

FTC publishes a long list of questions it wants to ask “patent trolls” - Suraj-Sun
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/ftc-publishes-a-long-list-of-questions-it-wants-to-ask-patent-trolls/

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beloch
Patents have always struck me as a bit like a mob protection racket. Either
you pay for the right to do business or they send lawyers in to make your life
hell. The business landscape is a bit like New York back when it was ruled by
gangs. A business might openly pay protection to one gang while secretly
paying another gang to shake down their rivals. These patent troll companies
are a bit like those shake-down gangs, only even less discriminating. They
wouldn't exist if respectable companies weren't lining up to sell them patent
rights.

Perhaps patent law, as it currently stands, really is analogous to DIY
justice. If you want a patent, it is entirely incumbent on you to pursue it.
There isn't any kind of public authority running around trying to determine
who came up with what first and making sure they get compensated for it.
Lawyers are the new hired assassins and goons. Perhaps the only way to tame
this jungle of gangland warfare is to develop something like police for the
business world.

~~~
eps
> Patents have always struck me as a bit like a mob protection racket

Always? Seriously? Just like that? Even when a pharma company invests huge
sums into R&D of a new drug and relies on patents to try and recoup this
money? That's too a mob protection market for you?

The concept of the patent protection is solid. It's the execution that went
astray at some point when they started issuing very generic patents. Bitch
about that.

~~~
chongli
_Always? Seriously? Just like that? Even when a pharma company invests huge
sums into R &D of a new drug and relies on patents to try and recoup this
money?_

Yeah, just as drug gangs invest large sums of money to try and expand their
turf.

 _The concept of the patent protection is solid._

No, it isn't. It has big problems even in the pharma industry, especially as
the gold rush on small molecules winds down.

Patents are monopolies and monopolies are bad for consumers. The idea that we
have to bribe inventors with such a dangerous power ought to be farcical and
obviously wrong to most people at this point, yet it continues to be repeated.
The other idea that markets will somehow align with the medical needs of the
population is also wrong, as evidenced by the failure of health care in the
US.

If we want important medical research done we ought to do the obvious thing
and pay universities and non-profit research labs/hospitals to do it. Hell,
we're doing a _ton_ of that already and then selling the patent rights away
for pennies on the dollar.

~~~
beloch
Publicly funded research typically focuses on curiosity driven, high-risk,
long-term research that doesn't have very good odds of ever producing a viable
commercial product. Private enterprise focuses on short-term, low-risk
research and engineering, packaging, marketing, etc. to bring safe-bets to
market. For every big-pharma dollar spent to produce a new drug, ten
government dollars were probably spent to get the underlying science to the
point where pharmacorps were willing to touch it, and a hundred dollars more
of government funding probably went off on various other tangents that turned
out to be dead-ends.

On the other hand, academics often suck at commercializing their research.
Bringing a drug to market involves many years of careful study and clinical
trials that are utterly boring to most researchers in academia. You can't get
journal publications out of your twentieth double-blind study looking for
side-effects! Big pharma companies do perform a valuable service, but the
rewards they receive are out of proportion. Multiple decades of monopoly are
an unreasonable reward for performing this last step in development,
especially when a lot of drug patents are the result of meaningless changes to
existing products that are made solely to restart the monopoly clock!

Taking academic research and turning it into a commercial product does take
time and money, and without patents this crucial last-step might not be
adequately incentivised. However, If corporations want exclusive rights to
commercialize publicly funded research, perhaps the public deserves a cut.
Perhaps Pfizer, etc. should be on the hook to help fund some of the taxpayer
funded research they benefit from. Either that, or some alternative way to
fund commercialization of academic research needs to be found.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>Bringing a drug to market involves many years of careful study and clinical
trials that are utterly boring to most researchers in academia.

This sounds like an excellent argument for doing away with medical patents and
replacing them with financial incentives (like a percentage of revenue tax on
anyone who sells the new drug for a few years) with proceeds going to whoever
paid for the clinical trials.

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TallboyOne
All I can say is... I don't get upset by much in this world, but this is one
thing that turns my heart to such table-flipping, redhot, searing rage.

I am so glad to see this, it makes my soul glow.

Down with these abysmal scum of the earth.

~~~
gavinpc
I suspect this is not all you can say.

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pedalpete
One question I'd like to see added is "how much revenue does this firm make
from this patent and how much does it stand to loose due to this
infringement".

This, I think, would immediately make it noticeable if the person is a patent-
troll, or a legitimate business trying to protect their revenue.

I believe, that in the spirit of patents, a patent holder should have to prove
damages to their revenue (or possibly future revenue).

~~~
mikeash
The problem with that standard is that it leaves out legitimate inventors who
lack the capital to produce and sell their invention.

This doesn't show up much when it comes to internet and software, because the
barrier to entry is low. But there are a lot of legitimately patented
inventions that require big money to manufacture. A small inventor who cannot
afford to manufacture their inventor on their own would lose out, because
other players could simply start using their invention without paying, knowing
that the small inventor has no revenue to point to.

Personally, I think the real problem is that the obviousness test is simply
not applied. Patents should be for inventions that take legitimately difficult
insight and work to achieve. They should not simply be a way to reward the
first person to think of an idea that a thousand other people could have come
up with if they had been in the same situation.

Making revenue solely from licensing out a patent to other parties is not
necessarily bad, _if_ it's a good patent. This turns into "patent trolling"
when the patent being used is something obvious, and the targets are being
sued after coming up with the idea independently.

~~~
ScottBurson
Yes. This is why I keep saying that to sue for infringement, one should have
to supply _objective_ evidence of nonobviousness: evidence that the problem
the patent solves was previously known and was considered difficult.

The mere lack of demonstrable prior art should not suffice.

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dangero
Perhaps best case is that the FTC concludes that patent trolls aren't breaking
the law at all. That could be the start of software patent reform.

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jfasi
It warms my heart to see hints that the tide might be turning on patent
trolls. While this precise effort might not yield results, it's comforting to
see that this has gained attention from the body whose job it is to address
these sorts of abuses.

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huhtenberg
Better than nothing I guess, but what if this ends with FTC establishing a
formal criteria for "patent asserting entities" and then said entities would
start working around it, say, by hiring an outsourced VB developer to become a
software company? Trolls are already run by people that lack ethics, so they
will just bend yet another batch of rules when they hit them.

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drakaal
I helped fight Acacia on the Streaming video patent that threatened to kill
porn on the Internet.

There are definitely trolls out there. Acacia was one of them.

At the same time there are organizations that are viewed as trolls that have
legit claims to enforce their IP.

The MPEGLA that collects royalties for h.264 is a good example. Most people
who use VLC never pay their royalty. They should. Part of the reason we don't
get better video codecs is because the royalties don't get paid and so there
isn't reason to do the research into improvements.

Yes, there is WebM, no it is not free of patent issues, but that is another
subject, not for this thread. The point of this is that there are many times a
patent is needed, and sending collection letters is necessary.

~~~
BerislavLopac
A codec is software. Software is mathematical formulae in code form. Math, and
therefore software, should never be patentable.

~~~
drakaal
Hardly. You clearly don't understand what a Codec is. It is not simply "math"
anymore than Google Search is just "math" or a physics engine for a game is
"just math".

Justify your piracy with better arguments.

~~~
XorNot
MPEGLA collect royalties from device makers and chip-makers. Good luck to them
if they want to collect royalties from every VLC user. I can think of nothing
which kills the demand for H.264 decoding hardware faster.

EDIT: This is as an aside to the fact that I'm pretty sure they don't have an
enforceable claim to kill x264.

~~~
drakaal
MPEG LA also collects for software implementations Who do you think Microsoft
Pays for the h.264 decoder in Windows.

X264 is derived from the SMPTE Sample code that is provided by the standards
body. It is Open Source but it is not Free.

~~~
XorNot
Functionally indistinguishable - x264 don't sell it. x265 was created
precisely so vendors could sell it.

