Hacker News Reader

Comment by MartinCron | Hacker News Reader

nothing more than an artificial monopoly only benefitting the patent holder

I thought that's exactly what patents are supposed to be. Inventors are rewarded with a temporary artificial monopoly.

At least in the United States, the express purpose of all patents, copyrights, trademarks, and other IP protections is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", i.e. for the public good. The vehicle used to achieve this end is the granting of a temporary monopoly, but the monopoly itself is not the end.

Absolutely right. I was just trying to point out that the monopoly in this context isn't some sort of dysfunctional side-effect, but part of the intended mechanism.

As another poster indicated, it is to benefit society. This makes a lot of sense on a practical level. If society is going to expend energy protecting such monopolies, it should be getting something in return.

It seems that the letter of the law has failed to achieve this. I'm not saying this is an easy problem to solve, however it is becoming a bigger problem as big companies commit more money to use these laws in ways that miss the original intent.

As such there is an increasingly urgent need to address the issue and revise the old straining laws with the experience gained in order to protect the original intent.

That is just one of the problems right there, patent holder isn't necessarily the Inventor. It just gets worse from that point.

Well, the patent holder is either the inventor or acquired the patent from the inventor. If we assume that the inventor is a consenting adult and didn't give the patent away under duress, I don't see any problem with that.

Patent troll company setup for nothing more than litigation, just one of the many problems with that.

Where does the patent troll company get the patent? Either they invent something or buy the patent from an inventor or from someone who bought it from an inventor.

The problem with patent trolls is that they are too often working with patents that shouldn't have ever been granted in the first place, and that it's so expensive to defend against a lawsuit, it makes sense to just settle silently.

There are many things wrong with the current implementation that can be fixed without throwing out the whole notion of intellectual property protection for inventions.

Especially now that the US has moved to a first-to-file system, there's no guarantee that the patent holder is the inventor. Separately from that, some patent troll companies file obvious, overbroad patents without implementing them (e.g. the classic case being doing <X> on the Internet, of course) to build up their stockpile. Just because they might end up with some patents when their junk sticks doesn't make them an inventor.

How is that different from first-to-invent system?

Concept of prior-art still exists in first-to-file system.

That is what I meant by "shouldn't have been granted in the first place"

If we reformed the system to force the patent holder to actually market a real product using the patent in order to be able to sue to defend the patent, making them more similar to trademarks, this would solve the pure patent troll problem. Unfortunately it wouldn't stop the mobile patent wars.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com