He is spot on. Patents are meant to reward original innovator not the guys who buy them in bulk and profit out of it. And if you are not using those patents to do some innovative products then you've wasted them. Something should be done about patent trolls. Seriously!
Patents are meant to reward original innovator not the guys who buy them in bulk and profit out of it.
I would disagree that non-practicing entities are fundamentally evil. If I have a legitimate patent on a useful and non-obvious invention that is unlikely to be independently created, I should be able to take my "reward" in a lump sum by selling the rights to it. Paul Allen isn't a patent troll because he owns an IP company; he's a troll because he's trying to enforce ridiculous patents that never should have been granted in the first place.
Of course, if the USPTO were actually competent the "buy patents and sue" business model would be much less viable.
"Patents are meant to reward original innovator not the guys who buy them in bulk and profit out of it."
Huh? Buy "buying them in bulk", the patent trolls are paying money to the original innovators. They are being rewarded. Why do you oppose innovators' right to sell their IP to other parties? It's hardly property if you can't transfer ownership.
They prevent others from suing you, at least over that one patent.
That said, I wonder how much it might fix if people were only permitted to license or cross-license your patents and forbidden from reassigning the patent or the right to sue over the patent.
They prevent others from suing you, at least over that one patent.
This is not valuable. Placing ideas in the public domain also prevents people from suing you and anybody else for those ideas, and it's much less expensive. The only reason to pay for a patent is to acquire the right to sue for compensation.
> They prevent others from suing you, at least over that one patent.
That's like saying that someone can't charge you rent for property that you own.
However, unlike with property that you own, you can get sued wrt an overlapping patent owned by someone else regardless of what patents you own.
> That said, I wonder how much it might fix if people were only permitted to license or cross-license your patents and forbidden from reassigning the patent or the right to sue over the patent.
In other words, you think that patents shouldn't be sellable.
Well, does it need to be property, or transferable? Is it not enough that it grants you a monopoly over doing stuff that will last you a very significant part of your working life? Why make is assignable in toto, rather than just licensable (so long as the right to sue is and remains exclusively the patent owner's)
1) Why not? I think the burden is on you to argue why IP rights should be limited. Defending property rights is the default position, not one that needs to be supported.
2) Selling IP rights lets you get immediate payment. Instead of a continuous royalty stream over decades, a lump-sum upfront with the same present-value. This could be more convenient.
3) IP rights let (I believe) an inventor defend their patent after their death. Without transferrable IP, if someone's life expectancy is shorter than their patent's term, they could not fully benefit from it. This would be unfair to them. It would also be inconsistent that they could not transfer IP to descendants like other assets.
4) (Argument I've read on YC) Selling patents lets them be better-defended (by specialist patent "trolls"). It removes the burden of litigation from the inventor: "go to court or lose your royalties to infringers".
5) The concept of "same owner" looks silly when IP is owned by businesses, rather than individuals.
Patents were originally meant to entice people into publishing secret methods for the betterment of public knowledge. The limited monopoly was the carrot on the stick to do that, not really meant to be the the ultimate reward of the system.
Of course the current patent system is a total joke with companies patenting blatantly obvious ideas left and right and playing the game of "who filed the obvious idea first and/or who has the most lawyers".
If there were a patent on the idea of harnessing power from Thomas Jefferson spinning in his grave, that'd be a real valuable one... because he must be spinning REALLY, REALLY fast by now.
Although this is the original title of the article, this kind of title doesn't attract lots of HN readers. It suggests that this article is solely about personal issues between two people.
As has been pointed out before this article, Paul Allen ploughed 10s of millions of $$ into the Interval Research Institute and employed people like Lee Felsenstein. Interval shut down in 2000. He just wants some money back from his huge investment in this institute.
