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So-called patent trolls may actually benefit inventors and the innovation economy, according to a Stanford intellectual property expert. Stephen Haber ( https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/stephen-haber ), a Stanford political science professor, suggests in new research that concerns about too much litigation involving patents is misguided.
A patent troll is a person or company that buys patents – without any intent to produce a product – and then enforces those patents against accused infringers in order to collect licensing fees. Some say the resulting litigation has driven up costs to innovators and consumers.
To the contrary, Haber said, his research with Stanford political science graduate student Seth Werfel shows that trolls – also known as patent assertion entities, or PAEs – play a useful intermediary role between individual inventors and large manufacturers.
http://scienceblog.com/77142/patent-trolls-serve-valuable-role-in-innovation-stanford-expert-says/
[Abstract]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2552734
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DrkShadow on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:37PM
(http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/patent-war-goes-nuclear-microsoft-apple-owned-rockstar-sues-google/)
From everything I've seen, the patent trolls are all about buying up patent portfolios from large corporations and suing other large (and small) corporations. Seeing this come from an academic begs the question: is this one of those weird, random babbles bordering on senility, or is this a case where we would find a trail of money?
I've never heard of patent trolls buying single random patents from individuals.
(Score: 4, Informative) by MrGuy on Wednesday February 25 2015, @01:01PM
It's not in the news as much as huge portfolio sales, but there are definitely a large number of entities out there who target buying patents from individuals (including patent monster Intellectual Ventures).
Google "We Buy Patents [google.com]" and watch the show.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday February 25 2015, @03:00PM
This is good old Austrian Economics, talking from a position of undeserved authority again. That resolves these discrepancies between theory and reality you're seeing.
He's taken an idealized model: that patents are valuable, that investors want good patents, that inventors make a living off inventing ideas continually, and slapped some math on top of that to show how middlemen also operating in an idealized way improve liquidity in the patent market.
But you start shedding those sorts of assumptions, and the argument starts to fall apart fast. There's a few reasons why Austrian economics gets away with this:
1. No economic model has that much predictive power. It's not hard to just point at failures on "both" "sides" to justify why your system is okay.
2. All economics are complicated. There's lots of variables, and the core assumptions of Austrian models are relatively easy to bury.
3. The Austrian model is the oldest and easiest one. They still teach Newtonian mechanics for the same reason.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @05:00PM
I suspect agent based modeling may yield better predictive power than more conventional economic approaches at this point. There are certain biases in academia that were brought up in the documentary "An Inside Job", that are difficult to offset. My hunch is that agent based systems would change the nature of bias in the experiment to some degree, though I admit I haven't considered it in enough depth to be able to say exactly how.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MrGuy on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:46PM
I can completely understand the linkage where the existence of patent trolls plays a role in encouraging the filing of patent applications. The ability to monitize a patent efficiently is a benefit to patent holders.
What's less clear is the linkage between "more patents" and "more innovation." Are people who wouldn't invent new things suddenly going to start inventing things because they're getting more money? Or are encouraging people who have a marginal claim on having "invented" something to file for patents in the hope of winning the lottery?
It's hard to assess this, but anecdotally, I've seen a lot of cases in the news of vague, overly broad, and questonably asserted patents (especially in technology), which actually foreclose innovation rather than encourage it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:56PM
To be fair, is this the fault of patent trolls, the patent laws or USPTO?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @04:47PM
Fair is fair but what does it matter (to the present discussion) whose fault it is? What matters is whether the existence of NPE's benefits `innovation' (whatever this means) and there is a lot of very convincing (though anecdotal) evidence that it does not, moreover, is harmful to it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mth on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:51PM
Not so fast: that they might play a useful role doesn't mean that they are a net benefit to society.
And I'm not entirely convinced the role is as useful as the article suggests it is. What is called an "inventor" when it comes to patents is the person who applied for the patent. Unfortunately, many patents get accepted that are not actually inventions in the real meaning of the word: a lot of them are obvious ideas dressed up in fancy language. Being able to let a middle man threaten and execute lawsuits to get money for a patent is only a good thing if the patent itself actually contributed something useful to the whole of human knowledge.
The root of the problem is that poor quality patents get accepted and it is very expensive to get them overturned. Patent trolls make that problem visible: since they don't make any products, they use lawsuits to profit from their patents and lawsuits are public; if a manufacturer does some kind of cross-license agreement with another manufacturer, the exact patents involved usually don't show up in the media.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Common Joe on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:52PM
I have a very low opinion of Stephen Haber after reading this article. He's either an idiot or (as DrkShadow [soylentnews.org] suggested), he's being paid to say this. Key items from the article:
I didn't bother reading the previous article.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @01:36PM
from the perspective of a parasite...ya, you got usefulness from your host.
Are they really arguing that because the parasites have more money, that the parasite pays for the legal costs and thus provides magic access to large scale manufacture?
Can we please find out what drugs are involved here.
It's nice to escape reality once in a while.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @02:02PM
is to reconcile the difference between legal logic, and empirical logic. Inventions are tangible empirical things, patents are linguistic abstractions. The latter is more flexible than the former. Failure to exercise constraint to offset that flexibility empowers language over labor.
Really my biggest beef with the USPTO, is their failure to shine a light on the tremendous amount of spyware that specifically targets the USPTO. There aren't a lot of legitimate apps that support TIFF, and that is all the USPTO uses. So there are dozens of software packages out there that are "free", except for the fact that all patent searches and submissions are man in the middled through China, or Russia, or just subject to typical http content keyword filtering by your ISP.
So people have the right to communicate with their government, as long as China, Comcast, TWC, etc. gets first crack at the communication and any respective intellectual property. I wasn't under the impression that the right to petition your government was contingent on third party brokers? Silk road is petty by comparison. We are talking about industrial espionage with both domestic and foreign benefactors with an impact on GDP that is quite possibly in the billions of dollars.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday February 25 2015, @02:03PM
Some say the resulting litigation has driven up costs to innovators and consumers.
An example of bad wikipedia editing, loose in the wilderness. Thats a weasel word phrasing.
So a nice presentation of a false debate. Go ahead, try to explain the financials of the opposing argument, how not paying license fees and predatory lawsuit costs somehow increases costs, or how paying out money for IP instead of $0 somehow lowers the expense column of a ledger.
This would be a better rephrasing of the original quote:
Everyone knows the resulting litigation drives up costs to innovators and consumers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ghost on Wednesday February 25 2015, @02:45PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @02:47PM
That is.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by physicsmajor on Wednesday February 25 2015, @03:25PM
Like most lies, this has a kernel of truth. Sure, in some cases they might be useful as an intermediary.
But this is outweighed to a hilarious degree by the massive drain on productive work and innovation caused by the system. Institutionalizing and incentivizing rent-seeking as a model is a disaster for society. This must be demonized, not praised.
Nothing more needs be said.