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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.