I'm not sure if it's fair to R&D costs to gut patents entirely, but I'd like to see them weakened considerably. Patent trolls should not exist.
Glad to see justice in this case.
Edit: Watched Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware, was interesting in regards to loose IP rights.
But is has. It's the changes in the patent system in the past decade that is forcing this patent troll to shut down. To wit:
* The US changed from first-to-invent to first-to-file. This reduces opportunities for patent trolls to patent obvious stuff that other people invented.
* Bilski and Alice have very firmly shut down the motherlode of crap arising from the State Street decision. Business method patents, and "do X on a computer" are quite invalid.
* Inter partes review makes it easier to challenge patents, and SCOTUS last year upheld it as constitutional.
* Venue shopping to get that one court that will always rule in favor of patents got a lot harder, as the TC Heartland case says you can only define the residence of the corporation as its place of incorporation.
* Prior use defense: if you used a method before it was patent, you don't have to pay to license the patent.
I think there are some other reforms that could be made (the big one is moving from one fixed term for all patent categories to varying it by industry), but life has gotten much harder for patent trolls.
This is perhaps the best way to actually protect yourself in some business situations where enforcing the patent and getting it in the first place is going to require too much effort for the given use case. You can just post a sealed copy of the invention to your solicitor, then crack on with making the product. If someone beats you to market and wants to sue you for copying their patent then you should be covered nicely, you have hard evidence you have not stolen 'their' idea.
You also don't have to publish for the world to see what your key invention is. If it is a manufacturing technique that is required to make an existing product more affordably then you can keep your invention secret that way.
Snopes describes the "poor man's copyright" as not useful in the US, "may" be some use in Britain: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/poor-mans-copyright/
It needs a lot of changes. One simple but important fix would be to revert the 1991 budget change that made the USPTO run on fees instead of taxpayer funds. This dramatically increased the incentive to approve shit patents, something borne out in the pre-91 and post-91 data:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/these-experts-fi...
I think the patent system needs a little work, yes, but I think it’s often conflated with the bass ackwards copyright law in the US. Used together, the two give you the ability to perpetually remain the proprietor of your “invention” because your invention is only ever distributed as a licensed work. This is directly at odds with the purpose of the patent system in the first place.
Patents are supposed to 1) reward inventors, during a limited, exclusive, window, for their inventions, and 2) reward society for curating good inventors by giving everyone access to the details of the invention immediately so our collective knowledge increases. It’s not meant to be used to build your corporate fortress. However, the patent into copyright strategy is how purely digital content behemoths survive. So good luck.
Jones developed this into a service called BusCall, which had some modest success.
I think the actual solution is simply improved patent review. The patent system is broken because there are so many bad patents; if only truly innovative stuff was patented, I think a lot of the reasonable criticism would become a lot less reasonable.
But without additional funding, improved scrutiny at filing time would also dramatically increase the cost of acquiring a patent, which is already expensive for individual inventors.
Monopoly == bad
Prohibit patents
For a very specific definition of monopoly (in particular, monopoly over use of a specific resource, not monopoly in the market sense).
In that same sense of the word "monopoly", private property == monopoly.
You can rent your house out an AirBnB 20 times while still living in it, and you can non-exclusively license your patent 20 times.
In fact, just last weekend I let 20+ people into my house for a party. The notion of privately owned property didn't suddenly become absurd at the beginning of that party...
"Exclusive right to use" is not unique to intellectual property, nor is the ability to scale a piece of private property from 1 user to N concurrent users.
You can stop them from infringing your patent, just as you can prevent your neighbor from building an apartment building on your real estate.