09th May 2008 by Mark Turansky
The New Yorker publishes an article proving the patent system is broken
Filed under Business The New Yorker has published an article on Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures, a think tank that brainstorms new ideas, patents them, and licenses their subsequent ownership of that new “intellectual property.”
The point of incredulity, for me, came when I read this quote from Bill Gates:
They also came up with this idea to stop hurricanes. Basically, the waves in the ocean have energy, and you use that to lower the temperature differential. I’m not saying it necessarily is going to work. But it’s just an example of something where you go, Wow.
The article talks about Alexander Graham Bell and his genius, and how Myhrvold is inspired by Bell. But Bell didn’t simply think up the telephone and patent it; Bell actually invented the telephone!
Intellectual Ventures files up to 500 patents a year. There are no inventions here, mind you, just ideas. You know the patent system is broken when a company can obtain a government-granted monopoly on an idea like preventing a hurricane and sue the bejeezus out of someone who might actually figure out how to control Mother Nature.
Ideas are cheap. Ideas are easy. It’s the implementation that is hard. The research and successful development of a seemingly impossible idea is worthy of a patent, not the brainstorming for the idea itself. How would you like to solve an impossible problem only to be rewarded with a lawsuit by a troll with a submarine patent who’s put zero work into solving the hard problem? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
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Yes, it’s sad. Business people always over-value their ideas, I guess its cause they get so few that they think they are so precious. It’s always distressing to see how they would rather ‘game’ the system, then actually fix any real problems. Just more A-types trying to get lists of things to jam onto their resumes. All style and no substance…
Paul.
Couldn’t agree more, however it isn’t just corporations that fall in love with their own ideas, people do that all the time as well. My largest concern is that I don’t believe there are many unique ideas out there, for example I had a very similar idea to the one mentioned above on afternoon pondering waves as renewable energy sources.
How do you patent an idea? That seams like a violation of the first amendment to me. The idea is nothing more than a string of words in (the English, perhaps) language that expresses a concept. Hate speech is protected by the very same idea that makes patents on intellectual property legal. Clearly, there is a conflict in either the language or the law, and I think it is the law.
I think it’s not a problem of law but practice.
I took part in a course about patents and intellectual property at my university few years ago. It was very general to make students understand basic concepts but the proffesor was a former director of national institution dealing with patents so he had a lot of real world experiece in this field. Some stuff doesn’t fit to be patented. There’s also something called.. hmm.. pattern-of-use (my ad-hoc translation) like for example shape of Coke can with its pull-tab opening mechanism.
Basically, you can’t patent an idea. Whatever you patent must be a reasonable description of its implementation. Patent application must include technical details proving that you are actually able to build/implement the invention. Look for example how many chipsets (Intel, AMD, Sun…) are covered by patents but these don’t overlap and don’t prevent competitors from development either.
As an assignment on taht course we had to pick a few invetions from patent repository available via www and analyse them if they should have been accepted. Fun coincidence is that I picked up anti-hurricane inventions - they at least were fun as opposed to chipsets and refrigerators
And I remember for instance a few of them:
- a way for stopping a hurricane by creating a number of artificial tornadoes that would aweaken upcoming disaster
- sending a baloon with fuel in the eye of a cyclone, then burining up the fuel to make enought heat to disturb cycleone’s inner forces
- sending a fighter/airplane with a special bomb at a specified height that would destroy inner mechanizm of a hurricane
and many more. The problem however with these is taht they were not detailed enought to deserve acceptance! It were rather a mere ideas not step-by-step description of implementation.
I think the problem is not in the law itself. The people who analyse and jugde patent applications have to deal with everything from biochemistry to drugs to hi-tech hardware to quantuum physics to software. Science has gone too far to let those people be experts on everything. As a result they often have no sufficent background knowledge to judge this. That’s why many patents are accepted despite they shouldn’t have been. Fixing the law won’t help much as long as experts won’t be able to keep up the pace of technology development, I belive. We all know how fast the Earth is rolling these days.
There are also differences in UE and USA law regarding patents. In USA you can write down your invetions, make you notary certificate it and hide it somewhere safe. In case someone else comes up with the same invetion you can stop him from patenting this! In EU if you hide you invetion then you can’t claim it’s yours in case someone else invents it too later on.
I don’t necessarily agree that ideas are easy or that implementations are easy. Likewise, I don’t think that either, in themselves, are hard. However, the combination of a good idea and a successful implementation is the detail that sets apart the real players in the world and all the wanna-be’s. That’s said, I’ve just patented this take on your writing. Use it and I’ll sue.