by how he bragged about the number of law suits the university had prosecuted, rather than the number of successful innovations that had been brought to the industry. I think it's great for university's to drive innovation and adoption, but I must question the motives of some of the individuals.
What is there to question? Either their motive is to make money, or it is to do as much research as possible. But it takes money to do research. One way to get money is to patent and license what you have so you can continue to innovate (which is the main reason why we have patents in the first place)
I find that the article is conflating the interests of the general public with those of a private company. A lot of money investment goes into research by a University. It is not clear to me why they shouldn't attempt to monetize it. At the extreme, yes, this may turn out to become patent trolling. Surely, there is a middle path where the university gets compensated for the amount of investment that goes in.
What exactly is the problem with patent trolls? Someone made an invention and wants to profit from it, and not every inventor is good at starting and running a business. Besides in quite a few business sectors the barriers of entry are too high to be able to monetize an invention from scratch. You see the exact same with lawyers, accountants, etc. Companies specialize in those specific tasks so they can be good at what they do, and other businesses hire them to simplify their own.
As I see it the problems are that patents are granted on ridiculous things, every new type of digital device comes with a slew of patents that basically replicate everything that can be done with a computer, and in biology patents are granted on DNA simply for finding it in a creature, not for actually designing it. That is one thing that should be solved, the other thing that should be fixed are the damages awarded by courts. For a phone or software product with 10000 features any single one shouldn't be worth much more than a ten thousandth of the price.
Your second paragraph seems to answer the question posed in the first one. If patent trolls actually produced nonobvious inventions and infringers were mostly copiers instead of independent inventors, then patent trolls would not be much of a problem.
[+] [-] alexeisadeski3|12 years ago|reply
The solution is to attack those two problems. Not to attack the concept of patents themselves nor NPEs.
If the anti-patent-troll efforts were focused upon those two points specifically, meaningful reform would be much easier to achieve; fewer special interests would be aligned against the changes.
[+] [-] tolmasky|12 years ago|reply
This is all exacerbated by the fact that the patent agency is a government agency, where there really isn't anything incentivizing them to get better. And yet on the other side you have lawyers who are 100% incentivized to create the most convoluted patents to actively confuse (the already ill-equipped) patent clerks and juries.
I also agree with the statement "if we could just grant the right patents then this wouldn't be a problem". I just don't see any reasonable way to increase the fidelity of patent grants, nor a reasonable fallback system for when a bad patent DOES inevitably get granted (trial by jury for discerning innovation is probably the worst method).
1000 years ago you could be a mathematician, poet, and biologist. Today, you have to go to school for 5 years to get a PhD in an incredibly focused subfield. 100 years ago the patents you were dealing with were "machine that makes light". Now its methods of improving graphics performance when running on this super specific kind of computer architecture. It might have been reasonable for an outsider to make a judgement call before, but I seriously don't think it is anymore.
[+] [-] interstitial|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wissler|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedbrown|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amirmc|12 years ago|reply
Also, please don't assume that whatever can get published in a Nature paper is ready for mainstream use. It can take years of further R&D (that's not paper-worthy) to actually create something for the market. Dis-incentivising that process would be detrimental in the long term.
Note: my comments relate to science-based patents, not software ones (I don't really understand those).
Edit: If the problem is with the Patent system, that's where a solution must be found. Identify and deal with the actual problem, not the symptoms.
[+] [-] yeukhon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anaphor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eshvk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wsxcde|12 years ago|reply
1. The universities do have a legitimate right to the work of grad students. They provide the facilities and the environment for this work to happen. And this is not just paying the electric bills and some of the stipends. It includes teaching the right courses, inviting leading researchers to speak thereby enabling the creation of new knowledge, helping conduct research conferences and so forth. It's only fair that they earn some money off the work that the grad students and faculty do.
2. Universities have a strong incentive to monetize their intellectual property. This is why they will almost always licence the IP back to the inventors for reasonable terms if the inventors want to start a company with their work. Just owning IP isn't very useful to universities, they want to earn royalties.
3. It's the current climate of academic funding being extremely hard to find that is forcing universities to look for newer revenue streams. If you are frustrated with their behavior, at least a part of the blame goes to our anti-intellectual Zeitgeist which regards academic teaching and research with extreme mistrust.
[+] [-] baldfat|12 years ago|reply
also these academia patents probably had public money funding then also.
[+] [-] eshvk|12 years ago|reply
Yes, but does that mean that all things that made from public funding should not be monetized? Is it a requirement that a road constructed out of taxpayer money should not have a toll?
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismcb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eshvk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anaphor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Rizz|12 years ago|reply
As I see it the problems are that patents are granted on ridiculous things, every new type of digital device comes with a slew of patents that basically replicate everything that can be done with a computer, and in biology patents are granted on DNA simply for finding it in a creature, not for actually designing it. That is one thing that should be solved, the other thing that should be fixed are the damages awarded by courts. For a phone or software product with 10000 features any single one shouldn't be worth much more than a ten thousandth of the price.
[+] [-] emiliobumachar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaykf|12 years ago|reply
"Are Universities Patent Trolls?", Mark Lemley, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=980776