How the patent war is stifling innovation in Silicon Valley [infographic]

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How the patent war is stifling innovation in Silicon Valley [infographic]

Posted Oct 3rd, 2011 at 11:59 AM and seen

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Via MBA Online. (H/T @gvoakes)

Go forth and innovate.

Annie Colbert

14 responses
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8 months ago Sandra Holtzman responded:

Great chart. Actually, there's a chart called "Who's suing whom?" in the telecom industryr which is a great illustration of how complicated these messes can be in each sector. www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/whos-suing-whom-in-the-telecoms-trade/

8 months ago Walt French responded:

Let's suppose that we HADN'T had patents in the cell phone industry…

Would Nortel have done all the hard work to create LTE? Would Samsung have done their share of the lifting for GSM? Who would pay a team of engineers for a couple of years' work, and then give it away to competitors, many of whom could make more money off it (since they had an easy-to-identify fruity name)?

How about the Motorola spin-out this year? Motorola Mobility was losing money and even losing share in the Android ecosystem to Samsung and HTC a year ago. Who would buy shares in a company that was totally dependent on one company, Google, for 100% of its business success, but was struggling? Would investors have thought they were buying anything if not for that trove of patents that could be sold to somebody else?

Heck, how about the java system that underlies Android? Sun thought they had a deal to license it, but then imploded when it turns out Google went ahead without it, freely distributing Sun's work that they expected to get payback for all their development. End of Sun!

I get that there are such things as trolls but I'm dumbfounded that so many people think all the hard engineering work at different companies (ESPECIALLY the work to agree on standards, which CAN'T be trade secrets) would get done by some volunteers who think it's just fine to work without any hope of pay.

8 months ago Art Scott responded:

Microcode messed up everything ...? Should we just go back to hard wiring everything ...?

8 months ago mpt responded:

I respectfully disagree with Sandra Holtzman. This is not a great chart. It is a terrible chart.

The “$2.5M” circle, which should be 2.5 times as large as the “$1M” circle, is 6.3 times as large.

The “$60M” circle, which should be 2.9 times as large the “$21M” circle, is almost exactly 9 times as large.

And the chart of patent cases filed starts at 1000 rather than zero for no good reason, suggesting (unless you look carefully) that the number of filings has quintupled rather than “nearly doubled”.

Software patents are bad. Misleading people about them is also bad.

8 months ago Tom Bortels responded:

Any argument that in it's opening paragraph names one side as "evil" or a "villian" is already suspect; if the case is compelling, the facts will show it - they don't need to be juiced up with ad hominem arguments. Those and the misleading graphics/charts/caricatures do more harm than help to your argument - they suggest it's not as solid as it really is.

8 months ago John Anderson responded:

Unfortunately the lines seem to be crossed between patents and software. Both are different entities and I think that this article has in some way missed the point.

Inventors should be able to protect their inventions regardless how they are constructed. The key point is that the invention has an inventive step. Whether this is implemented in software, hardware or both is irrelevant.

8 months ago Brad Eckert responded:

The patent system needs a relief valve. In the case of patent gridlock, the offending patents should be nationalized. Just as with eminent domain, property rights shouldn't be allowed to stifle progress. The government needs to grow some cojones instead of letting corporations have a free-for-all.

8 months ago Aaron responded:

@Walt French, the point is not Hardware Patents (e.g. radio chips, methods of transmitting data over RF, etc) is not so bad, which I think you're referring to, but pure Software Patents (e.g. use 2 fingers, drawing apart, to zoom in) are a pretty horrible thing. Literally no reasonable sized software can be created without infringing on some software patent somewhere, and there is almost no way to know this. And often times there's only 1 good way to do a specific task, with dozens of clunky, really painful ways that might need to be created (and then patented) because there's a patent on the good way that is pretty clear to anyone who tries to do a specific type of task.

8 months ago cyberdyne (Twitter) responded:

Patent trolls are patent trolls and everyone can agree that's bad, except for patent trolls. Software patenting is complicated, and clearly it isn't done right now. But to suggest to software patents themselves are bad is to suggest that all those software engineers out there should be writing software for free out of the goodness of their hearts because gosh darn it, software should be free.

Only software shouldn't necessarily be free. There's a huge difference between describing an action or feature such as a hand gesture and patenting that and writing code that actually accomplishes it.

We should be trying to figure out how to find a middle ground between allowing ridiculous patents that describe nebulous functionality and failing to protect and reward well-written, original ideas that are actually implemented in software.

8 months ago Walt French responded:

@Aaron, I've been engaged with hi-fi, radios (as a home & commercial engineer), tech gear, computer design and construction, software.

There just AIN'T a significant difference in the type of engineering that you do in these domains, just that so much of today's innovation is in software.

People made these same claims against Edison's patents. Against the inventor of FM and some key circuitry for ALL radios, that he invented. In every case, there was a strong financial interest in expropriating the hard work of others.

In 2011, Google wants us all to believe that software patents are bogus, but coincidentally, they're facing a huge lawsuit over their conscious decision NOT to license Sun's engineering work and to perhaps “make some enemies” by taking that. By the way, that action was pretty much the last straw in Sun's ability to survive.

8 months ago MechR responded:

@cyberdyne:
"But to suggest to software patents themselves are bad is to suggest that all those software engineers out there should be writing software for free out of the goodness of their hearts because gosh darn it, software should be free."

No, that's what copyright is for.

"There's a huge difference between describing an action or feature such as a hand gesture and patenting that and writing code that actually accomplishes it."

Indeed; the former is patented, and the latter is copyrighted.

8 months ago WaltFrench (Twitter) responded:

Today's software troll outrage: FossPatents identifies that Intellectual Ventures has sued Motorola over 6 patent IV controls. Four software, two hardware.

To my jaundiced eye, the hardware patents (e.g., U.S. Patent No. 7,120,462 on a “portable computing, communication and entertainment device with central processor carried in a detachable handset”) are actually more generic than the software patents (U.S. Patent No. 7,409,450 on a “transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) packet-centric wireless point to multi-point (PtMP) transmission system architecture”). Or maybe you think a “method and system for distributing updates by presenting directory of software available for user installation that is not already installed on user station” is easy-peasey.

But the greater outrage comes from the reporting that Google, Inc., was disclosed in a recent filing as being an investor in an IV fund. (There are many.) In other words, a non-practicing entity partially backed by Google, is suing MMI.

In other words, [1] Google being involved in suing practitioners is just business as usual for a firm that calls software patents “bogus” and [2] these patents are hard-core engineering and NOT something that copyright of a particular code sequence would protect. Anybody with access to the patented description should be able to re-implement them, which would normally obviate any concern about copyright.

So I (again; sorry if some people keep presenting lots of bad examples masquerading as rebuttals) say: software patents represent hard work and business as usual is to respect and compensate that work when it's intentionally incorporated into a product for sale. The Big Kahuna claiming otherwise is up to its ass in hypocrisy.

People who want a pro-FOSS perspective on patents etc in tech, and are willing to read a few hundred words every couple of days (let's call it high-school-level accessible) might want to prefer Mr. Müller's work to cartoon figures. Otherwise, those people risk repeating arguments that make them sound like they dropped out before sixth grade.

8 months ago NeilHaskins responded:

@WaltFrench
I don't think a “method and system for distributing updates by presenting directory of software available for user installation that is not already installed on user station” is easy-peasey, but I do think it was done on Linux at least 7 years before someone else decided to patent it.
I think this is the patent your referring to http://www.google.com/patents/about/6557054_Method_and_system_for_distributi....
It was filed in 2000.
From the wikipedia article on dpkg, the Debian package manager
"dpkg was originally created by Matt Welsh, Carl Streeter and Ian Murdock, first as a Perl program, and then later the main part was rewritten in C by Ian Jackson in 1993."
Maybe software patents aren't intrinsicly bad, but the system for giving them out is seriously flawed, and the durations are far to long in such a fast advancing industry.

8 months ago WaltFrench responded:

@NeilHaskins, I'm neither a patent lawyer nor an expert on communications protocols, so I have no reason to dispute your assertions.

I just think it's a waste of time to chase down this stuff and post it at HolyKaw. If the information is unique, MMI's lawyers would be happy to have it. Very likely, of course, they already do, and it may or may not make their case stronger.

In that same vein, I wonder: if this particular patent is so egregious, whoever is attacked with it (here, MMI) ought to be able to use such seemingly obvious examples, and just send the attacker (here, IV) packing. The court would also ask IV to pay costs, even, for wasting everybody's time.

Yet somehow people are really worried about the miscarriage of justice because the PTO can't re-examine the patents (they do), and courts can't understand the issues (despite the fact that they're presented with them, A LOT).

So why do knowledgeable tech experts waste their time worrying about lawyers wasting their time?

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How the patent war is stifling innovation in Silicon Valley [infographic]