If that NPR broadcast is correct, then what Intellectual Ventures is doing -- licensing shell companies to do their dirty work for them while proclaiming publicly that they're purely defensive -- is so evil that one has to wonder if they even believe their own bullshit. Attacking inventors and creators in the name of defending them gives new meaning to the phrase "protection racket". Three cheers for Chris Sacca having the balls to publicly make the obvious Mafia comparison.
My favorite part of the broadcast (the abridged ATC version - I haven't listened to the full hour, is it better?) was the engineer who went on about what unintelligible garbage most software patents are. The ones I've read remind me of the bogus design documents put forth by architects and middle managers in large companies -- box charts and technobabble.
The game theory of patents has been blindingly obvious to me for years. If you think others can independently come up with it, patent it. If you think it's utterly novel, hide it as a trade secret.
When you think of it like that, doesn't the whole edifice come crumbling down? The goal of patents was to encourage publication of new techniques. But the most valuable ones escape.
There are situations where it would be impossible to develop an utterly novel solution without publicity, namely any system that despite its complexity can be trivially reverse-engineered and anything whose value is dependent on the public availability of [expensive, privately-funded] research demonstrating how it works.
These edge cases exist; the problem is the patent system doesn't assume they're edge cases and instead seems to encompass anything and everything that can be classed as an invention (not to mention some concepts that are so vague and broad it's question whether they actually describe anything at all)
The problem with trade secrets companies are unwilling or unable to patent won't go away.
My favorite part of the broadcast (the abridged ATC version - I haven't listened to the full hour, is it better?) was the engineer who went on about what unintelligible garbage most software patents are. The ones I've read remind me of the bogus design documents put forth by architects and middle managers in large companies -- box charts and technobabble.
And they call them "inventions"!