That would mean only large companies would own patents. It would be the death of the independent inventor. No capital to make what you invented? Oh well…
Not at all, Patent is there for protection. So if you invent something that requires capital, but are a non-practicing entity, you can't enforce your patent. So lets say a bunch of companies start to practice your patent, all of them now have incentive to buy your patent because if any of them own it, none of their competitors can use it anymore.
>>> I would say it needs to be realigned to only allow productive companies to hold/protect patents.
>> That would mean only large companies would own patents. It would be the death of the independent inventor. No capital to make what you invented? Oh well…
> If you can't make what you invented, the whole world can't have your invention? That seems suboptimal for society.
Right now, a small independent inventor can use their patent rights to secure capital to produce their invention. If only "productive companies" can hold patents, instead of investing in small inventors, they'd just freeze them out until they lose their rights (or use that threat as leverage to buy the patents for less than they're worth).
The "whole world" won't get their invention, just the people rich enough to profit from it, and the inventor gets squat.
> instead of investing in small inventors, they'd just freeze them out until they lose their rights (or use that threat as leverage to buy the patents for less than they're worth).
I'm trying to understand your point but it seems like you are saying that all people with sufficient capital would band together to prevent small inventors from getting funding for years?
> I'm trying to understand your point but it seems like you are saying that all people with sufficient capital would band together to prevent small inventors from getting funding for years?
Legal rights are often the only protections the little guy has. Take them away, and the big guys are better able to take advantage. The people with sufficient capital don't need to band together in a conspiracy, they just need to understand their advantage, and act accordingly.
And I don't know where you're getting "for years" from. If a small inventor/"[un]productive company" can hold a patent "for years," you're basically describing the current patent system, and the ancestor comment becomes a meaningless suggestion. If the ancestor comment isn't a meaningless suggestion, someone "with sufficient capital" should be able to sue an inventor's patent into nonexistence for being held by an "[un]productive company," which would be strong leverage to demand a lower price.
One of the biggest merits of the patent system is it gives independent small inventors a chance at seeing some success. A "reform" that undermines that is not a reform worth pursuing.
Also a lot of "reforms" proposed by internet commenters aren't very thought through. Often they're just narrow things aimed to stop some specific thing that's in the front of their mind, with little consideration of collateral damage.
They can make it; they just need to pay a reasonable royalty. One of the easiest fixes for patent litigation issues would be for congress to set some bounds on what a reasonable royalty is.
There would be no reason to buy the license because you'd lose in court if you weren't using it. Companies could just use it with no fear of you winning a case against them.
You can't even just accept that the originating patent holder should be able to sue while anyone who buys the patent can't. Patent trolls would just hire the person who registered the patent or sue on their behalf.
There is no elegant solution to the patent troll problem. If someone can sue, then trolls can sue.
The days of garage invention and patenting those are gone. Patent process itself is so expensive and laborious that many do not do it, and upon that to keep patent 'alive' there is an annual expenditure.
I'm not sure whether today there are are many patents which are with small inventors and they are holding onto them till they gather enough funds to productionize them.
How about modifiying to if you can prove "prior art" on an invention but did not have sufficient capitol to file for the protection or start up a business with the patent so that someone else is granted the patent later, the prior art owner is not subject to the patent?
Not a perfect idea, but an idea to kick around on improving rather than just the blanket statments of "kill all patents" that are so trendy. Also, we don't have to say that all garage inventors are dead.
That's not a terrible idea. People likely underestimate how much of the legal system runs on - essentially - sensible human discretion in applying rules like that one.
You realize that is highly dramatized and curated?
Annually around 1.5-2 millions patents are granted. How many episodes of Shark Tank has run till now and what subset of the participants had patents on their inventions?
And, how many of those inventors would not get any funding if there was no concept of patents.
> That would mean only large companies would own patents.
Wrong. If you applied a tax to IP that increases relatively fast over time (say doubles each year), you could "easily" select the parameters so, that it makes cheap to hold your patent for a while after the invention ( assuming you have some revenue at least on sight), while making it too expensive to hoard patents for nothing, and make keeping the patents closed unnecessarily long for even the largest corporations.
Although interestingly in the EU there is now a small use-it-or-lose-it element with sound recordings, where the copyright on sound recordings expires fifty years after the original recording, or seventy years after the first publication (or at least public playback) by the rightful owner. Cue a number of labels actually officially releasing a number of previously unpublished recordings in order to prevent the corresponding bootlegs of those recordings from falling into the public domain.
Perhaps we could do something like: if a company is not actively using a patent themselves, they lose exclusive rights after a short period of time (3 years lets say). Even when sold, the time counts from when the patent was created, not bought.
Should limit the extent of the damage caused by patent trolls.
This is a good idea in theory, but what stops a factory offering to produce one of anything for a few thousand dollars, just to meet the requirements of "making a product." If there are requirements for how many you produce, how does that affect small businesses or businesses that want to keep products exclusive?
I think in general we should just halve the time of patent protection, including the lead-up time where it hasn’t been finalized yet but still protected.
They make CPU designs which they license out. That's copyrighted IP, and thus a product.
If ARM stopped making CPU designs and decided to just live off of their ISA patents while doing little to no actual development, yeah, then they certainly shouldn't have the right to be milking that cow in perpetuity, in an ideal world.
Yes, it's interesting that although patents were intended to allow huge corporations to suppress competition, now these huge corporations have to spend endless legal fees fighting patent trolls.
> patents were intended to allow huge corporations to suppress competition
Afaik, there weren't any "huge corporations" around when the patent system was first devised, only what today would look like mid-size national companies. There is a good chance the initial legislators thought they were actually protecting the little guys. Alas, good intentions tend to pave roads to very hot places...
That would essentially end innovation. If you invented the new latest and greatest gadget/medicine/process, a mega-corporation with more resources than you will undercut you with the exact same product within the week.
You can say patents relating to phones should be narrowed, but ending the patent system would be a hundred times more disastrous.
In reality, the big corporations have huge “defensive patent” war chests which your innovation probably infringes on in some way if you were to try to bring it to market. The deck is stacked against the individual inventor more so now than in the past.
I don't agree that we should eliminate parents, but it most certainly would not end innovation. China has very weak IP rights but there is still plenty of innovation.
Nah just need overhaul and better control, start with taking legal actions against patent trolls on federal level. People will always look for ways to make money with very little effort
> start with taking legal actions against patent trolls on federal level
How would that work? So you are allowed to acquire legal rights, but if you try to enforce those rights, the federal government will take action against you? Seems like a bizarre and unnecessary trap to set.
If you really want to stop this kind of thing surely the more logical thing to do would just be to say that patent rights are personal, ie, they cannot be sold to third parties. Of course, that would lead to a significant devaluation of intellectual property, which (so the theory goes) would result in less innovation.
The problem is that companies just lobby to extend how long they're valid for e.g. Disney. The entire system is fucked. I wish a bomb would just wipe out Congress sometimes.
Which countries provide more innovation, those with strong patent laws protecting inventors, or those with lax or no patent laws, allowing anyone to just copy inventions without rewarding inventors?
[1], look at figures at end of paper. Figure one shows the percent of inventions in various industries that would not have been developed without patent protection, and it's 60% for pharm, >35% for chem, and significant for machinery, electrical. This chart is from 1986, so tech didn't exist as it does now. Many other charts, some much more recent, show that without patent protection a lot of current invention would not get done.
[2] is an interesting one, a recent paper studying the effect WWII had on innovation by making patents secret so enemies could not learn from them. The effect is that without patents making companies publish innovations, follow-on innovation was slowed significantly. So this provides evidence that patents add innovation by letting competitors learn more quickly.
[3] - patents in the UK : "We find evidence pointing to a positive association between patenting and innovative performance measured as turnover due to innovation, but not between patenting and subsequent employment growth."
[4] "We find that patent approvals help startups create jobs, grow their sales, innovate, and reward their investors. Exogenous delays in the patent examination process significantly reduce firm growth, job creation, and innovation, even when a firm’s patent application is eventually approved. Our results suggest that patents act as a catalyst that sets startups on a growth path by facilitating their access to capital. "
[5] "Using unique data on all first-time applications filed at the U.S. Patent Office since 2001, we find that startups that win the patent “lottery” by drawing lenient examiners have, on average, 55% higher employment growth and 80% higher sales growth five years later. Patent winners also pursue more, and higher quality, follow-on innovation. Winning a first patent boosts a startup’s subsequent growth and innovation by facilitating access to funding from VCs, banks, and public investors."
There's hundreds more papers - go to google scholar and search and learn about it.
Now, as to your statement, "Please provide some evidence, other than your intuition, that the patent system is necessary and useful, over no patent system.
reply". Do you have any good survey papers or wide scale evidence to support that a patent system isn't necessary and useful? Anecdotes, blog posts, stories about this or that company are not solid evidence, since those all ignore the totality of evidence.
Thank you for looking into this. I'm sure most people wouldn't. I'll start at the end where you say "Do you have any good survey papers or wide scale evidence to support that a patent system isn't necessary and useful". I argue the burden of evidence is not on me to prove that something other people are advocating for is useful, it is on them.. in the same way that the burden of proof is on a person claiming something, and not on the person not claiming something.
That said, several of the papers you cite don't show that the patent system itself is better than no patent system. They are all conditioned on there already being a patent system. So, they are in the form of "if you have a patent system, than 'x' situation/circumstance is better than 'y'.
For example, your #2 example says that when patents are secret, innovation drops compared to when they are open. What about when there are no patents at all? Secret is not even close to the same as 'no patents', because in a 'secret' patent system you have no idea if you are infringing on someone's patents and will be subsequently sued out of existence.
Similarly, in your #4 and #5 examples, that can be explained by how necessary having a patent is to securing yourself against lawsuits, but these fears wouldn't be relevant in a system without patents.
Sadly, IP, including patents, are forced on most countries by way of international trade agreements so it is hard to find real examples to discuss.
As for counter-literature, there is a significant amount as well, so this will likely end like every other 'sourced' internet debate. One of my favorite references is 'The Case Against Patents' [1] . Perhaps you will find it interesting.
>I argue the burden of evidence is not on me to prove that something other people are advocating for is useful, it is on them..
When you make the first claim in a discussion, and your claim is counter to both economic theory (patents help) and the common arguments for a thing (patents help by adding disclosure and protecting small inventors), the burden on you is to prove why the economic theory or common understanding is wrong.
>several of the papers you cite don't show that the patent system itself is better than no patent system
All showed that the patent system provides benefits.
I'm already familiar with the St. Louis Fed paper. It's from 2012, and their opening sentence "The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless the latter is identified with the number of patents awarded – which, as evidence shows, has no correlation with measured productivity." is directly refuted by the evidence I posted in papers from, respectively, 2018 (references your paper), 2019 (revised 2022), 2013, 2016 (directly addresses your paper, starting on page 1, again on page 5 - provides clear evidence that your paper has been superseded in the literature), and 2017.
So, 5 more recent papers against your favorite one? I think I'll choose the more recent work, especially since a few cite your work and provide direct and irrefutable evidence that there are benefits.
Most interestingly, if you read the Levine & Boldrin paper carefully, they fill it with anecdotes, but nearly zero actual broad data, since the broad data do not support their story. The strongest citations in their paper are back to their own papers, which, if you read those, are similarly anecdote based.
The proper way to do evidence is to take all evidence, not just the pieces and anecdotes one likes, and then analyze. Their paper simply doesn't do this. It's a collection of the stories they like, incredibly many, with extremely little other evidence, or new datasets, or new analysis, to make their case.
For example, my line [3] above shows exactly how to do research: they list the datasets they used, which are all known data for the respective question. They explain their methodology for analysis. They show the numerical outcomes. They explain the relevance.
There is not one anecdote in their paper. Now count how many anecdotes your paper makes to state their case (dozens? it's truly astounding).
You're welcome to show me where in their paper they provide analysis for such large scale, all encompassing data. It's well known in the literature this paper does not do so - it's a collection of anecdotes with a popular title. It doesn't prove the case it claims to by a long shot.
>One of my favorite references
The thing about favorite references is you need to follow up on later work, otherwise your favorite reference may well be invalidated by later work when you decide to pull it out.
I generally prefer more recent research, especially when it's numerous and they cite and address older research in question, to understand a topic.
Why not just limit patents to 3 years before they expire.
In today's world this should be all you need to pay for the research and go from startup to established company.
Some products take much longer to develop. A drug or medical device can easily take 10 years from concept/ip filing to hit market.
Other products have slow uptake. If you make a novel product with growing users, Google shouldn't be able to clone it at 3 years and push it to a billion of their users.
"BlackBerry's sale is to what could be considered a "Non-practicing entity," a company that doesn't earn revenue from product or services sales, but is more likely to do so through asset protection. Many refer to these sorts of entities as "patent trolls.""
That looks pretty bad. Seems pretty obvious this is going to cost Apple & Google some serious money, even if it's just hiring more lawyers for the lawsuits from "Catapult IP Innovations".
Good question. What actually happens if an open source permissive license product is accused of violating a patent? There’s not exactly a company to sue.
I'm not. There's no point suing for patent infringement unless (a) you want to squash competitors or (b) you think you'll get a bucket of money.
Since they were bought up by a nonpracticing entity, (a) doesn't apply. There's no way they'll recoup their $600M investment by going after companies that sell low volume, low margin devices.
By the time the Linux phone people have war chests to raid, theses patents will be expired. Rest assured they're targeting some subset of FAANG. The article mentions a patent on charging batteries.
Facebook and Amazon sell stuff with batteries in them. Perhaps the trolls think they can extract a few hundred million from Oculus and Fire tablets. Come to think of it, Tesla probably has some cash laying around, and I think their cars can move and also contain batteries. Why should they be allowed to freeload?
Similarly, ICE cars use lead acid batteries, don't they?
This patent could be a gold mine, and we owe it all to RIM for inventing the rechargeable battery in the mid 1990's!
I wonder when the current patent on charging rechargeable batteries expires. I wonder who the PTO will issue the next iteration to, and if they're publicly held...
So the solution is easy, Big player should give their lawyers to the people without money in those proceeds so to not allow such precedents to be created
At $600m and most the way to being expired, I don’t think it makes economic sense to only target small players. A patent troll could also find novel ways in which a court might view these patents as applicable that Google and Apple missed.
Well, the new owners will continue collecting the same royalties that BlackBerry was getting until the patents expire; I'm not sure how much it is for this specific pool, but probably up to a few tens of millions of dollars per year.
On top of that, they can always leverage the IP against smaller existing players or new entrants and use it to bump up rates for the rest of their portfolio.
I think they couldn’t monetize because of the reputational damage of trying to extract over them. So it would just be defensive. Thus my thinking that they looked it and didn’t think they needed defending.
Maybe BlackBerry tried to charge too much (because they know Apple or Google have deep pockets) and Apple or Google decided it would cost them less to litigate or pay the troll.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if BlackBerry had more lawyers than engineers at this point.
In my failed attempt to retort with a witty pun on Ballistas, I ended up spending close to half an hour exploring a rather deep rabbit hole on the evolution of medieval siege weapons.
The company buying the patents is new with no history. Do any of the parties involved in financing the deal have a history of being litigious over patents? If the patents are generating royalties, this could just be a boring financial move where RIM gets a lump-sum cash infusion in exchange for a predictable, but finite, revenue stream.
There are many non-practicing entities that don't abuse their patents. ARM is an example.
You don't buy 600 million dollars of patents as an NPE without planning to shop around licenses with an implied threat of litigation. You don't have to be scumbags about it, but you are going to have to press your claims to make money back.
I'd argue ARM isn't really an NPE. They actually sell useful designs that are actually implemented right? It's customers are paying for a design, architecture and software--not the freedom from being sued.
Being litigious and earning revenue from non-practicing patent ownership are fairly intertwined.
Being a new company with no history is, likely, strategic. Patent wars between practicing entities tend to be multi-front. Each side brings its own war chest of patents claims. Settlements tend to be more of a cease fire than a permanent end. They agree to stop suing each other.
Being non practicing means that a patent war can't interfere with your more important interests. Being clean slate means that whoever you sue can't return fire by going after the rest of your patent portfolio.
"Patent trolling" isn't black or white definitionally, but it has earned its bad name. It's an ugly game of dirty tricks.
All good points. And if this is a new entity, it likely isn’t bound by any “you don’t sue us, and we don’t sue you” agreements. It could be new money in play.
Of course it could just be financial engineering, though I suspect that would look more like an asset backed loan.
The company may be new, but I guarantee you that it's the same old crowd of patent trolls. They will never give up until the patents are expired or certain East Texas judges retire.
What I would like to see is what does a model licensing agreement look like?
All we ever see is “threat of litigation by troll” “company takes stand against troll”
But we have no clue how the negotiations went? We have no clue how many are agreed upon, we have no clue how many are tolerable small revenue splits or something else
All we are left with are extreme positions that imagine every patent or litigant is an extortion racket and thats just negligent
Patent trolls usually go after the smaller players, not companies like Apple and Google who have enough money, lawyers and their own library of patents to defend themselves.
I'd love to know if they floated any of these patents to Google, Apple, etc... and if those companies did the math and decided that litigation against a patent troll would cost less than what Blackberry was asking for.
Yes there are. Plenty of folks out there who want to make money from their money and don't care how. So funds get raised for this kind of venture pretty easily.
We're humans. We can dis-incentivize greed through legal frameworks - taxes on speculative assets or on patents that are not used or fairly licensed by the owners, for example.
What consists of "not used" or "fairly licensed"? Who decides this, and how do those definitions evolve over time? Like most legal frameworks they would likely lag behind the reality of the times they are applied to...
I'm all for trying to prevent abuses and patent trolls and the like, but it's not as easy to solve as it might seem.
Sure, but we could set at least some basic parameters, e.g. "not used" = "has not been used in an actually available product in the last five years" and "fairly licensed" = "the patent holder has listed a process and conditions under which the patent can be licensed, there exists a mediation process in case an applicant deems the fees/conditions to be excessive, and there are no complaints filed at the regulatory agency about unfair treatment".
> has not been used in an actually available product in the last five years
What if the production cycle is longer than 5 years?
> the patent holder has listed a process and conditions under which the patent can be licensed, there exists a mediation process in case an applicant deems the fees/conditions to be excessive, and there are no complaints filed at the regulatory agency about unfair treatment
This sounds like something that everyone would dispute, and there would be a years-long waiting list for mediation.
I agree with you in principle, but I just think it wouldn't work.
Eh, there are upsides to this. Litigation funds (which invest to buy speculative chunks of 'promising' lawsuits) do enable people to sue large companies when they otherwise wouldn't have had the wherewithal. That said, it's likely a net negative, I agree.
It's in TFA: > The company is funded by a $450 million senior secure loan, which includes $400 million of "conditional commitments from a lending syndicate" led by Third Eye Capital.
So basically by patent trolling and investing in patent trolls investors are encouraging patent trolls to de facto legally harass people and companies and cause distress on multiple levels(affected company, lawyers and court) which all costs time, money and energy.
The patents that were sold had to do with BlackBerry's legacy non-core business (mobile devices) and don't comprise their entire patent portfolio. They've specifically said that the patent sale won't affect their existing customers (such as QNX licensees).
Lotnet is fundamentally a poison pill agreement against members selling their patents to non-practicing entities. It only ever makes sense to join such an agreement if you are a net implementer of patents and don't anticipate needing to exit the industry any time soon.
For a company like Blackberry, who hasn't designed a phone in years and coasted entirely on licensing and production deals with TCL, it makes zero sense to do this. If you own a lot of phone patents but aren't making any phones, you effectively already are a patent troll.
they didn't need to be apple ? they didn't even need to be #1 yet now they don't exist. same as the nokia folks. one thing though I won't blame them for is short-terminism instilled in business schools.
Patent trolls are like the herpes of the innovation world - they will infect smaller players and inhibit their ability to develop without flare ups of litigation
After generations of leadership change, can a company have the same values and vision of the previous leadership? I suppose on paper it's still BlackBerry. But selling patents of a company that was a leader in revolutionising the mobile sector to patent trolls only mean the trolls mean to aim higher in terms of litigation
They're going to be going after somebody pretty soon to recoup that cost, probably had someone in mind before they concluded the deal. Hold on to your hats, incoming!
Does anyone here run or work for a parent troll? Do you look at yourself in the mirror every day and hate what you are, or is money your only guidepost in life?
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] thread>> That would mean only large companies would own patents. It would be the death of the independent inventor. No capital to make what you invented? Oh well…
> If you can't make what you invented, the whole world can't have your invention? That seems suboptimal for society.
Right now, a small independent inventor can use their patent rights to secure capital to produce their invention. If only "productive companies" can hold patents, instead of investing in small inventors, they'd just freeze them out until they lose their rights (or use that threat as leverage to buy the patents for less than they're worth).
The "whole world" won't get their invention, just the people rich enough to profit from it, and the inventor gets squat.
I'm trying to understand your point but it seems like you are saying that all people with sufficient capital would band together to prevent small inventors from getting funding for years?
Legal rights are often the only protections the little guy has. Take them away, and the big guys are better able to take advantage. The people with sufficient capital don't need to band together in a conspiracy, they just need to understand their advantage, and act accordingly.
And I don't know where you're getting "for years" from. If a small inventor/"[un]productive company" can hold a patent "for years," you're basically describing the current patent system, and the ancestor comment becomes a meaningless suggestion. If the ancestor comment isn't a meaningless suggestion, someone "with sufficient capital" should be able to sue an inventor's patent into nonexistence for being held by an "[un]productive company," which would be strong leverage to demand a lower price.
One of the biggest merits of the patent system is it gives independent small inventors a chance at seeing some success. A "reform" that undermines that is not a reform worth pursuing.
Also a lot of "reforms" proposed by internet commenters aren't very thought through. Often they're just narrow things aimed to stop some specific thing that's in the front of their mind, with little consideration of collateral damage.
You can't even just accept that the originating patent holder should be able to sue while anyone who buys the patent can't. Patent trolls would just hire the person who registered the patent or sue on their behalf.
There is no elegant solution to the patent troll problem. If someone can sue, then trolls can sue.
I'm not sure whether today there are are many patents which are with small inventors and they are holding onto them till they gather enough funds to productionize them.
Not a perfect idea, but an idea to kick around on improving rather than just the blanket statments of "kill all patents" that are so trendy. Also, we don't have to say that all garage inventors are dead.
Annually around 1.5-2 millions patents are granted. How many episodes of Shark Tank has run till now and what subset of the participants had patents on their inventions?
And, how many of those inventors would not get any funding if there was no concept of patents.
Wrong. If you applied a tax to IP that increases relatively fast over time (say doubles each year), you could "easily" select the parameters so, that it makes cheap to hold your patent for a while after the invention ( assuming you have some revenue at least on sight), while making it too expensive to hoard patents for nothing, and make keeping the patents closed unnecessarily long for even the largest corporations.
EDIT: I accidentally included copyright in this. It is not.
Should limit the extent of the damage caused by patent trolls.
If ARM stopped making CPU designs and decided to just live off of their ISA patents while doing little to no actual development, yeah, then they certainly shouldn't have the right to be milking that cow in perpetuity, in an ideal world.
This is the current system
Will it be enough to kill patents? Maybe
Afaik, there weren't any "huge corporations" around when the patent system was first devised, only what today would look like mid-size national companies. There is a good chance the initial legislators thought they were actually protecting the little guys. Alas, good intentions tend to pave roads to very hot places...
You can say patents relating to phones should be narrowed, but ending the patent system would be a hundred times more disastrous.
How would that work? So you are allowed to acquire legal rights, but if you try to enforce those rights, the federal government will take action against you? Seems like a bizarre and unnecessary trap to set.
If you really want to stop this kind of thing surely the more logical thing to do would just be to say that patent rights are personal, ie, they cannot be sold to third parties. Of course, that would lead to a significant devaluation of intellectual property, which (so the theory goes) would result in less innovation.
The specific problem that the US patent system enables is that patent rights can be assigned to anyone, just like any other property right.
That is what allows NPEs to exploit this manifest economic inefficiency.
Ending all patents very much throws the baby out with the bathwater.
The federal government can and should intervene to reform the laws that allow this.
[1], look at figures at end of paper. Figure one shows the percent of inventions in various industries that would not have been developed without patent protection, and it's 60% for pharm, >35% for chem, and significant for machinery, electrical. This chart is from 1986, so tech didn't exist as it does now. Many other charts, some much more recent, show that without patent protection a lot of current invention would not get done.
[2] is an interesting one, a recent paper studying the effect WWII had on innovation by making patents secret so enemies could not learn from them. The effect is that without patents making companies publish innovations, follow-on innovation was slowed significantly. So this provides evidence that patents add innovation by letting competitors learn more quickly.
[3] - patents in the UK : "We find evidence pointing to a positive association between patenting and innovative performance measured as turnover due to innovation, but not between patenting and subsequent employment growth."
[4] "We find that patent approvals help startups create jobs, grow their sales, innovate, and reward their investors. Exogenous delays in the patent examination process significantly reduce firm growth, job creation, and innovation, even when a firm’s patent application is eventually approved. Our results suggest that patents act as a catalyst that sets startups on a growth path by facilitating their access to capital. "
[5] "Using unique data on all first-time applications filed at the U.S. Patent Office since 2001, we find that startups that win the patent “lottery” by drawing lenient examiners have, on average, 55% higher employment growth and 80% higher sales growth five years later. Patent winners also pursue more, and higher quality, follow-on innovation. Winning a first patent boosts a startup’s subsequent growth and innovation by facilitating access to funding from VCs, banks, and public investors."
There's hundreds more papers - go to google scholar and search and learn about it.
Now, as to your statement, "Please provide some evidence, other than your intuition, that the patent system is necessary and useful, over no patent system. reply". Do you have any good survey papers or wide scale evidence to support that a patent system isn't necessary and useful? Anecdotes, blog posts, stories about this or that company are not solid evidence, since those all ignore the totality of evidence.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w25383
[2] https://www.nber.org/digest/jul19/wwii-policy-kept-patents-s...
[3] https://www.nber.org/papers/w19089
[4] https://www.nber.org/papers/w21959
[5] https://www.nber.org/papers/w23268
That said, several of the papers you cite don't show that the patent system itself is better than no patent system. They are all conditioned on there already being a patent system. So, they are in the form of "if you have a patent system, than 'x' situation/circumstance is better than 'y'.
For example, your #2 example says that when patents are secret, innovation drops compared to when they are open. What about when there are no patents at all? Secret is not even close to the same as 'no patents', because in a 'secret' patent system you have no idea if you are infringing on someone's patents and will be subsequently sued out of existence.
Similarly, in your #4 and #5 examples, that can be explained by how necessary having a patent is to securing yourself against lawsuits, but these fears wouldn't be relevant in a system without patents.
Sadly, IP, including patents, are forced on most countries by way of international trade agreements so it is hard to find real examples to discuss.
As for counter-literature, there is a significant amount as well, so this will likely end like every other 'sourced' internet debate. One of my favorite references is 'The Case Against Patents' [1] . Perhaps you will find it interesting.
[1] https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/wp/2012/2012-035.p...
When you make the first claim in a discussion, and your claim is counter to both economic theory (patents help) and the common arguments for a thing (patents help by adding disclosure and protecting small inventors), the burden on you is to prove why the economic theory or common understanding is wrong.
>several of the papers you cite don't show that the patent system itself is better than no patent system
All showed that the patent system provides benefits.
I'm already familiar with the St. Louis Fed paper. It's from 2012, and their opening sentence "The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless the latter is identified with the number of patents awarded – which, as evidence shows, has no correlation with measured productivity." is directly refuted by the evidence I posted in papers from, respectively, 2018 (references your paper), 2019 (revised 2022), 2013, 2016 (directly addresses your paper, starting on page 1, again on page 5 - provides clear evidence that your paper has been superseded in the literature), and 2017.
So, 5 more recent papers against your favorite one? I think I'll choose the more recent work, especially since a few cite your work and provide direct and irrefutable evidence that there are benefits.
Most interestingly, if you read the Levine & Boldrin paper carefully, they fill it with anecdotes, but nearly zero actual broad data, since the broad data do not support their story. The strongest citations in their paper are back to their own papers, which, if you read those, are similarly anecdote based.
The proper way to do evidence is to take all evidence, not just the pieces and anecdotes one likes, and then analyze. Their paper simply doesn't do this. It's a collection of the stories they like, incredibly many, with extremely little other evidence, or new datasets, or new analysis, to make their case.
For example, my line [3] above shows exactly how to do research: they list the datasets they used, which are all known data for the respective question. They explain their methodology for analysis. They show the numerical outcomes. They explain the relevance.
There is not one anecdote in their paper. Now count how many anecdotes your paper makes to state their case (dozens? it's truly astounding).
You're welcome to show me where in their paper they provide analysis for such large scale, all encompassing data. It's well known in the literature this paper does not do so - it's a collection of anecdotes with a popular title. It doesn't prove the case it claims to by a long shot.
>One of my favorite references
The thing about favorite references is you need to follow up on later work, otherwise your favorite reference may well be invalidated by later work when you decide to pull it out.
I generally prefer more recent research, especially when it's numerous and they cite and address older research in question, to understand a topic.
Other products have slow uptake. If you make a novel product with growing users, Google shouldn't be able to clone it at 3 years and push it to a billion of their users.
That looks pretty bad. Seems pretty obvious this is going to cost Apple & Google some serious money, even if it's just hiring more lawyers for the lawsuits from "Catapult IP Innovations".
Maybe the freshly formed company is owned by some former RIM exec(s)...
I expect that Apple and Google were already licensing any blackberry patents they needed/would be forced to use.
This is big enough that Apple and Google’s operational risk group would have done a calculation to buy if the exposure was less than the sale price.
The patent trolling is likely for smaller companies who can’t afford to fight the troll.
Since they were bought up by a nonpracticing entity, (a) doesn't apply. There's no way they'll recoup their $600M investment by going after companies that sell low volume, low margin devices.
By the time the Linux phone people have war chests to raid, theses patents will be expired. Rest assured they're targeting some subset of FAANG. The article mentions a patent on charging batteries.
Facebook and Amazon sell stuff with batteries in them. Perhaps the trolls think they can extract a few hundred million from Oculus and Fire tablets. Come to think of it, Tesla probably has some cash laying around, and I think their cars can move and also contain batteries. Why should they be allowed to freeload?
Similarly, ICE cars use lead acid batteries, don't they?
This patent could be a gold mine, and we owe it all to RIM for inventing the rechargeable battery in the mid 1990's!
I wonder when the current patent on charging rechargeable batteries expires. I wonder who the PTO will issue the next iteration to, and if they're publicly held...
Patent trolls sometimes sue people without money in order to get precedents that can be used against people with money.
BlackBerry has been licensing these patents for years; all of the usual suspects have already either agreed to terms or been sued by this point.
On top of that, they can always leverage the IP against smaller existing players or new entrants and use it to bump up rates for the rest of their portfolio.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if BlackBerry had more lawyers than engineers at this point.
In my failed attempt to retort with a witty pun on Ballistas, I ended up spending close to half an hour exploring a rather deep rabbit hole on the evolution of medieval siege weapons.
There are many non-practicing entities that don't abuse their patents. ARM is an example.
I'd argue ARM isn't really an NPE. They actually sell useful designs that are actually implemented right? It's customers are paying for a design, architecture and software--not the freedom from being sued.
Being a new company with no history is, likely, strategic. Patent wars between practicing entities tend to be multi-front. Each side brings its own war chest of patents claims. Settlements tend to be more of a cease fire than a permanent end. They agree to stop suing each other.
Being non practicing means that a patent war can't interfere with your more important interests. Being clean slate means that whoever you sue can't return fire by going after the rest of your patent portfolio.
"Patent trolling" isn't black or white definitionally, but it has earned its bad name. It's an ugly game of dirty tricks.
Of course it could just be financial engineering, though I suspect that would look more like an asset backed loan.
All we ever see is “threat of litigation by troll” “company takes stand against troll”
But we have no clue how the negotiations went? We have no clue how many are agreed upon, we have no clue how many are tolerable small revenue splits or something else
All we are left with are extreme positions that imagine every patent or litigant is an extortion racket and thats just negligent
There is room for nuance by adults
Abolish the patent system and let human innovation leap forward.
What consists of "not used" or "fairly licensed"? Who decides this, and how do those definitions evolve over time? Like most legal frameworks they would likely lag behind the reality of the times they are applied to...
I'm all for trying to prevent abuses and patent trolls and the like, but it's not as easy to solve as it might seem.
What if the production cycle is longer than 5 years?
> the patent holder has listed a process and conditions under which the patent can be licensed, there exists a mediation process in case an applicant deems the fees/conditions to be excessive, and there are no complaints filed at the regulatory agency about unfair treatment
This sounds like something that everyone would dispute, and there would be a years-long waiting list for mediation.
I agree with you in principle, but I just think it wouldn't work.
You've just moved the greed from one place to another.
A bridge troll finds a bridge and then starts extracting toll from everyone crossing it without providing any benefit.
A landlord is pretty close but not quite the same.
But landlordship leads to most humans being born on this Earth already indebted into serfdom to the ones “owning” the land.
... by patent trolling
Nothing that's Blackberry's owners' problem.
https://lotnet.com/members/
For a company like Blackberry, who hasn't designed a phone in years and coasted entirely on licensing and production deals with TCL, it makes zero sense to do this. If you own a lot of phone patents but aren't making any phones, you effectively already are a patent troll.
two things that blackberry phone users love. (in my experience of the last 20 plus years)...