
"Patent trolls could be the end of Silicon Valley" says Tim O'Reilly - cjfont
http://thenextweb.com/video/2011/10/21/tim-oreilly-says-patent-trolls-could-be-the-end-of-silicon-valley/
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zmmmmm
Patent trolls are a symptom of the problem that the patent system
misidentifies the risk involved in invention.

The concept is to mitigate the risk of innovating by adding reward. But the
reward in the patent system is associated to the conceptualization of the idea
which (mostly) carries no risk. The risk comes when you try to invest in that
idea to bring it to market. So patent trolls can capture all the reward but
not have any of the risk. The only way to solve this is to limit the reward to
match the risk: a patent owner should only be entitled to damages that are
directly comparable to the revenue they themselves are making from the same
invention in the same market. If a patent troll is doing nothing with an
invention then it should fall into the public domain.

~~~
netcan
Even that has issues. Say you invent X and start selling it locally. You're
making a few $100k p/m and growing fast. The global market could be in the
billions but your planning on growing one town at a time.

Meanwhile, another company with resources uses your invention and decides to
grow 10 cities at a time. They can be 10X bigger than you very fast. They're
eating your lunch, even if you'd only have made a fraction of what they made
in that period.

That said, patents aren't supposed to be for inventors, they're supposed to be
for society, to help stuff get invented and produced. Society benefits more
from the larger company.

~~~
jonnathanson
_"patents aren't supposed to be for inventors, they're supposed to be for
society, to help stuff get invented and produced. Society benefits more from
the larger company."_

It's both.

The original vision for the patent system, as laid out in the Constitution,
was "...to promote the progress of science and useful arts [thereby
benefitting society as a whole], by securing for limited times to authors and
inventors the exclusive right to their writings and discoveries."

The end-goal is, as you've stated, the benefit of society as effeced by
innovation and discovery. An important implication in that goal is that
society does not benefit, and maybe even hurts, from stagnation in the arts
and sciences. The founders theorized that a society free from any patents or
protections would lead to stagnation, because there would be no financial
benefit to the inventors, and hence, fewer would get into the innovations game
in the first place. In order for society to benefit from innovation, being an
inventor needs to have some serious upside, so that more inventors keep
inventing.

There's nothing in the letter or spirit of the US patent system that claims
the "larger company" or the "smaller company" in your example is better for
society. Indeed, the patent system is mainly concerned with the
startup/inventor at its seed stage. Where the startup or inventor goes from
there is left open to the dynamics of the marketplace.

~~~
wnight
The section you quoted only supports the claim that patents are for society -
all benefits to the creators are merely to promote the progress of science,
etc...

They merely gave congress the power to do this, like declaring war, but they
didn't mandate it.

Patents are broken. Fundamentally and in this implementation. We could reward
those who helps society, such as inventors (regardless of who builds the
invention) and the engineer who creatively gets the price down to where
everyone can have one, and the manager who wrangled thousands of people to
make something great, all without granting a single monopoly.

Simply divide the cost of the patent office (ignore the money it collects
because it's a tax on industry), and give it to the people who've made things
we like/need. For more money, tax industry equivalently to the average current
patent litigation burden and give that to the innovators as well. It's no less
fair than what we do now, at its worst, and its upsides are tremendous.

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crag
My problem with patent-overload is that it's turned into a protection scheme.
Big company approaches me and my little company and says,

"We think we have some patent issues".

And I say, "Really? Unlikely, we wrote everything from scratch."

And they reply, "How much money did you make last year?"

And I ask, "What's the got to do with anything?"

And they say, "do you know how much it will cost you to defend against our
claims? So you can license for this sum now or pay 100 times that to your
lawyers."

Guess what I do?

It's the same with patent trolls. Although they usually wait until you have a
product to go after.

~~~
glassx
It sounds a lot like how the Mafia operates...

~~~
Tobu
Right, it's a protection racket. Except that software isn't anyone's turf in
particular, there are no gang wars to keep the troll count low, so you'll end
up paying, paying, and paying again until you are big enough to spend a lot on
IP lawyers. Then the lawyers start to twiddle their thumbs, and you begin to
acquire your own patent portfolio. Then you become part of the problem.

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cynest
The second paragraph is a direct quote from wikipedia. See:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tim_O%27Reilly&...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tim_O%27Reilly&oldid=453563125)

The quote in question:

>Tim has been active in this space and in 2001, O’Reilly was involved in a
dispute with Amazon.com, leading a protest against Amazon’s one-click patent
and, specifically, Amazon’s assertion of that patent against rival
barnesandnoble.com. The protest ended with O’Reilly and Amazon.com founder
Jeff Bezos visiting Washington D.C. to lobby for patent reform.

~~~
sumukh1
Kind of ironic.

And it's not like copyright trolls are limited to Silicon Valley. It's coming
from content "creators" like the blog linked. If the quote that was stolen was
originally from the AP the blog would have to pay $40. (See:
<http://mashable.com/2009/08/02/associated-press/>)

~~~
chc
Copyright trolls are almost wholly absent from Silicon Valley. They tend to be
in Hollywood. Patents and copyrights are totally different things.

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kevinalexbrown
My biggest problem with patent-overload isn't Apple v. Google v. Amazon, and
lost innovation, it's Big Company v. Samll Company (particularly the physical
engineering kind), with large legal departments versus smaller ones. E.g.
"please top infringing on our bs ethernet connector patent"

~~~
iqster
One solution could be to give patent amnesty to small independent
organizations - less than X million in revenue. That would at least have
prevented LodSyS from going after small developers. The basis for this is
recognition that a small entity would simply implode if they had to defend
themselves in a court of law.

~~~
tomjen3
The problem is that the big companies would then infringe on the patent
deliberately through a bunch of completely owned sub companies created solely
for that purpose.

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ltamake
Well, patent trolls cause companies to spend more money on legal efforts than
on innovating so I agree.

 _insert rant about how broken the patent system is here_

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InclinedPlane
The system has always been defective to a significant degree. The difference
today is that the information age makes it that much easier to abuse and run
afoul of the system. It's certain that there have been many independent
invention "patent violations" throughout recent history that flew under the
radar of the legal system merely due to the difficulty of researching such
things in an era of less pervasive communications.

We've sped up the rpms on the centrifuge and the system is shaking itself
apart.

------
freejack
The only thing keeping the trolls slightly at bay (such as it is) is that they
are forced to do their own prosecution. I think its only a matter of time
until the IP lobby wises up and start agitating to pass laws that make patent
violations a criminal matter such as they have done with other forms of
intellectual property, i.e. trademarks, etc.

Over the years, many of the checks and balances have been eroded and much of
modern IP law is a one-sided scam that doesn't work in favour of the market,
competition or society as a whole.

