It's well worth a listen. Some of the highlights include:
"For decades, the patent office considered software to be like language. A piece of software was more like a book or an article. You could copyright the code, but you couldn't patent the whole idea.The story continues by investigating a particular company called Intellectual Ventures that's been labeled a patent troll—buying up patents and using shell companies to aggressively sue for infringement. Chris Sacca (a venture capitalist who sounds like an interesting fella) draws parallels to Al Capone:
In the 1990s, the Federal courts stepped in and started chipping away at this interpretation. There was a couple big decisions, one in 1994 and another in 1998, which overturned the patent office completely.
A flood of software patents followed. A lot of people in Silicon valley wish that had never happened, including a very surprising group: computer programmers...
In polls, as many as 80 percent of software engineers say the patent system actually hinders innovation. It doesn't encourage them to come up with new ideas and create new products. It actually gets in their way.
Many patents are so broad, engineers say, that everyone's guilty of infringement. This causes huge problems for almost anyone trying to start or grow a business on the Internet...
All the big tech companies have started amassing troves of software patents — not to build anything, but to defend themselves. If a company's patent horde is big enough, it can essentially say to the world, "If you try to sue me with your patents, I'll sue you with mine."
It's mutually assured destruction. But instead of arsenals of nuclear weapons, it's arsenals of patents."
"The pitch he heard was, basically, Intellectual Ventures helps defend against lawsuits. Intellectual Ventures has this horde of 35,000 patents — patents that, for a price, companies can use to defend themselves.My own experience with software patents (to date) is limited. I haven't seen anything so sinister as the Intellectual Ventures situation, but I have heard the "mutually assured desctruction" analogy before. And I do know that new patent submissions take somewhere between 18 months and 3 years to be processed by the appropriate office. Perhaps I'll have more to say in roughly that amount of time.
Technology companies pay Intellectual Ventures fees ranging 'from tens of thousands to the millions and millions of dollars ... to buy themselves insurance that protects them from being sued by any harmful, malevolent outsiders,' Sacca says.
There's an implication in IV's pitch, Sacca says: If you don't join us, who knows what'll happen?
He says it reminds him of 'a mafia-style shakedown...' "
I'll be curious to see how (if?) the landscape is affected by the current patent reform debate.
Further Reading:
This is why I love NPR. I love long-form investigatory journalism, especially when it's actually journalism. Great stuff, thanks for the links.
ReplyDeleteTo be clear on my earlier comment, I acknowledge that individuals on NPR sometimes display a bias I disagree with, but the type of content they provide, this form of journalism, is now almost completely dead and they are the only place to find it. They spent 5 months on and off researching a piece and then spent 25 minutes reporting on it from several angles. In the 24-hour cable news world, this doesn't exist anywhere else anymore.
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