Comments on: Patents and Innovation

By: Ian Rae

Ian Rae — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 17:18:09 +0000

I gotta agree with both sama and albatross. Patents have undoubtedly become a kind of currency. I have often heard that corporations use their patent portfolios as much for deterrence as for licencing purposes – a sort of “mutually assurred destruction” balancing act presumably exists in large corporations. I also see how patent production can be used in the corporate world the same way academics productivity is tied to papers published. Of course the big problem is that if the incentive is to create patents regardless of quality or validity (clearly the patent office has shown its inability to judge patentability) then the system can no longer function according to its original intent. At least academic papers are subject to peer review and experiments are meant to be replicated and confirmed by other labs. I wonder what percentage of patents would be deemed to actually fall within the original intent of the founders of the patent system.

By: albatross

albatross — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:10:57 +0000

There’s one other really important role which patents play, in some organizations. They’re a countable unit of output for a research lab to use to justify their continued existence, or for a researcher to use to prove to his management that he’s been doing something useful with all their money. This (IMO) drives some large fraction of the marginal patents out there, in almost exactly the same way that counting publications for hiring and tenure decisions drives some large fraction of papers out there.

By: sama

sama — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 11:02:43 +0000

You're forgetting as well that the patent office is taking on average 5 years to approve or deny patent applications for software. That means that for the average entrepreneur, there is NO protection to be afforded by a patent. At best, the patent offers a salvage value for the business should it fail. But this is precisely the type of nuiscance lawsuit that drives so many of us up a tree. If a patent can't be issued in a timely manner, then it's generally worthless. I have personally come to believe that that they're not really worth pursuing for entrepreneurs. For large corporations OTOH, they become a great way of smashing smaller competitors, and tokens for cross licensing with other big companies, thereby raising the barrier to entry for newcomers who cannot get all the cross licensing agreements needed to do business. BTW, don't know if you caught this but Nathan Myrvold is starting his own patent company. Looks positively evil. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6478691/site/newsweek/