Slashdot Log In
Do Patents Stop Companies From Creating 'Perfect' Products?
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Jun 19, 2007 02:31 PM
from the would-have-gotten-away-with-it-if-it-wasn't-for-those-darn-patents dept.
from the would-have-gotten-away-with-it-if-it-wasn't-for-those-darn-patents dept.
Chris M writes "In a recent CNET article, the mobile phone editor writes about what he thinks would make a perfect phone. Unfortunately, as someone in the comments section points out, much of the technology that is used in this concept phone belongs to separate companies. 'I'm sorry to be the Devil's Advocate here, but most of those feautres are patented to separate companies. It would require almost all the major manufacturers [working together] to do this, which is highly unlikely.' Do you think patents are stopping companies from creating 'perfect' devices, or are there other factors at work?"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Not Really (Score:5, Insightful)
I think in certain respects patents spur competition and make every phone better. Each company tries to come up with something that their competitor hasn't thought of to help differentiate their product. They would be less likely to invest the time and effort to develop innovations if they knew their competitor would just immediately copy it. The really perfect phone would not be possible to begin with without all these previous innovations. One could argue that patents made the author's ideal phone possible, but it is more a business issue whether it ever comes to market.
During WWII, the British and Germans both independently and secretly discovered chaff as a radar countermeasure. Neither side used it in the beginning because they were more afraid of the enemy copying them and gaining a bigger advantage than they themselves would receive.
(I do think software patents need to be drastically reformed or completely done away with altogether)
What would be cool (Score:3, Informative)
Then you could drag and drop the desired features onto the phone that is plugged into your computer via USB.
That would be the perfect phone.
You can improve a patent and then get a different patent for it. So it seems to me that someone saying that it's patents holding this back only show their ignorance of the patent system.
Re:What would be cool (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I might want more RAM, or a faster CPU, or an advanced GPU
golly, gee. I'm thinking you would need to get a new goddamn phone.
The article is about certain features, Clearly certian things would upgrade. Of course if it is perfect at the time you get it, you wouldn't need to change any of that crap, would you. What everyone but you and one other poster know is they mean 'perfect at the moment of purchase.'
See, what you want is a fucking magic phone pixie.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What would be cool (Score:5, Informative)
That's not how patents work. If you change one thing and patent the new "invention", it's a new patent, completely separate from the original one. You have to reference the original, but there are no fees to be paid.
True. But if you try to create any instances of your patent, then you will have to pay fees to the original patent-holder (or get sued.) See, patents are like class definitions, but to create an instance of that class, you have to pay. You may extend someone else's definition, and then they will need your permission to change it, but you still need to create an instance of the base class with yours.
Parent
He is technically correct... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
You are NOT technically correct... sorry (Score:3, Interesting)
Why? It's non-commercial "R&D" use. I (personally) can use the disclosure to create a device for "R&D" as long as it's not used commercially (which might include giving it away as that could cause commercial harm to the patent rights owner or licensee).
This stands in most jurisdictions but the US non-commercial use allowed is very limited and R&D by businesses (which includes Universities in US patent la
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no such thing as an "idea patent". There is such a thing as an "invention patent". You can't patent an idea. You can patent an implementation of an idea. Amazon's one-click patent doesn't patent the idea of one-click shopping. It patents the only practical implementation of one-click shopping, which isn't strictly
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I want something small enough to fit in my pocket that won't die on me when it's in my shirt pocket and lean over the pool or toilet (both have happened) and it falls in.
Other than that, I really don't care. Sure, the camera feature is neat and I do find myself spending time playing sudoko on my phone to kill time, but I don't text message, I've never seen the need to read email
Re:Not Really (Score:5, Informative)
Currently, I own the Samsung i607 (blackjack) which earns about an 8/10 from me, which no other phone ever did. It's very thin, light, durable, and has an easy-to-care-for matte finish. It has a full QWERTY keyboard, and a very nice screen, fast processor, 3G, etc... If it had a 4-day battery life instead of 1.5-2 day, and a standard bluetooth stack that would let me sync and tether with ease from my Ubuntu laptop, it would match my dream phone... Not so hard, really...
Parent
Yes, not just phones (Score:5, Informative)
Company A patents technology X, but has no interest in making a product that has technology X plus feature Y. Company B would like to make a product with technology X and feature Y, but is stumped by the patent. Result: the world never gets an X+Y product.
This is not just theoretical. I work in a field knee deep in patents and I see this sort of nonsense all the time.
Parent
Yes. Tragedy of the Anticommons (Score:5, Informative)
This is a well known phenomenon, referred to as the Tragedy of the Anticommons [wikipedia.org]. Yochai Benkler describes how multiple patent holders delayed the development of radio [jus.uio.no] until the U.S. government intervened:
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not Really (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, using this kind of "e-cash" is extremely convenient -- you can use it on teh train, in teh shop, etc. etc. There are some kinds that have your name on it, there are some that are (nearly) anonymous. Pretty neat, really. But, we didn't have it until like yesterday. So, why did this boom come _now_?
It seems that most of the e-cash/e-money/e-payment patents taken out by a few small and innovative companies in the late 80s (which innovative companies AFAIK have traditionally requested egregious licensing fees) expired just around the time the e-cash boom started. So now we have the implementations built on those ideas popping up, as it is finally feasible, sans the patent fees.
Since the implementations and the features are now largely non-exlusive, companies have to compete hard on the service; and since there are no licensing fees and no risks now from using _that_ technology, people concentrate resources on the solution instead on risk avoidance and litigation.
Finally, I can't see how the patent holders have profited from the patent-- noone licensed them then, noone's paying fees now. So, the patents in this case seem to have stopped inovative product development that benefits the society for what -- a decade?
I bet enough research into the way patents are used will show it results only in preventing competition and raising the price of the service, countering the intent of the patent in the first place.
Parent
Well.. (Score:2)
however
2)A bad idea is still a bad idea.
the problem with co-operation (Score:2)
Sometimes (Score:4, Insightful)
Other times, someone patents "the way it's done" and the result is, when you try and find another way to do it, you actually find a better way.
The problem is, you never know which one you're going to get when you're just starting. I definitely thing innovation can overcome most patents, but a lot of time that's a real pain in the ass, when all you want to build is a slightly better breadbox.
Re: (Score:2)
And so it goes. You want a hammer? licenses it or make it better. And the patent will expire.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Other times, someone patents "the way it's done" and the result is, when you try and find another way to do it, you actually find a better way.
Yes, like when ogg-vorbis was created as a free replacement for the patented mp3. The problem, however, is that those who have the patents for mp3 are still saying that ogg-vorbis is violating some (unspecified) of their patents, so almost no commercial entity has dared support this new and better format.
Originally I was only against patents on software and business methods. But after spending years learning more about patents and how they work in the so-called free market, I now think that it is time
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If there is any one type of IP law that I would not want abolished, it is patents. Far from stifling innovation, they actually require it. Because the patent system requires that all patents are fully documented, and since the patents themselves expire relatively
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You have a good point there.
My point is that when the government issues monopolies in the market (as patents are), the government is actually working against the free market.
Of course it isn't quite as simple as I state it here. There are some arguments for patents that look good on the surface.
One of these arguments often seen in the mainstream media is the idea of the lone inventor who gets a patent to protect his investment in the research and development he has done, so he will not be ripped off
Re: (Score:3)
The Perfect Phone in 20 years (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Perfect Phone in 20 years (Score:4, Insightful)
In 20 years, there will be a host of new technologies around, all encumbered with patents, that people will want to have in a 'perfect phone.' The stuff that's under patent now will be like pulse-dial rotary POTS equipment. If you're lucky it's still use-able, in the most basic sense, but it doesn't do much of what people want.
The problem is that innovation is now moving so much faster than it was when the patent term was set at two decades -- by the time something works its way out of patent protection now, it's generally pretty obsolete. And this will only get worse as the pace of innovation continues to quicken.
Parent
Re:The Perfect Phone in 20 years (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the way the patent system is supposed to work. The patent system is a tradeoff... we slow down progress slightly (by making people wait at most 20 years to build the perfect device), but hope that we speed it up more by giving people extra incentives to innovate.
Unfortunately, that's not the way the system actually works. When the patent office lets you patent things that were obvious 10 or 20 years ago (eg. patenting xor, or patenting the idea of VoIP/POTS integration when the idea was an integral part of the design of various VoIP standards released years ago), then the patent system doesn't just slow things down 20 years, it's actually 30 or 40 years instead. And when there aren't realistically sufficient checks to prevent obvious things being patented, it means that a bad patent examiner can slow things down for 50 or 60 years in a few cases where they really screw it up.
Also, in the modern world, clearly companies already have a huge incentive to innovate. Was the dot-com boom driven by the fact that companies could patent things, and monopolize the area for 20 years? Or was it instead driven mostly by VC's hoping to profit from first mover advantage [wikipedia.org]? In my mind, it was clearly the latter.
Parent
Perfect Devices are Bad for Business (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
pfft... (Score:3, Insightful)
No -- Yes.
I say that because the patent system, good, bad or otherwise, has been around long enough that if there was genuine smothering of genius going on, it would have been a major topic long since, and because everyone has a different interpretation of 'perfect' devices. (left handed versus right - textured vs. smoothed...)
For those that need a concept to wrap their heads around, read the book 'The Difference Engine'
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aacarss
Worked so far... (Score:4, Interesting)
Communication is now essentially instantaneous. Bob in New York patents a better belt buckle in 1850, Jim in San Francisco designs something similar. It'll be a minumum of a few months before someone who's seen one happens to see the other and he almost certainly won't care about whether it is or isn't patented and Bob isn't going to go to the expense of sending his lawyer across country for several months to find out. Even if there is a clash, the markets are so separate, it's not worth pursuing getting both sides in a single courtroom.
The pace of invention has continued to dramatically increase. Modern machinery turned up with the industrial revolution. Electricity only became a common power source in the last century. Computers are 60 or so years old. Home computers are less than 30 years old and only common in the last 15. The internet has only really spread in the last 10. And, right now, 3D prototyping tools are becoming available for the first time. Combine those increases in the power of tools for realizing ideas with the increase in population and you're comparing a patent system designed for one level of patenting with one that's being asked to handle exponentially more.
What can be patented has changed. The criteria of "That a reasonable person couldn't come up with on their own" sure as hell doesn't apply to One Click shopping (Wow, really, people would prefer less hassle? Rocket science!) nor does it apply to, Creative's "I have a large collection of music, I'd like to divide it up somehow, perhaps some kind of a folder analogy." which Apple got sued over for daring to copy from the desktop where it was common to MP3 players where somehow Creative were the only people who could ever think of it. Add in being able to patent everything from genes to ways of doing business and you've got a system that is in no way representative of the past.
In the scheme of things, 25 years isn't that long to wait. In a world where computing of 10 years ago is utterly different to the computing of today, a 25 year patent means "a means for using a casette player to store data" would just be coming out of patent protection. So, yes, in terms of digital technology and gene research where 25 years is the entire lifetime of the field, it absolutely stifles things and makes a great case for those mediums to have a 10, or ideally 5 year patent term limit - enough to benefit from your invention, not enough to stifle the whole industry for as long as it's been around again.
Parent
What is "perfect"? Who defines "perfect"? (Score:5, Insightful)
No QWERTY keyboard. I use my phone more often for email than actually using it as a phone. A QWERTY keyboard is a necessity - there is nothing more frustrating than trying to type an email on a standard phone keypad. Predictive typing software mostly sucks.
If a company could create the "perfect" phone, the financial rewards of such a device would make either patent licensing, or litigation acceptable costs.
The problem is, no one knows what the "perfect" phone should look like, or how it should operate. For every person that wants a QWERTY keyboard there are those that don't.
The whole argument reminds me of the "cancer cure" conspiracy theorists that say the cure for cancer is not available since it would hurt the profits of those companies that provide treatments. Baloney! The cure would be worth 10 times the entire treatment regimen of the patient.
The perfect phone doesn't exist because it can not be defined.
-ted
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Qwerty is all you need? You make it too easy. My perfect phone would:
yay stupid questions (Score:2)
No, of course, it's only patents! If only it weren't for those pesky patents, we would achieve perfection and transcend the physical plane.
Obviously patents prevent people from making spiffy devices. you have to license the patents, and it's not hard to imagine patent licensing agreements that prohibit the inclusion of other (competing) technologies. It would actually go a long way towards expl
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There's plenty of devices with unused space in ROM. And do you know how visionaries become recognized as such? They spot opportunities before others do - perhaps even before the market is aw
It's a hole that's hard to dig out of. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not a problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, that elimenates all the little guys from competing because they can't afford to license the technology.
On the other hand, companies prefer to purposefully 'differentiate' their products so the customer is presented with a choice - which the company is banking on. You will probably never see the 'perfect' phone, as a result. It is the nature of the beast.
Sorry to claim the obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
Drug industry does it all the time (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the hell would drug companies want to find a cure for AIDS? There's no money for a cure. The real money's in the treatment!
It's an old problem. (Score:4, Informative)
There's plenty of historical evidence that things like patents and copyrights are primarily a barrier to progress, unless the government steps in a second time and decrees some sort of mandatory licensing. (But this doesn't have much effect on the doctrinaire arguments that we read here so often.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There isn't much the Patent office can do about a petty son of a bitch.
Re:Incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Incorrect (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Welcome to the Internet, folks. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm so bleeding smart that I don't know the basics about what I've just claimed to be so smart about.
Check out Amazon's "One Click" patent. Go ahead.
Re:Incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
Try building a phone that works with the CDMA cellular network, and doesn't violate Qualcomm's patent. It's not going to happen. They've patented too much stuff that's too fundamental to making an interoperable device.
If you piss them off, or if they decide for some reason not to license their patent(s) to you (e.g., you want to make a multi-network phone and their other customers -- the telcos -- don't like the idea), you're S.O.L. as far as most of the U.S. cellphone market is concerned.
Video compression is the same way. Try to build an MPEG-4 encoder that doesn't violate the MPEGLA's patents; it's not going to happen. Sure, you could build some completely unrelated video encoder, but that's of extremely limited utility in a world where standards matter.
Parent
The obvious conclusion (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Incorrect (Score:4, Informative)
You mentioned FUD. A big problem is patent FUD. What matters is what people think. Chilling effects. Many people think patents might be violated even when not. Or they feel they're not in violation but don't want to get in long expensive court battles even if victory is certain. Or they know they will be in violation of patents that should never have been granted, and calculate that trying to get them invalidated isn't worth the expense or that going ahead and hoping they aren't sued is too risky. These problems are made worse by the government's attitude of "when in doubt, grant the patents and let the courts sort 'em out." The patent office rakes in more fees, the lawyers get richer, the justice system hires more people to handle the load, and the rest of us foot the bill for this very expensive system.
As for examples, how about Apple's "Look and Feel" patents on the MacIntosh GUI? Microsoft was not allowed to use a trashcan icon. When they opted for a "recycle bin" they were nonetheless challenged again by Apple, weren't they? How about the hundreds of patents on the hundreds of tiny variations on arithmetic coding? While LZW and the GIF image format weren't too hard to work around, arithmetic coding was another matter. Only takes one of those hundreds of patent holders deciding to sue to make arithmetic coding not worth the trouble, not when Huffman is almost as good. The result is, no one will touch arithmetic coding even though the basic algorithm is free of patent protection. Instead, everyone uses Huffman coding. The primary difference between the long vanished "bzip" and "bzip2" is in bzip2, bzip's arithmetic coding was replaced with Huffman. People would not even use bzip because of that.
Note that we're talking about the users who by rights should have nothing to fear from whatever alleged patent violations authors may have committed. Instead, the possibility that a court might pull the plug, as nearly happened to the Blackberry, is enough to scare off users. Then there's the stunt SCO pulled, trying to shake down Linux users for $699 each in licensing fees, lest they convince a court that they aren't blowing a bunch of smoke and do manage to get an insanely draconian and unenforceable injunction ordering everyone to stop using Linux. That anyone actually paid SCO is sad. That patent trolls might have such leverage is ridiculous. Dell customers don't have to worry should Dell be found in violation of some patent. Dell's PCs won't suddenly stop working. But somehow Linux users do have to worry, with MS claiming Linux is in violation? WTF?
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
New Inventions, not new concepts An invention is a specific implementation of a concept. If you can't specify how it's built, it's just a concept. (Or rather, that's the way it's supposed to work. Software patents are a slightly different kettle of fish, but the same rules should apply)
The protection garnered by a patent grant is one of an exclusive monopoly. You can prevent anyone else (within the patent office's jur
Re:Incorrect (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds more to me like a bunch of individual monopolies each trying to force their competitors either out of business or to their knees, resulting in a slew of competing products that do nothing but frustrate consumers due to their lack of interoperability.
How many picture card formats do we have now? 15 major ones? Is that REALLY necessary? There's something to be said for innovation and competition, sure, but there's a reason we invent standards.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)