This is the patent system working as intended. Protection for technology development.
You may say it limits innovation. But it also protects smaller players from investing in innovation, by de-risking that a big customer might copy them and destroy their business. Which is mostly this scenario.
I think the bigger problem with the patent system is the patent trolls. Please someone solve that problem.
We like to talk about the specific effects of the patent system (protects the little guy, etc), but we rarely talk about the cumulative effects of it.
The more I look at the small innovators, they are all hungry to improve upon things the big companies are sitting on for 20+ years with a big moat to protect them, and I really get to thinking that in aggregate we are doing more harm than good.
A response I hear is "then no one would invest" and I think that's false. The investment landscape would change from a small number of big investments to a larger number of smaller investments - investing in tooling to help you beat the competition next year, but not necessarily giving you a 10 year investment for your big dream. And I think that's fine - people still want to innovate and the market already rewards innovators. It is not clear to me that government mandated restrictions on innovation are a good idea at all, and none of the common talking points really engage with the facts as I see them.
Take a look at FDM 3D printers. They went from $50k to $25k in the 13 years they were for sale and under patent protection, and then 10 years after patent protection ended they were $250 and sold by a wide variety of companies all over the world.
How many of today's patented goods could be made for 100x cheaper without patents and what is the cumulative effect of manufacturing machinery, medical equipment, washing machines, computers, and more being 100x cheaper? Is our world really better without that?
We have already run the experiment nearly 100 years ago shortly after WW2 (and prior to the Bahl Dole act) on what happens when people have idea requiring capital investments that aren't protected by risk mitigation IP.
People don't invest because of first mover disadvantage in game theory.
Genuinely curious for my own research, can you give me more information? What exactly happened? What projects failed to gain investment? What projects subsequently were only funded due to IP restriction grants?
LCD drawing tablets were another victim - Wacom sitting on their EMR patents, selling only overpriced pro gear cost the world a couple generations of digital artists!
Patents don't protect smaller players -- enforcement is cost-prohibitive.
The only sector that could plausibly justify patents is biotech... but even there, the vast majority of early R&D is publicly-funded, and thus should negate protection.
A Government-mandated monopoly on ideas may have made sense at some point, but it's antiquated today. Today they serve to stifle innovation, extract rent and act as yet another form of regulatory capture -- e.g. when they become standards.
(Coming from someone who has 20+ patents to their name.)
In fact they have the opposite effect on smaller players. The big players all have a few thousand (junk) patents and they make deals with each other to exclude the smaller players, who can't afford to file thousands of patents to join the club.
Everyone always says this. In fact, I was in Google's patent litigation division, and I can tell you firsthand that there is WAY less of this than you think. A cross-licensing deal is incredibly hard to negotiate.
So if you could back this up with some links, it'd be appreciated. Otherwise it's just an urban myth.
Google literally bought Motorola for their patent portfolio -- or at least, that's the only "asset" they retained when divesting of the company years later. And I readily admit: Google is a "be less evil" player in this respect. (But not all: See wage fixing collusion verdicts.)
At some point, we have to acknowledge that patents are pursued purely in the spirit of mutually-assured destruction from other litigious players. This manifests as a tax on everyone -- the only people that win are attorneys.
So now you're moving the goal posts. Now it's MAD (which I don't deny). I think we're done here. You're also bringing up irrelevancies like wage fixing: true, but not patents.
the claim was "they cross-license." As I said if you read, the myth is "plausible" but not "confirmed."
yes, there are some cross-licenses. No, they are not universal. I gave examples of obvious ones that nevertheless don't exist.
On Motorola: I'm afraid I have to claim superior knowledge on that one. At the time, Google was actually hiring patent acquisition people, and in fact, I was interviewing them. They probably fell for the myth that you fell for.
They stopped that pretty quickly, when it became clear that most of Motorola's patents were worthless. I've looked them over myself. They were worth less than nothing: it meant that suits against Motorola now had to be defended. In other words, it was a big mistake that they undid.
It's not a myth, I've been involved in these sort of negotiations. The particular industry was maybe 10 years older than Google, but the number of patents, rather than their quality was the key factor.
Or worse, a small player developing something and then finding out after the fact that a junk patent prevents them from even selling the thing to begin with.
See, this to me is the stupidest part of the whole system. Its essentially saying that 'first movers advantage' of an idea is something that can be protected for the life of a patent.
You can be tripped over by patents you don't even know existed in unrelated fields, owned by people who didnt even work with the patent. So stupid.
I'm really interested in the "does it limit innovation" question. Is this a case where Qualcomm is really innovating and coming up with novel ideas, or are they just some of the first people to encounter particular problems and are simply solving them in fairly obvious ways that would occur to anyone else who encountered those problems? And if it's the latter, is it that they are doing those investigations because of the potential for patents? Would the pace of innovation be slower if those incentives didn't exist, or would they be faster because everybody else independently figuring those things out later wouldn't need to pay Qualcomm for decades? Is there some sort form of technology economy scholarship that could answer those questions?
If I had to guess, I'd guess that Qualcomm's patents over stuff like Wi-Fi and CDMA were probably more harmful than beneficial, but I'd love to know how one would analyze that.
Unless I misunderstand, they are codifying their patents into open standards like 5G.
So you can't implement 5G without their patents. Add that to encouraging complexity (10,000+ pages of spec to do something outwardly similar to WiFi), and they have a really effective moat around an "open" standard.
The entire protocol space is somewhat arbitrary. This is a bit like patenting a strategy in a board game you created, and that everyone is required to play.
I've been saying for years that patents and copyrights should be ruled out in communication protocols and communication formats, including file formats, file systems, languages, APIs and even fonts.
Getting your patents into standards is the fundamental business model of many patent holders. Not just for big business either, I’m friends with a bunch of PhDs/researchers who all have patents in their respective fields, they all know that they’ll only get paid for the patents that end up in standards, and devote a non-trivial amount of effort to pursuing that outcome.
> they are codifying their patents into open standards like 5G.
What do you mean by open standard? I don't think 5G is patent-free by any means, nor is 802.11/Wi-Fi for that matter!
That's just how most hardware standards are developed, as far as I know. The best thing you can hope for is a consortium maintaining a FRAND patent pool, like for the MPEG family of codecs (and even there you can't be sure that there aren't any patent trolls lurking outside the pool).
> I think the bigger problem with the patent system is the patent trolls.
This is almost a no true scotsman argument.
The patent trolls are a direct result of incentives the patent system creates, getting rid of them necessarily involves seriously reforming the system.
> You may say it limits innovation. But it also protects smaller players from investing in innovation, by de-risking that a big customer might copy them and destroy their business. Which is mostly this scenario.
Who is the "smaller player" in this scenario? $150 billion QCOM?
You may say it limits innovation. But it also protects smaller players from investing in innovation, by de-risking that a big customer might copy them and destroy their business. Which is mostly this scenario.
I think the bigger problem with the patent system is the patent trolls. Please someone solve that problem.