IV is a garbage company trying to portray itself as a bastion of innovation.
There are certain severe "bugs" in the way our intellectual property laws work in the US. IV exploits these bugs to make Billions of dollars.
IV is not concerned with whether something is good or not. They exist to make hay while the intellectual property laws remain broken.
I had no idea they had 500 people working for them. That means that there are at least 500 people that are severely deluded, or morally repugnant.
If you are an engineer or a lawyer familiar with the patent laws in this country, you can't read the claims asserted by IV and say that they are boosting "innovation" with a straight face. What they do is a dead weight loss on our economy.
I feel sorry for the people that work at IV. They have whored themselves out for a little bit more money, instead of just working productively in this economy.
I don't know how you can show your face in front of your kids and family knowing you go to work every day in an extortion racket.
I would rather make a modest living and look at myself in the mirror with no shame.
I think dogpiling Intellectual Ventures is striking at the branches, and not at the root. The problem isn’t “patent trolls.” The problem is patents:
> Even if patents actually accomplished their advertised purpose — “securing for limited Times to … Inventors the exclusive Right to their … Discoveries,” as the US Constitution puts it — they’d be a very bad idea. The claim that one can own an idea is silly on its face, and not a claim that anyone would pay the slightest mind to were it not enforced at gunpoint by the state.
> But the advertised purpose of patents is not their actual purpose.
> Their actual purpose is to restrain competition and limit innovation so as to provide economic advantage — monopoly pricing power, in fact — to established firms who, by virtue of their ability to pay off (pardon my indelicate language; I believe the word I’m looking for is “lobby”) politicians, bureaucrats and judges, can thereby indulge their desire avoid market competition on price or quality. [1]
No, patents are fine. The problem is that current patent laws enable patent trolls. If we could find a way to eradicate patent trolls while preserving patents, their intent would be served much better.
For example, you should only be able to acquire patents if you can prove you have a business pertinent to those patents. This kind of measure would instantly kill all patent trolls.
This kind of measure would instantly kill all patent trolls.
And anyone else who files for a patent but is unable to bring their idea to market in the form of a product or service. This includes (but is not limited to) private inventors, universities, research institutions and even large companies such as ARM Holdings plc.
Couldn't agree more. The focus on non-practicing entities is misplaced. There's no reason we shouldn't incentivize inventors who come up with great ideas so they can sell them to others who have the skills to bring them to market.
I think the more appropriate distinctions between good patents and bad are in the subject matter of the claims themselves (e.g. the novelty and non-obviousness requirements). Thankfully, the Supreme Court is tightening this up lately.
Thankfully, the Supreme Court is tightening this up lately.
I'm not so sure about this. The Supreme Court is attempting to define and apply standards that some experts consider arbitrary and highly subjective. One example is the attempt to make a distinction between a mathematical function and a novel software algorithm. It almost seems like the distinction is made based upon whether or not the particular justice writing the opinion is able to understand it. Some might even go so far as to say that only magic is patentable (recalling the oft-repeated Arthur C. Clarke quote).
Patents were made to protect against an injustice, but they are causing a greater injustice. The injustice they sought to protect against, is the cheating of the inventor of the fruits of his labor, by some Capitalist exploiter, who takes the invention without compensating the inventor.
Unfortunately, in order to protect against that injustice, we have created a framework that perpetuates a greater injustice. The "inventors" have become the wolves in this system, because the bar for invention is so low. And arguably there is no practical and economic system we could use to properly raise this bar. The expertise required to properly remove "trivial" patents is too expensive for the state to deploy, and is in too short supply. We need that expertise to be used to make things, not sit at the Patent Office to sort through patent applications.
Analogously, what if we were greatly troubled by bullies in American schools, and decided to deploy a system whereby highly trained monitors would follow each child around to make sure they were not bullied. The system might result in zero bullying, but the costs might be prohibitive, not only in terms of salaries for all of these monitors, but in invasion of privacy, and perhaps even persecution of innocent children that are mistakenly identified as bullies by under-skilled monitors.
If we sought to remove this system of anti-bully monitors, I'm sure we would here a giant ruckus from all the anti-bullying activists who would demand that the system be kept in place ... to stop bullying. And since bullying is such a terrible thing, we would have a hard time repealing the anti-bullying law in Congress.
And no doubt, the union of anti-bullying monitors would raise the money to lobby against us in congress, as their jobs and benefits would be under threat.
Patents were the worst "good" idea that the founding fathers had. They really fucked up bad. And I don't think we will ever be able to get out from under this shit system. The patent lawyers make too much money. The trolls make too much money. The shit-stains who file the bullshit patents and don't know how to make real products, make too much money.
And the American people don't care, because, so far, the system has just acted as a tax on engineers ... and engineers make enough money to eat. It doesn't matter to the American people that an entry level Patent associate at a big law firm makes $160,000 per year (standard and without much variation) while a software engineer that produces the patented technology makes only about $80,000. Nobody thinks there is any irony in that.
Well if you assume the judicial system is corrupt - then the real problem lies in the courts - not necessarily in patents.
>The claim that one can own an idea is silly on its face
You do realize that the la-la land you want to live in doesn't preclude the ownership of ideas. Trade secrets will always exist and there is no practical way to prevent their existence.
Not only do patents allow innovations to be shared - but it also opens up the limited-time monopolistic advantage to other industries. It's easy for Google to have a secret algorithm on their servers, or for KFC to have a secret recipe - but it's harder to have a secret algo in a DLL, or a secret engine in a car.
In your world, hilariously, in-house server side software development would be significantly more profitable than client side software development.
> Not only do patents allow innovations to be shared
No one learn from patents anymore. Thats the core argument against patents as a tool for knowledge.
If patents are a tool for knowledge, lets maximize that then. Lets require a working model. Lets require source code.
It used to be that this was how the patent system worked, but then the lobby removed it from the system. Now its just a legal document, written by lawyers for lawyers.
If it shames people from joining them and filing garbage software patents, then yes.
You aren't going to convince someone that works at IV one way or another. Its not like they haven't heard the arguments before. Its just that they don't care.
IV is an evil corporation. It does not feel pain. It cannot be reasoned with. Nathan Myhrvold struck it rich with Microsoft, then he beat cancer and now he's repaying us for all this luck by becoming the biggest patent troll the world has ever seen. Nathan is a shitstain.
Do you have any idea how morally bankrupt Microsoft was in the 90s? These guys got their training at Microsoft. The irony is the chief has completely changed, while the underlings continue on, perhaps trying to move out of his shadow.
Edit: Perhaps a little context is in order for the younger crowd here, since the MS today is very different from the MS of the 90s. First is "embrace, extend, extinguish", which was used to great effect with Internet Explorer and with Java. Their FUD campaign against Linux was legendary. They played nasty tricks during acquisitions. The list goes on[1].
1. http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_4.html (To be fair, this person obviously has an axe to grind, so read with a bit of skepticism, but I worked at both competitors and partners of MS during that time, at neither position was very comfortable.)
Well, if we look to religious texts, they have been the cornerstone of social control for millennia. There may be better tools, but judgement and shame have been undeniably effective.
Even though the PR seems to say that MJ is joining the force - you can clearly see that none of the original Vocaltec/Magicjack VoIP patents have been asserted against anyone else/used as defense in any patent lawsuit. By playing ball, we were able to use their patent portfolio to defend against the MANY patent lawsuits brought against MJ. It did help in a few cases when we were sued over a number of different VoIP and USB-related patents. From what I remember, though, it was expensive to be in their alliance and you had to contribute your own patents as well. The idea itself is interesting. I think a non-profit could better fill the need for everyone sharing a big patent blanket.
The lawsuits that IV helped you defend against, were those from trolls or from practicing entities that had patents?
I'm asking because I would think that having a bunch of patents would only protect you against practicing entities that are in violation of random other patents just by being alive, it wouldn't really stop trolls from trolling. Do I have that right?
All were from trolls/non-practicing entities except for one (which we settled). As soon as we went public, we became a target.
It would come in the form of:
"Hello, we are XYZ company are you are infringing on 1,324 of our patents related to computing and to communicating over USB - we would be happy to not move forward with our lawsuit for the sum of $500,000"
We called it the reverse nigerian prince.
It protected us from the vast majority of trolls - and it really came down to the "thump" test. The thump test is when company A asserts patents against company B. Company A comes storming in the court room (or via plain ole email) and drops it's stack of patents on top of the table. We now have to invalidate each and every claim which puts the vast majority of the burden on us. We would then turn around and drop our borrowed patent portfolio on the desk and it would thump pretty loud as well. That stopped 95% of the major patent lawsuits from moving forward, as stupid as it was. We took an aggressive stance to counter-sue for patent infringement and ALSO to invalidate via prior-art. Instead of sharks smelling blood in the water, we stopped getting the lawsuits because we aggressive sought to not only stop a lawsuit, but to invalidate the patent from ever being asserted again due to prior art which could be applied in any future patent lawsuit case (and in some instances, would invalidate the patent or have it "re-examined")
Unfortunately, I feel there is still a very vulnerable phase of small business between profitable and not profitable enough to employ these strategies. As the MJs of the world (~$200M market cap) start to adapt - the trolls simply get change their nigerian email to $100,000 instead of $500,000 and start working their way down to smaller companies.
I dont get Myhrvold. He was wealthy beyond all get-out and, judging by his educational background, was probably intellectually curious at one point in his existence. Why would he direct the fall/winter of his life energy into this bullshit?
I believe its a deep feeling of inadequacy. We are not his peers. He considers Gates and Jobs as his peers.
I suspect that despite his achievements he may have felt a bit like a peasant in their presence.
He may have wanted to achieve their fame and wealth.
He thought IV would be a good vehicle to achieve fame and fortune. I think he may not have understood the deep revulsion of the engineering world towards his methods.
He may have initially thought we would consider him a savior working for our benefit ... after all I think he used to believe he was doing it for "inventors".
Now he is too far gone probably. He either no longer cares what engineers and the world thinks, or he has deluded himself into thinking that his scamming is good for the world.
Either way, he will probably carry this infamy to his grave.
Although, I have to say, our country has a way of rehabilitating robber barons who give their wealth away. So his end-game may be to take his enormous wealth and use it to destroy some terrible affliction of mankind.
I think it would be a triumph, and perhaps ironic(?) if he took his wealth and used it to reform the patent system.
But short of that, he will probably be remembered by those of us in the tech and legal fields as a scammer and a scumbag of epic proportions, who was protected in his thieving by the laws of the USA. In any other time or place, such a man would have been tarred and feathered by a posse of his community for his conspiracies and crimes.
It's entirely plausible - perhaps very likely - Myhrvold believes in what he's doing, believes in patents, believes patents help innovation, and so on.
The world is filled with billions of people that believe truly crazy things, plenty of those people are smart and successful.
"Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that IV kept asking the same companies to reinvest, and if they didn’t, the threat was that the company could always find something to sue one of the entities over."
Say, nice corporation you got there. Shame if anything were to happen to it.
> The main issue debated is whether or not companies like IV hurt or help innovation with its business practices.
This is an interesting point. Has anyone (without a direct financial interest to do so) made a credible argument that IV is anything other than harmful to innovation?
IV is not a typical patent troll, so the standard patent troll argument is hard to apply. They do not file large numbers of small lawsuits, but rather a small number of very large lawsuits (e.g. against the Intel/Ford/AIG types). They generally do loser pays, and a few other things that make them hard to bucket as a normal patent troll.
IV spends a large amount of money (billions [1]) on purchasing patents. One might reasonably expect that to encourage innovation. As I understand it, most of those patents are not software patents, though (again I am not 100% sure) a large fraction of their lawsuits are based on software patents [citation needed]. One might reasonable expect that to discourage innovation.
An interesting anecdote:
Nest bought IV licenses to defend itself from Honeywell [2]. I would argue that Nest is a relatively decent innovation, so in this (very specific) case, one could argue that IV encouraged innovation.
> IV spends a large amount of money (billions [1]) on purchasing patents. One might reasonably expect that to encourage innovation.
I don't see how purchasing any kind of patents can encourage innovation. Innovation is encouraged by returns from the innovation, not by returns from sold patents. Recycling patents for profit is a completely parasitic business which has nothing to do with innovation.
You found an R&D company, the research goes slower than expected, and after five years you run out of funding. Result of that is: 1) you can sell the partial progress and recoup at least a little cash; versus 2) all your work is worth absolutely zip. If (1) is true rather than (2), you'll be more likely to engage in a risky R&D business in the first place. If (2) is true, you'll focus on something that will yield a sellable product quickly.
This sort of trajectory is not uncommon in industries that have a steep R&D curve. When I worked at an wireless R&D company, we had individual pieces of lab equipment the cost of which would fund a non-trivial web startup to an MVP stage. There are biotech startups that burn through hundreds of millions of dollars without getting to the MVP stage. What the company is left with if it can't build a sellable product before running out of funding is a major concern for these sorts of businesses.
I agree with you, and I don't think patents themselves are the issue. It is the vast number of bad patents that are being approved and used as leverage against those that can't financially defend themselves.
If an R&D firm have spent millions developing (inventing) a new method of transportation, then they should be able to have that method patented. But I'd argue that "swipe to unlock" is not an invention and should definitely not be patented.
The transfer, sale, and collection of patents is fine as far as I'm concerned. That isn't the part that's broken.
Frivolous patent suits are only possible because there are frivolous patents being approved.
The problem is that distinguishing between good patents and bad ones isn't easy and the current statutes don't make it easy. Hence the seeming concensus on HN that patents are more trouble than they're worth. Which is an entirely justifiable viewpoint given the demographic of this site: if you're in the internet sector where capital costs are low and five years might as well be an eternity, then patents are almost certainly more of a hinderence in your industry than a help.
The question is: what about the 90% of the engineering world that's outside that sector? Imagine a hypothetical company trying to do what Google is doing with self-driving cars. Is there a non-IP business model for such a company that doesn't involve "bankroll blue-sky R&D with the massive profits thrown off by your advertising business?"
If you give money to people in exchange for innovation that encourages innovation. That said, purchasing patents only encourages innovation if those patents are the product of innovation.
#1 can be a concern if #2 is too common. I.e. if it's too easy to make junk patents, trading them can become a lucrative parasite business. So some will file tons of junk patents just to sell them to trolls. In such scenario the fact that some are ready to pay for such junk encourages more patent pollution which only harms innovation.
Judging by the current patent system, patents and innovation aren't equal in many cases. On the contrary, patents are often equal to the stifling of innovation. So giving money for patents is not equal to giving money for innovation in general case.
There's also the possibility [1] that their lawsuits prevent companies from free-riding off the innovative ideas by using them without licensing them, thereby increasing the return to innovation. Though obviously if the typical such lawsuit is over obvious ideas or ones independently discovered by the defendants, that would not apply.
[1] not claiming this is the actual case with IV, but it's important to be aware of this mechanism
That is a simplistic argument. What is the difference between a large company with several labs producing 'innovation' and a large company funding several labs to produce 'innovation'?
Those examples have nothing to do with my argument. Both of your examples neglect the crux of my statement. Paying for patents is not the same as funding innovation. Funding innovation may involve paying for patents.
What I stated is that if your company makes its only revenue by the litigation involved with the patents it purchases, it is a parasite. Why? Because it does not produce any goods or services to keep the economy moving.
Of course IV does not only make revenue by litigation, they also make revenue by licensing patents without litigation. If the patent system were not broken this would be a perfectly reasonable business model, funding new inventions and selling the rights to produce them (which of course would require litigation if people produced those inventions without paying). For your argument to be valid you must establish that not only is the current patent system broken, but that it would be fundamentally impossible to have a non-broken patent system.
Devil's advocate: A secondary market for patents incentivizes investors to fund innovation, in the hopes of re-selling when/if the IP becomes valuable.
That's the story, anyway. In the real world, I think patents are vastly net-negative towards genuine innovation, and in most cases, morally repugnant besides.
A secondary market for patents is fantastic. There are secondary markets for everything. The banking/venture system is designed to allocate scarce resources as efficiently as possible - why wouldn't the same thing exist for inventions?
The real problem IMO is that patents are being issued for frivolous ideas. If patents really represented inventions of value, then the secondary market should be correctly allocating those patents to the right people. Unfortunately, patents do not represent inventions of value, because what we see is the secondary market identifying "infringements" everywhere, so it's more profitable to extort.
If there are so many infringements, how is the patent possibly novel?
I agree that the practical problem with the current patent system is in implementation: the granting and enforcement of broad, poorly-defined patents, and the costs of litigation. Whether it's possible for a good implementation to exist, particularly in a long-lived form that copes well with radically new technologies, is debatable.
My moral objection to patents can be concisely summed up by John Carmack:
"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying."
Anything that is so specific that it could not be reproduced by an independent human in a clean room (ie, the full text of Harry Potter) is well protected by copyright. Anything which can be reproduced through simple problem-solving can not be said to be "owned" by its creator. Patents outlaw thinking itself.
Without an excellent argument, I don't think I can agree. Many members of the public believe patents are a bad thing for society because 99% of all reporting on them is about the negative aspects; you rarely hear about the good that has come from them. It's the same reason people in the US feel less safe than ever from violent crimes even though the rates have dropped significantly. the norm is boring and the exceptions are newsworthy.
In practice, the efficacy of patents probably varies by industry. For software patents, I have a hard time thinking of a single instance where they benefitted innovation. Does anyone really think that Amazon wouldn't have 1-Click, or Apple wouldn't have rubber-banding, without patent protection?
In other domains, I'm sure there are instances where patents did genuine good, benefitting both their creators and society. (It's worth noting that patents are specified in the Constitution as intended for the public good.)
However, I still contend that the net effect is, on average, a drag on innovation, even if it's closer to 60/40 than 99/1. The system incentivizes a "mutually assured destruction" of big companies and patent portfolios, and blocks out small players who can't afford a legal team. It moves market competition into the domain of a flawed justice system, where even a victory can destroy a creator through millions in legal fees and years of lost productivity. It creates a vacuum filled by companies like IV who sit on their laurels and milk patent licenses, often for inventions never realized, rather than actually make anything.
Their partner programs where they partner with inventors to fund the development of inventions, and then handle the licensing and commercialization, seem like they could help innovation. Here's a description of their partnership with Caltech [1]:
The partnership allows Intellectual Ventures to fund
the inventive work of students and faculty in areas of
interest to Intellectual Ventures, such as next generation
data centers, dynamic surgical enhancements, and green and
sustainable chemistry. Caltech will own the resulting patents
and IV will receive a license to commercialize the technology.
The inventors will earn a share of the profits from inventions
that are commercialized, and will also have an option to create
startup companies based on their innovations.
I believe they have made similar arrangements with several other universities.
This is grasping at straws, but I could argue that IV has brought a lot of attention to the ludicrous nature of our IP system, which might lead to increased support of IP reform, which could help innovation.
Kind of eerie when you realize you're looking into the portrait of someone without any conscious or ethics.
I have little sympathy for the employees that got laid off, and am reassured that IV is finding it harder to operate. However, it's a bit disconcerting that they've claimed to "automate" their process.
I'd be curious to know what returns have IV realized for it's investors to date?
Also, "Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that IV kept asking the same companies to reinvest, and if they didn’t, the threat was that the company could always find something to sue one of the entities over."? Sounds like an extortion racket.
> Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that IV kept asking the same companies to reinvest, and if they didn’t, the threat was that the company could always find something to sue one of the entities over.
This is such a brazen shakedown, it's not even funny. Are there any laws which can be applied to prevent this?
There are certain severe "bugs" in the way our intellectual property laws work in the US. IV exploits these bugs to make Billions of dollars.
IV is not concerned with whether something is good or not. They exist to make hay while the intellectual property laws remain broken.
I had no idea they had 500 people working for them. That means that there are at least 500 people that are severely deluded, or morally repugnant.
If you are an engineer or a lawyer familiar with the patent laws in this country, you can't read the claims asserted by IV and say that they are boosting "innovation" with a straight face. What they do is a dead weight loss on our economy.
I feel sorry for the people that work at IV. They have whored themselves out for a little bit more money, instead of just working productively in this economy.
I don't know how you can show your face in front of your kids and family knowing you go to work every day in an extortion racket.
I would rather make a modest living and look at myself in the mirror with no shame.