

How would you disrupt the patent system? - iand
http://blog.iandavis.com/2011/08/05/how-would-you-disrupt-the-patent-system/

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azakai
A class-action suit against the patent office.

The main problem today is that the patent office grants too many trivial
patents. It isn't surprising that it does so, it is motivated to do that: It
gets paid per patent, and the faster a reviewer agrees to a patent, the
quicker the work for that patent ends.

The only way to fix that is to reverse or at least balance the incentives.
Which means, a big cost for every trivial patent the patent office issues.

It would be good if lawmakers passed legislature that did that. But we can't
expect them to. A class-action lawsuit can do the same, though. Everyone that
has ever been sued or forced to take a license for a trivial patent has been
harmed by the patent office not doing its job properly. All those people have
standing to sue. For such a massive amount of people, a class-action lawsuit
is the way to go.

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nextparadigms
And sadly, the Obama guy responsible for the current "patent reform" wants the
Patent Office to make the filing and acceptance of patents even _faster_.

They're completely going in the wrong direction, full speed ahead.

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BigZaphod
There's probably problems with this, but...

Patents should not be an exclusive license. Instead they should be a limited
time income tax benefit. In other words, when you are granted a patent then
you get some small percentage break in your income taxes for some number of
years. So the only way to benefit from granted patents is to have some actual
income! Once an idea is patented, you cannot charge a license fee for the idea
as the idea is now public. You can, however, still license implementations of
the idea - just like you can with implementations of proprietary ideas covered
by trade secret.

The granting of patents would work the same way they do now - first one to
file wins. However since you do not get the benefit of owning an idea for the
next 20 years and collecting licensing fees on it, the benefit of filing for a
patent on new ideas immediately might be a lot lower than it would be to just
keep it secret under trade secret and use it yourself as long as possible. The
idea here would be to balance the value of an idea in trade with the value of
it as an income tax benefit. If you have a bunch of good ideas you've been
using for years but are no longer really "secret" you could attempt to patent
those old ideas so that the rest of the world can share them and you can get
some tax breaks on perhaps the down swing of a product's life cycle. If
someone else has already patented the idea ahead of you, well, so be it. The
idea is out there already so society hasn't lost anything.

My thinking is that this could be balanced so that the tax benefits are such
that companies would want to keep things secret for awhile but then attempt to
patent older ideas once products near end of life. It's a race and balance
there between keeping something secret and trying to get the tax benefit out
of old ideas that might not be very profitable on their own anymore. Any tax
benefit would be better than none, so it would seem that old ideas that are no
longer used but were being hoarded by the company would suddenly be "valuable"
to them, so they'd get the idea out into the public and everybody wins in the
long run.

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SamReidHughes
It's really easy to come up with patentable ideas at the current standard of
patentability. If you _paid_ people for patents as you suggest, you'd just get
flooded with patents for novel but useless contraptions. So then you'd need to
get the government deciding whether something is useful and paying people
create allegedly useful inventions, rather than the marketplace.

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BigZaphod
No one would be getting paid (by way of tax discount) for a patent unless
they're already doing something the market values and therefore generating an
income to tax in the first place. It doesn't matter if the income is from use
of the idea in the patents or not. Any income generation is a sign the market
is rewarding them for _something_. The government doesn't need to decide
anything differently than they do now.

The patent system is already flooded with useless and novel things. The reason
is that people are hoping that over the next 20 years (or whatever) that the
idea might suddenly become valuable and they can profit off it. With my idea,
at least, you cannot profit from a patent unless you're already profiting in
the market.

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SamReidHughes
You're proposing that Joe the candy store owner be given money by the
government for filing a patent on kite-powered lawn mowers.

You claim that since Joe is evidently providing _something_ the market values,
we should cut his taxes.

But that's what _everybody_ with income does. So why not cut everybody's
taxes? We could do that without a sideshow of filing useless patents.

This idea

1\. Does not tie rewards in any way to actual innovation.

2\. Explicitly suggests that people keep things as trade secrets for a while,
which negates the actual purpose of the patent system!

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BigZaphod
If you know the perfect solution, I'm sure we'd all love to hear it. All
you're doing it tearing me down. You're not offering any suggestions to fix
these apparently obvious glaring problems in my idea or the current system.

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nextparadigms
I think patent pools are the quickest way to solve this issue in the short
term. It won't solve the patent troll problem, but it will slow it down
because everyone in the pool will have access to a vast amount of patents, so
it will be harder for the troll to reach any company that participates in the
pool, or at least there won't be as many trolls going after them.

But it should work very well in protecting the companies from the pool against
large "patent aggressors", or even against other pools from competing firms.
Think of it as NATO vs Russia+China.

In the long term, if patents don't get abolished, at least I'd like to see a
law that allows companies to _opt-out_ of the patent system[1], so they don't
get to sue others, even if they become big companies, but others can't sue
them either. This won't kill the patent system overnight, so big companies who
are against abolishing patents, because they have so many, will still be able
to assert their patents against other big (or small) companies who also have a
lot of patents and don't want to lose them overnight.

 _[1]This opting out of the patent system idea came from someone else here on
HN._

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tzs
> In the long term, if patents don't get abolished, at least I'd like to see a
> law that allows companies to opt-out of the patent system[1], so they don't
> get to sue others, even if they become big companies, but others can't sue
> them either.

That's the most ridiculous idea for patent reform I've ever read. There are
two possibilities.

1\. Patents in fact do encourage innovation (at least in some industries) by
allowing innovators to recoup their R&D costs before the copiers can jump in.
Without this, copiers would get in too fast and reduce the price to where the
innovator never makes back the R&D costs.

2\. Not #1.

In case #2, we should just get rid of patents.

In case #1, which is most likely the correct case at least for industries
where it takes a huge amount of R&D to get a new product to market (e.g.,
drugs), your suggestion would in effect encourage the formation of more copier
companies, and give them free reign to copy.

~~~
nextparadigms
And what's so wrong about copying? Do companies really start a business
thinking they won't get copied? Getting copied by more companies means you'll
have to innovate faster, and the end result will be higher quality products
for customers, and lower prices. I don't think a little higher competition
across the board will stop companies from being built.

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mayank
The religious faith in free markets you seem to imply is a bit naive. In
reality, startups would be crushed by the biggest player sucking up their
innovations and broadcasting it faster and to a larger audience. Let's not
forget that patents were originally meant to level the playing field, and
that's not a terrible goal (the execution is another matter).

Mathematically, your free markets need to be clamped at some boundary
conditions if you don't want them to get stuck in a local optimum (e.g., big
company swallows all). Patents are one way to do this, in theory at least.

~~~
nextparadigms
And your faith that small companies actually use patents to defend themselves
against big ones is a bit naive, too. If anything the big companies use their
vast amount of patents to crush small startups that compete against them, even
if they managed to get 2-3 puny patents. But the truth is many of them can't
even afford to buy a lot of patents.

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ww520
1\. Cut the patent expiration time. Cut it by 50%. 2\. Cut the patent
expiration time further of non-original owner patents. Cut it by 75%.

~~~
nextparadigms
They should last anywhere from 1 year to 5 years, depending on the importance
of technology. For example, if it's a web related patent, like a "one-click
payment system" it should only last a year. If it's a really important
technology, in a slower industry, it could last up to 5 years. In the mobile
industry, which is very fast paced, it should last only 2-3 years.

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burgerbrain
How would I do it?

I would create a patent pool administered by a non-profit that only grants
licenses (for free) to people or entities who do not own their own patents or
own other entities which own patents. Owners of patents would not be granted
licenses even for a fee. Patents would be donated to the pool as a form of
charity.

No idea if that would work, but that's what I'd try. A key problem I see is
that getting a patent is expensive, it's hard for individuals (from whom most
contributions would undoubtedly come) to compete with companies who make a
game of churning out as many patents as possible (IBM for example). If however
it became large enough, and there were changes in the current system to make
defensive patents less valuable, hopefully it could reach a certain critical
mass where it would make sense for companies to gift all their patents to the
pool in order to gain access to the others.

Startups without existing patents would of course benefit from this.

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Astrohacker
Government will not solve this problem. Companies should operate anonymously
on the internet, and just ignore patents and copyrights. Then they can't be
stopped and IP laws will become obsolete.

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drivingmenuts
5 years exclusive ownership - must be available to be licensed and may not be
buried. Renewal costs double each time. Don't renew and it becomes available
for anyone to use.

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setori88
Possibly this method might help in disrupting patents <http://peerpatent.org/>

