Why isn't there a Kickstarter for killing patents?
galenward.comThe flaw, here, I think, is that's it's still prohibitively expensive. If it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to invalidate a patent, we're probably talking hundreds of millions of dollars to invalidate all of the patents that could be used for trolling.
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.
> This is a situation where the government needs to step in and do its job
That's what they're doing right now. And that's the problem.
No. The job of the government is to use patents "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." Says so right in the owner's manual. Patent trolls are exploiting legal loopholes to do the opposite of "promoting progress," so the laws need to be adjusted to fix this. As far as I'm aware, private entities cannot pass laws. So. The government needs to be involved. And they need to do a better job.
I think we'll just have to disagree. It is my opinion that answers of the form, "well the only problem is that the laws are just a little off and it can all be fixed with a few tweaks," are incredibly naive. They've been repeated over and over as government has grown in size. It ignores the fundamental problem: at the end of the day, it's just humans making and enforcing the laws, and they are under extreme pressure by the system to become corrupt and bend the laws in their favor.
If you want a system of IP run by elected representatives, then you've got to accept the corruption that comes with it.
You're disagreeing with something I'm not saying.
I disagreed with your proposed solution. Which you said was to just tweak the laws.
Josh, you're right - that's why it isn't possible right now. I put that we need a simpler, cheaper way to invalidate patents before a patent-killing x-prize is possible in the post, but maybe not clearly or loudly enough.
Tim O'Reilly created a site called BountyQuest in 2000, where he posted a $10,000 bounty to invalidate Amazon's 1-click patent.
"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...
I really don't understand what you're advocating or what mechanism you hope to develop.
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.
"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 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.
> 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.
The problem is that everyone with enough economic or political power to do something about the patent situation has a strong incentive to preserve the status quo, because they benefit from the competitive barrier large patent arsenals create just as much.
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.
A problem I see is that companies would have to spend time defending legitimate patents just because consumers want the technology to become widely available. The scheme could cause business to waste money litigating defensible patents just because there's enough stir / money behind advocacy for opening up the idea.
I would say that the burden of proof, and accompanying legal defense costs, should rest with those who seek a state-backed monopoly of an idea, rather than with patent "infringers" as it is now.
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.
My argument is based on the premise that most software patents are bad for our economy.
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.
The monopoly is supposed to be compensation for disclosing how the invention works, not merely creating it. If one-click were so amazingly hard that nobody else could have done it for another twenty years, we might have derived some benefit. But when any of us could do the same in hours, the patent is merely obfuscated drivel.
I like the use / active-pursue requirement except it seems nearly impossible to enforce. A patent troll could easily spend money to look like they're trying to use a patent.
I think Ask Patents is supposed to be like this. HN already posted an article about this a few weeks ago.
Ask Patents is for stopping patents from being granted. I'm suggesting a way to kill patents that are already granted + monetary incentives for the worst / most expensive offenders.
Not true, I've seen requests for granted patents.
Interesting!
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?
Indeed, as stated, askpatents is not just for new patent applications. It's got a bit of head-wind right now, and the more people that get involved the better.
I mean, (disclaimer: I'm an engineer there) you could use Crowdtilt for something like that. "Put together $x to fund lawyers to defeat patent Y" or "I know how to undermine Patent Z and I need to raise $x to make it work" or whatever.
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.)
The EFF is probably the closest to doing something like this, but they picked the patents and there isn't a way to support killing just one: https://www.eff.org/patent-busting
The simplest market-based solution for killing troll patents I can think of involves anti-troll entities effectively using the troll's tactics against them: mass mailing people whose product might be accused of violating a dubious patent with a no-win no-fee offer to strike down the patent. Contributing to a pool to fight a patent is potentially even cheaper than settling it, especially if the quality of the patent and the NPE's incentive to defend it is low.
(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)
I don't agree that killing patents is the right approach, how about this as an alternative: The site's admin team could identify patents of particularly useful or disruptive potential and users could pledge a value to bring this patent into the public domain, and their pledge could remain valid for some reasonable period of time, the site could then put forward the aggregate pledge and buy the patent with the view to releasing it. Perhaps a price could be agreed upon up front. The same could be done to bring creative works like books into the public domain.
I am not sure if patent trolls will want to part with their main source of income for any reasonable amount.
I would worry about the opposite problem: Troll gets crap patent for $X, sells it to community for $10X and then goes out and gets ten more crap patents.
The patents won't be killed if they're valid; it still has to go through the USPTO. Why do you think that killing those patents is not the right approach?
Your approach (if it worked) would just incentivize filing more patents to try to get bought out.
I agree that non valid patents should be killed. If a patent is valid perhaps its usefulness in monetary terms to the community is still worth more than the present value of what trolls and legitimate patent holders could expect to earn by holding it.
Aren't patents that issue assumed to be "valid" no matter how kafkaesque that might be?
I was using 'valid' to mean that the community thinks they're valid, not to mean that the USPTO thinks they're valid.
>The same could be done to bring creative works like books into the public domain.
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 problem with this - at least as I understand it - is that patent trolls make a lot from patents on a one-by-one basis - much more than companies want to pay or feel is affordable.
What I know of patents is that they need to be sufficiently novel in order to be valid.
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.
We have a crowd-scale community checking patent applications now: http://patents.stackexchange.com/
The problem is the sheer number of bad patents that have been granted already, and the cost of successfully challenging them.
There is already some crowdsourcing of patent research being done like at http://www.articleonepartners.com/ which essentially offers monetary rewards for the top contributions of prior-art or whatever the particular study asks for. Granted, you don't get to pick which patents are listed to research, but I suspect this sort of bounty program greatly lowers the cost and increases the breadth of material available to patent researchers for any number of purposes. And if patents can be challenged for a reasonably small cost, that should mean more silly patents actually get challenged.
RPX[1] is doing some interesting things with Patent Troll Insurance, but it's really only a viable option for huge corporations who want to buy into the troll-defense patent pool.
[1] http://www.crowell.com/NewsEvents/AlertsNewsletters/all/Cour...
Actively harmful to the industry. You'll just end up creating similar market forces such as the MPEGLA that is currently making advancement in video compression close to impossible. Troll-defense patent pool simply creates a large artificial barrier to entry into the market.
It's probably better than nothing, but actually removing the patents and allowing open competition is more beneficial for the public and economy overall.
Sounds like (+ AskPatents money), I'm up for it. Also potentially creates market for patent lawyers to clear their consciences.
It's costly to kill patents, but the trolls can create more for nearly free. It'd be a losing battle.
You and I have very different concepts of "free". Patents cost thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, each.
1. Agree 2. Though about this a long time. 3. Believe their should be three tiered fee system for patents. 4. Low income entities--first two patents free. 5. High income entities--pay 2x current fees. 6. Anyone abusing the patent system would be barred for a certain amount if time, or life.
Regarding different tiers, what would prevent a large entity from creating smaller ones to hold their patents? In fact, they already do so, for others reasons.
I don't think patent fees are meaningful to any organization filing for patents. Attorney costs are what, 50-100x the fees now?
Did anyone else read that as "Kickstarter for killing patients"? :) I need to read slower.
If you want to get rid of software patents, move to Europe. US is not so great after all with all the idiocracies related to software laws, patents and security.
Why isn't there a Kickstarter for curing cancer?
I realize this question is in jest, but it may not be a bad idea. I could envision a Kickstarter fund for individuals to fund research projects to help scientists who can use the help. Granted that may not lead to a cure, but it might help. In fact I'd rather do that than the usual marketing driven thing of wearing a ribbon. I also think this would make funding research a bit less abstract.
the amount of money and lack of tangible immediate results would make this untenable. This is way outside the scope of normal crowd funding. This is why large companies with deep pockets and wealthy philanthropic concerns exist.
Large companies with deep pockets existed because there was no way to internationally organize around a monetary research fund cause and get live information about the progress in both a transparent and not prohitively expensive way for the organization to operate.
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.
Do you really think that people can afford to crowdfund multi-year complex research into illnesses and diseases?
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.
Do you really think that people can afford to crowdfund multi-year complex research into illnesses and diseases?
Of course they can. Where do companies get their money from? Thin air?
from the sale of products they've invested years of research in. From angel funding and capital from the market, wealthy backers and philanthropists.
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.
Maybe the "reward" isn't that you get immediate results, but you get the satisfaction of laying down a brick in a larger building? Maybe if we could put a face on research it would be less abstract to every day people who aren't in science?
There's something to be said for that, which is why charities and philanthropic organisations exist. the question is whether money is being funnelled efficiently in the right direction and used efficiently. Who's to say that laymen with no grounding in a subject make a good judge of that.
There's a YC backed startup doing just that. https://www.microryza.com/
Well said: I too would rather do that than the usual marketing driven thing of wearing a ribbon.
I don't think curing cancer makes much sense in the Kickstarter sense: 1. It is enormously expensive - curing a form of cancer costs well into the millions. So it wouldn't get funded. 2. There are loads of funding sources out there already. 3. "Curing" is actually very difficult to define. Most cancer treatments reduce and you'd need a bunch of expensive studies just to determine if the metric was met if it was anything short of "cured."
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.
Well, the model would be a little different. It wouldn't be just about money. You would want to crowd-source work, ancillary projects, etc. Also, I wouldn't crowd-source a cure for cancer, but research in general.
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.
You can't donate people to test drugs on.
Donated money can pay people willing to act as test-subject.
I don´t think the solution to patents is creating yet another business on top of it. That only benefits the lawyers.
The boring, frustrating answer is that Kickstarter forbids it.
Why not Eminent Domain for patents then?
wow, I dunno why but I've read that as parents first...