NASA patents...

[Darnok]

Patents are evil, NASA is no better, but since they are giving away some of their patents maybe you can make use of it http://www.technology.nasa.gov/patents

[MinimumSky5]

Patents aren't evil, but some of the people using the patent system are evil. Still, props to NASA for giving them away.

[Darnok]

Patents aren't evil, but some of the people using the patent system are evil. Still, props to NASA for giving them away.

If some system allows "evil people" to abuse it, it is wrong system.

This http://www.technology.nasa.gov/patent/LAR-TOPS-217 could be used in KSP?

[KerikBalm]

Then pretty much every system is wrong.

Name a system, and I'll find an example of abuse.

[Hary R]

If some system allows "evil people" to abuse it, it is wrong system.

This http://www.technology.nasa.gov/patent/LAR-TOPS-217 could be used in KSP?

Never a system is created to allow abuse, evil people find a way to abuse the system.

[p1t1o]

Does the patent system itself generate more abuse than would exist without patents?

Without patents there would be whole industries dedicated to stealing other peoples ideas.

The system isn't evil, humanity is. Not totally, but clearly as a species, we have a very wide, very dark stripe down our sides.

[Darnok]

Then pretty much every system is wrong.

Name a system, and I'll find an example of abuse.

Software licensing

Never a system is created to allow abuse, evil people find a way to abuse the system.

Patent system was created to allow abusing. But if you think otherwise then for you patent system should be called "bad design".

Does the patent system itself generate more abuse than would exist without patents?

Without patents there would be whole industries dedicated to stealing other peoples ideas.

The system isn't evil, humanity is. Not totally, but clearly as a species, we have a very wide, very dark stripe down our sides.

Patent system is dedicated to stealing ideas Military and agencies have full access to every patent and they don't have to obey patent-law.

Without patents you still have copyrights on your implementation of idea or algorithm.

Imagine scenario without patents where you invented super-fast-searching-algorithm, you made company to make profit out of your invention. But I can also start company making better implementation of your idea and that would be small progress step for humankind, but huge profit leap for me. Of course for you it is bad, because I just took away part of market share from you... after while I was able to improve your basic search-algorithm ever further, yet another step for humanity. And now you can read about my improvements of algorithm and implement them on your own. After while 3rd company arise and creates even better implementation, that company will take market share from both of us, but if they improve algorithm we can push our implementations further.

Change implementation into manufacturing to see how it can work with companies making engines for example.

With patents it would be impossible to make so many improvements, because after invention you would patent it and nobody would be able to use it without paying you. What makes this invention useful only for large corporations that are able to invest lots of money at start. Patents are slowing down technology, because you wouldn't invest more money to improve your searching-algorithm, you would wait for corporation to pay you fee for agreement to use it. Those corporations wouldn't improve your algorithm because their research would be your property any way.

Corporations doesn't like competition that is why patents are so great for them.

Edited October 14, 2015 by Darnok

[Hary R]

Patent system was created to allow abusing. But if you think otherwise then for you patent system should be called "bad design".

Not all of them. Depend of the country, yes I do think otherwise and some country patent system are a "bad design" then.

End of off topic for me.

[KerikBalm]

Software licensing

I suggest you look into various linux related cases.

Lots of abuse regarding taking open source software.

Start here for example

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_controversies

Patent system was created to allow abusing. But if you think otherwise then for you patent system should be called "bad design".

Thats some excellent logic... here... I'll try

*The* patent system was created to encourage invention. If you think otherwise, then for you *the* patent system should be called "awesome idea".

Patent system is dedicated to stealing ideas Military and agencies have full access to every patent and they don't have to obey patent-law.

The patent system is dedicated to the prevention of stealing ideas.

The governments that issue them in general have rights to excercise a compulsory license.

The whole point of a compulsory license is a check to prevent the abuse of patent monopolies.

The system of compulsory licensing could and should be used to correct many of the perceived abuses of the patent system.

For example, when rights to a medication are bought and the price of a pill is raised from 13.50 to 750, the patent system could be used (if the government wished) to grant to the government a compulsory license to produce those pills at a reasonable price.

Its not that the system is designed to be abused, its that the government is not using the ful system, and is letting it be abused.

Without patents you still have copyrights on your implementation of idea or algorithm.

No, you don't. Full Stop.

Imagine scenario without patents where you invented super-fast-searching-algorithm, you made company to make profit out of your invention. But I can also start company making better implementation of your idea and that would be small progress step for humankind, but huge profit leap for me.

But you can't, because you don't know what the algorithm is, or how it works, and you don't have the source code, because the idea wasn't published and made publically available as a patent - its instead kept as a trade secret.

Of course for you it is bad, because I just took away part of market share from you...

Which is why many companies (such as dupont) don't use the patent system, and keep trade secrets instead. They hide an idea from the world so they can exclusively use it longer than they'd have patent protection

With patents it would be impossible to make so many improvements,

No it wouldn't. What you describe is a common case that results in Cross-licensing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-licensing

Those corporations wouldn't improve your algorithm because their research would be your property any way.

No it wouldn't

Corporations doesn't like competition that is why patents are so great for them.

Which is why Dupont often doesn't use patents, and keeps trade secrets instead.

Like you do on so many subjects, you are criticizing and writing about something that you clearly do not understand.

----Edit----

As mentioned in the cross liscencing article... the problem is "patent trolls" or "patent holding companies. The primary business of a patent holding company is to license patents in exchange for a monetary royalty. Thus, they have no need for rights to practice other companies' patents"

These people do not develop ideas.

They do not make use of the ideas.

They just buy and sell the rights to the ideas, jacking up the price... like commodities traders and useless wall street types.

The patent system has a provision to stop this.. the government should use compulsory licensing when these patent trolls are sitting on a patent to make money for doing nothing.

Then there's the even worse patent trolls that will sue people on a BS basis, hoping for an out of course settlement, even though they hold a patent that could easily be invalidated in court, or isn't really related or being infringed.

If the cost of the court proceedings is more than the price they ask, people pay.

This is a problem with the legal system in general (this happens in every area of law, particularly in the US), and not the patent system.

Edited October 14, 2015 by KerikBalm

[KSK]

Without patents you still have copyrights on your implementation of idea or algorithm.

Imagine scenario without patents where you invented super-fast-searching-algorithm, you made company to make profit out of your invention. But I can also start company making better implementation of your idea and that would be small progress step for humankind, but huge profit leap for me. Of course for you it is bad, because I just took away part of market share from you... after while I was able to improve your basic search-algorithm ever further, yet another step for humanity. And now you can read about my improvements of algorithm and implement them on your own. After while 3rd company arise and creates even better implementation, that company will take market share from both of us, but if they improve algorithm we can push our implementations further.

Conflating software patents with the patent system as a whole is unhelpful because software patents are a bad example for a number of reasons. Forgetting about any personal opinions, from a legal perspective, putting a good system in place to protect software inventions is very difficult - I'd say we don't really have one yet but its not for lack of trying. Also software, as an industry has an extremely low barrier to entry in terms of the equipment needed to write your software and the ease of duplicating and distributing it. This is not at all true for other industries. Your scenario above is also extremely simplistic and assumes that people will always "buy a better mousetrap", which is clearly not true. Technical merit is often way down the list of factors that decides whether something becomes successful or not.

Change implementation into manufacturing to see how it can work with companies making engines for example.

With patents it would be impossible to make so many improvements, because after invention you would patent it and nobody would be able to use it without paying you. What makes this invention useful only for large corporations that are able to invest lots of money at start. Patents are slowing down technology, because you wouldn't invest more money to improve your searching-algorithm, you would wait for corporation to pay you fee for agreement to use it. Those corporations wouldn't improve your algorithm because their research would be your property any way .

This is so mixed up that I don't even know where to start. Lets try your engine example and see where it takes us.

I have a brainwave on the way home tonight and invent a brand new engine. For simplicity, we'll assume that my engine is genuinely brand new and not just an improvement on an existing engine. I file a patent application to protect my invention.

That patent will contain a description of at least one way of making my engine. It will also contain a set of claims that define what competitors can or can't do without infringing my patent. The claims are normally broader than my description, that is they're allowed (within reason) to cover things that I haven't explicitly described. This is good because it prevents competitors from reading my examples, making a minor modification to them and avoiding my patent. I say 'within reason' because clearly, an overly broad patent gives me too much power over my competitors, which is a bad thing.

My patent will be published and be available for everyone to read. That's one of the main points of the system and there's nothing I can do about it. My competitors are then entirely free to read my patent and improve on my invention. They might need to pay me money to use their improvement, or they might not. That gets complicated.

So I've got my patent pending. Now what? That's entirely up to me. I can give it away for free to anyone that wants it. I can give it away for free but with certain conditions attached, one of which might be that if anyone makes any improvements to my engine, they have to make those improvements available for free. I can license it to a company, collect my royalties and sit cackling on a huge pile of money for the rest of my life. I can license it to a company, collect my royalties and invest those royalties into making an improved engine myself.

Lots of options. Your example might well be true in some cases but it's certainly not going to be true in all cases, probably very few cases.

Or maybe I want to go into business for myself.

In which case I'm going to need money and probably lots of it, to get my engine to market. So I'm going to need investors. But those investors are going to need some certainties before they give me any money. My patent is a big help there because it stops Big Engine from taking my idea, making their own version and squeezing me and my investors out of the market before they get a chance to recoup their investment. Without the patent, they're much less likely to invest. Far from 'only being useful to large corporations' if you're in the business of manufacturing something that isn't lines of code, patents are one of the few tools that a start up company has to compete with the large corporations.

So what happens if I don't have a patent for my engine? Somehow, I scrape together the cash to start a company. I start selling my engines. A.N.Other Corp copies them and starts selling them too. I can't compete with their economies of scale, marketing budget, distribution networks - all the good stuff that comes with being a large company - and I go out of business. But hey - net win for humanity right? My engine is still out there being used? I shrug my shoulders, go invent something else and try again. Same thing happens. Caring a little less about humanity this time, I try again with a third invention. By this time, I'm a bit more business savvy, so I do things a bit differently, a bit smarter. Makes no odds. A.N.Other Corp gets another windfall and my third company goes bust.

Screw humanity - I'm done with this. Gonna get a paid job with A.N.Other Corp.

In the meantime, A.N.Other Corp has just gained a whole bunch of new technology which it can bury, charge extortionate prices for, or otherwise abuse.

If you want technological development to be at the whim of a handful of large corporations then getting rid of the patent system is an excellent way to do exactly that.

Edited October 14, 2015 by KSK

[Mitchz95]

If some system allows "evil people" to abuse it, it is wrong system.

Then I guess freedom of speech is a bad system, too?

[GeneCash]

One reason NASA holds patents is to keep other people from abusing them. This keeps private companies from patenting the same tech and then trolling with it.

For example, the Wrights held various patents on the airplane and sued the hell out of anyone trying to make an airplane until they ran out. Few people bother remembering that part of "inventing the airplane"

[KerikBalm]

Yea...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war#Patent_war

In the end, the US govt essentially stepped in and did compulsory cross-licensing.

"In 1917, the two major patent holders, the Wright Company and the Curtiss Company, had effectively blocked the building of new airplanes, which were desperately needed as the United States was entering World War I. The U.S. government, as a result of a recommendation of a committee formed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, pressured the industry to form a cross-licensing organization"

This wasn't a problem with patents, it was a problem of people who weren't willing to work with each other.

The Wright brothers did make a valuable contribution, and they were willing to let others use it... for a fee. Curtis also made valuable contributions... but neither one wanted to pay the other's fee.

The government took far too long to intervene. The system had a rememdy, the government just didn't put the system to use.

Also relevant:

"During the 2001 anthrax attacks through the US Postal Service, the US Government threatened to issue a compulsory license for the antibiotic drug ciprofloxacin, if the patent owner, Bayer, didn't lower the price to the government. Bayer lowered the price and the government backed down on the threat."

The US government should be threatening to issue compulsory licenses for a lot of drugs unless the prices are lowered.

The system is set up to avoid abuse. That is the whole point of the compulsory license provision.

Article 5A.2 of the Paris Convention states:

"Each country of the Union shall have the right to take legislative measures providing for the grant of compulsory licenses to prevent the abuses which might result from the exercise of the exclusive rights conferred by the patent"

The system is most definitely set up to prevent abuse.

If its being abused, the government is not doing its job... and that isn't the fault of the patent system.

[Mazon Del]

Patent system is dedicated to stealing ideas Military and agencies have full access to every patent and they don't have to obey patent-law.

Actually, as a guy working for a defense contractor I can tell you that this is not quite how it works. On any patent gained by someone, such as Raytheon, where they discovered the patent-able item while fulfilling a government contract then Raytheon get's total ownership of the patent, however the government gets the right to use the patent as though they owned it. Now, while this technically means in many ways what you say it does, in actuality it is implemented in the way that a lot of open source hardware licenses are today. Yes, on a given contract with a Raytheon competitor, like Lockheed, they could just hand Lockheed the patent info and never pay Raytheon a dime. But that doesn't make any sense, because Raytheon already has the infrastructure to produce the hardware/software in question. So they'd be stiffing Raytheon to save money that they immediately spend having Lockheed build a copy of the infrastructure that Raytheon has. Far easier, and cheaper, to just pay Lockheed the cost of purchasing the equipment from Raytheon. They do not need to compel Raytheon to fulfill this order, because we'd want to. It's 'free money' even if it means helping out a competitor on a contract we had wanted. Because the alternative is just that we get zero money, and the project goes ahead anyway because the government can just have someone else produce the items in question, but now we seem like jerks which WILL be taken into account on future contract bidding processes. (IE: If we have a history of being obstructionist with our patents that they paid for us to get, then they are not going to want to give us the opportunity to get more patents.)

And similarly, even though the government has the ability to just kind of do whatever with non-government assisted patents, it still ends up being far easier to just pay for the product from the company that owns the patent in the first place. Why should they pay to set up a production line to make computer mice for themselves when they could just buy them in bulk from a normal company? And they cannot force a company to provide them with goods/services free of charge. Correction, they COULD do so, but without a VERY VERY good reason you'd have just about literally every other business in the nation pouring money into that companies legal team to sue the government, and they WOULD win because even in drastic circumstances (war time and such) the government has to reimburse companies for goods/services provided. While I am sure there are plenty of anecdotes of situations where they got away without doing so, they are vastly in the minority compared with the rest of the time.

A nice example of using someones product without paying for it is that piece of software the Navy (Airforce? one of the two) got caught using. They had paid for like 5 licenses of the software, and when the company forced an audit to happen, they found out that the government had installed something like 15,000 licenses across their computers. The company tried to get the government to pay for each of those licenses, which would have cost over 1 billion dollars (VERY expensive software), and only got about a third of that. But that was mostly because the government looked into why it happened and discovered that it was because of a breakdown in their protocols for telling people "We only have 2 licenses, no more." than any actual malicious behavior.

Personally I don't think our current patent system is that great, but I agree with the need to have one. I'd make two changes to it in the US if I could. Change number 1 is that software patents have a lifespan of 5 years, with an additional 3 that can be gained if the patent requires specialized hardware, as opposed to the full 20-ish for normal. 5 is certainly long enough to roll out a software product and hit peak saturation rate, and the extra 3 covers the time it should take for you to spin up production lines for hardware. The second thing I'd add, which I recognize is largely unfeasible especially given that I have friends inside the patent office that yell at me over it, is that we go back to the old days when you were required to submit either a working demonstration or an accurate model with your patent. This was a check to ensure that people actually worked on their ideas instead of hording them. They dropped the requirement largely because of storage and processing limitations on the models.