Why isn't there a Kickstarter for killing patents?(galenward.com) |
Why isn't there a Kickstarter for killing patents?(galenward.com) |
That's part of the problem, right? For each patent we hear about being killed, there are ten, twenty, or a hundred more waiting in the wings to take over. And why wouldn't there be, since there appears to be little financial downside for the trolls.
Anyway: Having the community spend millions upon millions upon millions to fix this problem would just be another financial drain on the industry. This is a situation where the government needs to step in and do its job, because there's a busted system and the players involved are simply not capable of fixing it without the government's help.
That's what they're doing right now. And that's the problem.
"The way the system works is that a company or individual, remaining anonymous to the public, must pay BountyQuest $2,500 to post a bounty on the site. BountyQuest, which is to receive a 40 percent commission on bounties paid, will monitor the process and will be liable to pay the bounty if the posting group cannot or will not pay it to a deserving party."
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/23/technology/23PATE.html
However Tim then shut the site down, saying "I had high hopes for BountyQuest, too; it seemed like a great idea. But while I still believe that the failure to search for prior art remains a major problem for the patent system, the company was not able to make a successful business bridging the gap. Of course, this could simply have been an execution issue, or market timing. But it could also have been the fact that the patent mess is a thorny thicket that doesn't lend itself well to penetration by amateurs."
http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2003/bountyquest_10...
You basically want to put out bounties for law firms to take cases against patents? What patents would they target? What adversarial setting would they defend / attack patents in? Couldn't this result in a race to the bottom about what things people want in the public domain - ie. a bunch of people petitioning to have a law firm attack Amazon's One-Click patent? Basically if someone made something desirable enough, then an efficient market would funnel enough money into trumping their patent through your concept, destroying whatever incentive the company had to make something valuable.
I could be off on what your suggesting, so i apologize.
While there are lots of flaws & advantages in the patent system, one major opinion I have is that there should be some sort of use/active-pursue requirement. Ie. you can't claim property ownership over an idea unless you're actively putting it into product / trying to figure out how. Or maybe a shorter length of the patent (ie. 5/10 years), unless you're actively pursuing it.
This would be similar to adjustments in other types of property law. Ie. a lot of property law is based on incentives to define ownership / acquisition in a means that most benefits society. For example in the old property case Brazelton, they didn't award ownership to the person who found a sunk ship & squatted on it, but rather awarded ownership to the person who came later but actually had the technology to lift it.
I don't actually know enough about patent law to understand how this would need to be done, but if it's just a question of putting together money to fund professional counsel or research, you don't need something specific to this; there are several things in the existing crowdfunding ecosystem that can cover your needs.
And I am suspiciously going to neglect to mention the other ones.
But seriously, you can do this on a bunch of existing platforms, if it's just about putting money together, and if what you need is some kind of white label solution, so that it's focused around specifically that topic, you can do that on CrowdHoster (disclaimer: still crowdtilt.)
(of course the less good side of this solution is that the entity best placed to play the role of white knight is one actually linked to the troll who knows exactly who has received the litigation threats. That's probably where trusted bodies like the EFF should get involved)
Your approach (if it worked) would just incentivize filing more patents to try to get bought out.
This is a great idea. Unpopular works would be inexpensive to acquire rights for, so dedicated fan communities could try this.
Some out of print works might only cost a token amount. Might be able to buy them in bulk from publishers.
The challenge the patent office has is being able to effectively ensure that a patent is novel - it is simply not possible for them to determine if an innovation is truly unique and sufficiently novel, so they grant patents on the basis that they can be disputed if the idea is proven to be not sufficiently original in the future, after doing as many checks as reasonably possible internally via their examination staff.
We need a crowd-scale community who can tap into its broader knowledge to prove these patents are invalid before they are granted, ie at the patent pending stage. This isn't an easy task, but I would imagine that once it is working effectively it would be sufficient dis-incentive for trolls to bother lodging dubious applications in the future.
The problem is the sheer number of bad patents that have been granted already, and the cost of successfully challenging them.
[1] http://www.crowell.com/NewsEvents/AlertsNewsletters/all/Cour...
It's probably better than nothing, but actually removing the patents and allowing open competition is more beneficial for the public and economy overall.
That said, it might work on a limited basis if you applied an X-Prize to certain forms of cancer. It could mobilize people to really focus on certain types of cancer and specific goals.
For example, we might find a way to cure a lot of cancers by simply detecting them when they are days old when they are easier to treat, so a better, and inexpensive, way to detect cancers would be valuable.
I see absolutely no problem with this. If the patent is defensible, then no amount of law firm action or monetary incentive should make any difference in removing the patent. Most software patents are probably indefensible which does already say a lot about software patents.
Calling for changes to patent law is where I don't understand what you're hoping to accomplish. If there was going to be any change, it would already have happened.
If true, that's a pretty depressing statement, however, it sounds like fallacious reasoning to me. Just because the law hasn't changed yet doesn't mean that things are doomed to stay this way forever.
Amazon's One-Click patent is a perfect example. Amazon would have developed one-click whether or not it was patentable. By granting the patent, we granted Amazon a monopoly and didn't get anything in return.
I LOVE the shorter patent idea - particularly for software patents. It wouldn't work for pharma, but that's okay.
Granted patents aren't re-reviewed, so someone would have to cough up a few tens of thousands of dollars to do anything with submissions on granted patents.
Is the concept that people are contributing evidence to be used should someone challenge the patent?
If it's a legitimate patent, it's likely to hold up, and/or be seen as too tough of a target, and so be seen as a waste of resources to go after.
So no one wants to touch on meaningful reform, because that would blow up just as many of their own patents. Even companies that claim to amass patents purely for defensive purposes have this incentive.
There's also an agency problem. To fight patents you need patent lawyers, but patent lawyers have a strong incentive to expand the volume of patent litigation. It's like asking why the NYSE doesn't implement one of the simple solutions that would stop HFT: they're getting a cut on the volume of trades, so they don't care at all how decoupled from economic reality trading becomes.
If you want a system of IP run by elected representatives, then you've got to accept the corruption that comes with it.
Ten years ago, you would have to mail dvds because internet speeds weren't fast enough to live-stream the office surveilance camera. Twenty years ago you would have had to snail mail a bulletin every month about status updates.
Today you make a wordpress site with a $3 a year .com address and $50 a month hosting (or host it on the various media sites interlinked like a Tumblr), post live updates, and stream / upload video and audio about progress at a whim.
The middle men of a lot of things (movie production, r&d) did not exist because people wouldn't fund those on their own. They existed because it was infeasible to organize millions of funders and to properly broadcast progress to millions the way such organizations could to a boardroom. That has since changed.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1551949/
> It often takes more than 10 years to deliver a final, licensed vaccine,5 and requires not only excellence during research and product development but also managerial and funding commitment throughout the endeavor. The cost of developing a vaccine—from research and discovery to product registration—is estimated to be between US $200 million and US $500 million per vaccine.6 This figure includes vaccines that are abandoned during the development process. In short, vaccine research and product development is lengthy, complex, and loaded with binary outcome risks.
just because the complexity of a process is abstracted away doesn't mean it's ceased to exist.
Of course they can. Where do companies get their money from? Thin air?
I find it hard to imagine that you could keep asking for more and more funding on a promise for a cure for something in 5-10 years down the road, and continue to have the same private individuals with very little personal wealth continue to throw their earnings at it.
I imagine that individual smaller projects may well benefit from it, but crowd-sourcing cancer or something equally grand, people would lose interest in it. Not because they don't care, but because human beings have human timescales attached to expectations. Something that has a hard to quantify immediate success or reward attached to it is less likely to attract attention and investment.