A way to break loose from the present expensive patent-and-sue system of idea territory control

To get around the problem of patents and lawsuits effectively strangling new creative technological ideas for new American products, instead of the patent-and-sue system we now have for combat between individuals and companies, how about making it like the interstate highway system, a governmental and unbiased system for rewarding originators of the ideas and products based on those ideas, so that all technological patentable ideas are freely useful by all Americans in their products.

The compensation to the originators - and which could be secondary inventors too, anyone independently coming up with an idea even if already someone else had previously done that somewhere - according to a share of the amount of application of the idea in American technology products.

It would be paid for by a general tax as a fraction of the sale price of all technology products, without regard to which technological ideas or patents were involved in their creation and manufacture.

This is justified because probably all but the latest bit of an idea for technological innovation, is actually built on all the technological, scientific, engineering ideas developed and made available throughout civilization's growth, probably going back to the Greek scholars and even to the stone hatchet or even the invention of tamed fire for cooking.

The benefit of such a system is expected to be the unfettering of idea makers and manufacturers and technological product developers, so they can rapidly proceed with the implementation of their products and ideas for products. No need for a massive expensive legal department to root in the patent stuff to find which ideas can be pursued in a new product, which is something important for the backyard lone inventor, especially.

For example, let's say that Apple comes up with a new patentable idea. The idea is disclosed in the patent and registered with the patent office. From then on, everybody can freely use that idea in their inventions and products. Apple would get compensated for their invention by an appropriate portion of the taxes collected during the sale of technological products.

This would enable rapid building upon new ideas of others; more importantly, it would enable creation and development of new ideas and innovative products, without the hassle of wondering if someone else had thought of parts of it before, and would act to block the new product. It would also stop the technology-strangling business practice of patenting some key part of a technology, with no intent of using it in a product, but simply to prevent it from being used by a rival business; thus, more kinds of products would become available to the customers, expanding the functionality of the nation.

Opponents to this concept, I fantasize, would be those who derive fame&fortune off of the existing patent-and-sue system; those who consider their patent base as a means of control rather than just financial gain; those who would find it disturbing because it is not the way they are familiar with doing things or thinking about things; and the conservative political group who want less governmental influence and fewer taxes; this makes sense insofar as the risk of some political group getting itself into office who are in it for power and control by a mere few Americans, for their own exclusive benefit. Liberal politicals would question how could privateering such a system be made unbiased and unrestrictive by whoever was controlling it all. Then the costs of paying for it out of detailed tracking of which patent, which idea and in which proportion of each new product, would be overwhelmingly costly and time consuming, almost as bad as the present system and probably even more expensive. So it seems best to me to have it as stated above, paid for by a general tax on all technological based products, from toothpaste to jet aircraft. Even agricultural products depend a lot of technology for their products, such as tractors and fertilizers.

Such a system would be of great benefit in teh upcoming expansion of civilization into nearby space. Although much of teh technology being utilized by upcoming corporations, such as launch vehicle technology, was developed by NASA and therefore paid by American taxes and therefore free to use, newer space access & utilization technologies could be hamstrung by trickery use of the patent-and-sue system by those who patent some key part of a new upcoming technology, with no intent tu use it for goods or services, but merely to prevent rival ways of accomplishing needed things, from being utilized. Much of the space industries are solely based on gaining profit and have little intrinsic interest in the unbiased expansion of civilization into the resources of nearby space, and thus are likely to prevent American best approaches to space, if that is the way they gain most power and wealth.

This proposed system would also wipe out purpose from the often abusive corporate practice of the unrighteous application of the so-called "employment agreement" ceding all ideas by the prospective employee in the future to the employer, regardless of the employer having any intent to utilize the ideas of the employees. This has been blocking the nation's utilization of the vast majority of technologically-interested workers, people who are hands-on in technology and often get new ideas simply by the stimulation thereby of the technological creative part of the mind not involved with the performance of the job for which they are hired to do, which insight can inspire any time of day or night, on or off the job, and most of the time have nothing to do with their fulfillment of their hired-for job accomplishments.

By adopting the system proposed here, technological product advancement could be gotten out of the virtual exclusive control by wealthy companies, and back into the hands of the independent inventors and developers, including small businesses and backyard inventors, where currently most ideas have to die in the present expensive patent-and-sue system of idea control. All would ultimately benefit, from the huge wealthy corporations to the backyard lone innovators, insofar as contributing to the technological capability of the nation.

(Nonetheless I expect this concept to be deep-sixed, because "it is not how we do things, and we are the ones in control here, not you." The place is crawling with bullies.)

Is patent law doing what it was intended to do?

Patents were intended to protect the one who had struggled to create something new and achieved it, from the horde of copycats.

Copycats, from the bully sitting next to you as a schoolkid - who passed his tests by copying your answers, and you had better not try to hide your answers - could start from where the innovator left off, and without that life resource being used up in struggling to create the innovative thing in the first place, they could run with the idea and make their fortune with it, never compensating the actual originator who made it possible to exist.

It is an ancient problem. It was generally ignored; the upper crust tending to be formed of bullies who had no interest in supporting those who had been ripped off. So the innovators, who had found a way to make something new, would do their best to hide their secret means from the prying eyes of others; so as to protect their business making and selling their innovative thing. But when those innovators grew old and passed away, the special goodie that they had made and sold, vanished from the market and no one else knew how to make it anymore; and so everyone had to do without that special something from then on.

That was something that got the attention of the bullies who ran things, when they got deprived a bit, that way.

So a compromise was set up, where the innovator would be granted a limited time to exclusively make and sell his/her innovation-based product, if they would disclose how to create the innovation. I think it was seventeen years, in which it belonged to the innovator; thereafter it was free for all to copy.

The rulers of the land thought they had wisely solved the problem, providing for everybody's needs by issuing patents. And, it all sounds reasonable: 17 years of protection for your idea, your answer on the school desk test; then it is given away for free. The copycats could still make their fortunes by making the innovator's thing, except they had to wait some years to do it. And the snoops did not need to spy to steal the innovator's ideas anymore; it was all there, disclosed in the patent.

But instead of peace and prosperity resulting, there were fights over who would get the patent. Innovations have to be built out of the things already available, and so the search for new ideas for innovations went on being done by multiple people, often times. The early days of electronics often involved many quite angry disputes over who came up with an idea first, for example.

And all our innovative ideas are built on a vast legacy given by others of the past. Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Newton, Einstein, Jobs, and millions of others, put much of their lives into making the bricks out of which we now build our innovations. They are gone now, and best we can do is give a blanket silent mental thanks to their lives and their gifts to us, with which we strive to build anew, much as they did in their time.

Yet without the promise of a patent protecting you, there was little use in doing the long involved work of finding a way to create a new and useful thing, since the copycats, who often were also tough bullies - or hired them - stalkers & assaulters, would just grab away any success one had.

Nowadays, The start of Apple Computer by a couple of guys in a home garage, could not create the personal computer line that many of us so cherish. There simply are too many folks incredibly skillfully snooping and able to invade one's workspace while you are gone shopping, to keep anything secret and documented long enough to get a patent to protect the innovative thing. Huge corporations with almost endless deep pockets can hire industrial spies, to make sure nothing happens to challenge the huge corporation's business technological base, their "intellectual territory." Protects their investors; what else do you want?

Another way the huge corporations protect their existing intellectual property technological base, is by making sure that no one comes up with something better. This is done by requiring workers in technological fields, to sign an "employment agreement" that not only keeps them from stealing the company's intellectual property - the "employment agreement's" apparent intent - but also steals any and all ideas about anything that the employee might suddenly think of on or off the job. Those hands-on workers are the ones most likely to come up with lateral field ideas for innovation, since they are fascinated by the potentials of innovation, and are ever matching up their background knowledge with whatever they encounter in life, on or off the job. And so they are the ones most likely to come up with the really innovative new approaches. To prevent them from leaving and starting their own company based on their own innovative idea, the "employment agreement" forbids them from doing that. Thus, the nation is deprived of countless advances that would have solved problems and made life more bountiful. But it protects the various big employer's profit bottom line. The employee, who most likely is living with little surplus income from the job, cannot get patent protection from his/her innovative idea, which has nothing to do with their job or what they have seen others do on the job there. The employer claims ownership of all such ideas for innovation, but has no interest whatsoever in developing or making the new thing available to customers; so the idea is just dead, right there.

So, is the patent system achieving what it was intended to do? Imperfectly, at best.

The gaining of patents has merely become a game tool among businesses, patents mere pawns in their monopoly business games.

Gone is its original intent, to protect the innovative folks from predators.

Yet for sure, some businesses will hire a bunch of engineers to strive to produce a management-defined specific innovative thing; and that specific innovative thing deserves a patent's protection in the classical sense.

Yet the original intent of the patent system, to prevent loss of innovative product knowledge, and eventually make it fully available to all, by granting the originator exclusive right to produce the products utilizing that innovation but for a specific limited time only, has resulted in not only the "patent agreement" technique for suppressing innovation, but also the widespread "industrial espionage" against the backyard home inventors, making sure nothing becomes patentable by them, and thus unable to get financing for making their new product; the innovation dies right there, and thus all the consumers lose what might have been, as a result.

America has come a long way since the U S Patent system was set up. Could there be a major revision devised, so as to both reward innovation, yet also make such innovation immediately available to all?

This is something worth thinking about.

Some things seem headed a bit in that direction already. Open-source software, for one. Creative Commons licensing, for another. Yet these do not reward the innovators; they merely are some means for enabling some innovations not to just die due to strangulation by the intellectual-property-territory tools of big business, who would simply have grabbed any loose ideas and patent them as if they had done the work - sometimes patenting just to prevent others from utilizing the ideas. Copycats have free use of the innovative ideas, but now they need to acknowledge their sources for the ideas their products are based upon. At least the originators get their name mentioned, even if no other reward. And, that often is enough thanks.

Yet, sometimes an innovative idea is taken and run with, by a talented person skilled in actualizing such innovations, and squeezing hordes of money out of it, by them knowing how to manipulate the system. That kind of skill and effort surely deserves reward for making new product available to the consumer. They sometimes become billionaires over such doings.

And I wonder, how fair is it that they are billionaires due to their excellent business skills having achieved; yet the original innovative concepts on which their fortunes were based, get only Creative Commons names mentioned, but those innovators may be living in poverty.

This does not lure people to do the work of coming up with innovative ideas for solving problems or enabling new opportunities in our lives.

Maybe the system needs some new inspection, and wisdom applied, to match the world as it is now.

On the ongoing subject of Patent Reform

The ongoing subject of Patent Reform has pushed my buttons a bit;
"White Board: Austan Goolsbee on Patent Reform"
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/03/07/white-board-austan-goolsbee-patent-reform

The subject of the U. S. Patent system and far more generally, giving credit for the contributions of ideas and the development of physical means to explore application of those ideas, has been of interest to me. And decades ago I had read of calls for revision of the Patent system, although just how to do that were not described.

I recall back in the '60's when I had a couple ideas that I had suggested to my employer, who eventually wrote me a release for them, a friendly co-worker who had once worked as a patent lawyer, told me that a patent does not protect one's idea, it only gives one a right to sue those who use the idea after you have a patented granted on it. He said the only useful patents were for processes, and the patent also written to not include some key part of the idea so others could not really copy it from the patent data.

Plus even back then the cost of a patent was huge, many months of my salary. (My then-wife, who was very pragmatic and preserved only "#1," who I so desperately needed as my mate, always demanded my uncashed but signed paycheck, and in return I got $5 for lunches, and no other spending money ... she would not even allow me to buy a 4-function calculator while I was struggling to do my hobby project of calculating the materials stresses on my "Mooncable" anchored lunar tether to see if space-rated fiberglass would be adequate strength/weight ratio if designed with a constant-stress tapered cross-section, so I had months of hand calculation in my spare time and only had my slide rule as a help)

But later in the early 1980's when I worked for Shugart Corp, a division of Xerox, and had been promoted to have the Electronics Design/Development Engineer title (despite lack of a formal degree) I was in the loop to read the patent summaries that went around in the engineering department. Xerox and IBM had a mutual sharing of patents agreement, so the latest ones were listed there. I always really enjoyed reading those patent summaries, seemed to really brighten up my interest as a technically creative person by nature. Very stimulating reading. Those patents tended to be on electrical and mechanical things, which were both things I was long interested in and knew a lot about, so the patent summaries gave hints that instantly blossomed in my imagination for a few seconds, fun. So, I got a bit more acquainted with that subject.

And years before that, I had helped write the patent application wording that ultimately was granted, with the senior Electronics Engineer and I listed as the inventors, that eventually years later got granted. But I later heard that the company, Pertec Computer Corporation, only got the patent to prevent some rival company from seeing and patenting the idea and thus preventing Pertec ourselves from using it in our disk drives we developed and manufactured. (U S Patent 4,055,814 Abraham et al - I was the "et al" - "Phase Locked Loop for Synchronized VCO With Digital Data Pulses" - 1977.)

So, I have some awareness of the subject of patents.

I vaguely remember that back in the mid-1980's I had written up my ideas on how to possibly acknowledge all the idea inputs involved in making something new and useful. It went far beyond the original intent of the patent system. The patent system was originally created so as to give rights to the creator of some new product, often after years of tinkering on it, since there was a propensity for some other persons to just make money by copying the invention and selling it, cheaper because they had none of the costs of creating the idea and developing it into a manufacturable product, costs that would have had to be added to the product otherwise. Also the original patent was there with a time limit - 17 years I think - after which the patent would expire and everybody could then use its ideas; this encouraged inventors to disclose their processes in a patent, ensuring it was theirs for at least the 17 years, and to the larger system it meant that the ideas key to the invention would not be lost to civilization when the inventor passed away, as so often happened before then.

Yet as I pointed out above, a patent can be used to squelch the availability of an idea-based invention. This can be done by a company to prevent the use of a potentially rival technology, to keep it out of the competition; the patent would be gotten with no intent to actually make the products available to the customer base, but instead was gotten with the intent to prevent customers from utilizing those products, and thus would have to buy the company's established products. In 17 years the originator of the idea is likely to have perished from starvation or other neglect, so the advantages to such corporate stuff is likely to be permanent. There have been many stories floating around where this kind of thing was done, particularly in the automotive field, often said to have the motive of preventing fuel-saving mechanisms from being available to cars, so as to sell more of the highly profitable gasoline.

So, I think the subject of Patent Reform needs some heavy thinking and wisdom applied to it, far more than what is being now proposed by the Obama administration. But what they are dong is a good start, I think.

Perhaps I will re-think all the ideas I had for acknowledging all the idea input and craftsmanship involved in making an invention and producing it, and write them in this blog. I will let this urge stew while I go about my daily survival chores now.

Later - I need to point out that my purpose in this blog post is not so much as to point out rule changes needed in the patent system, but rather instead explore the need to find ways to encourage and support the idea-makers and creative crafts people that produce the innovations and inventions that are needed quite rapidly as civilization adjusts to its own expanding self, as humanity moves away from the animalistic hunter-gatherer predatory exploitative mode of life, and into the nurturing responsible mode.

Yet I realize that there is a tendency for some non-creative types of people to assume that inventions and their patents only come from the highly degreed (and highly paid) scientists & engineers who toil away in the bowels of some corporate lab, producing hugely complex and expensive prototype gizmos for the corporation to manufacture and make big profit for the investors; but exactly what the scientists and engineers focus on to invent for the corporation is only defined by the corporate managers, and the managers expect their defined patentable inventions to be produced as a result. Any other ideas the scientists and engineers might have are mere rubbish, wild cards, possibly disruptive jokers in the nicely laid out plans of the management staff, and are to be suppressed by every means. Management rules, period. Our system has painted itself into a corner, it seems to me.

Gone is the earlier notion that ideas for innovations and inventions come from the lone inventor who spontaneously comes up with ideas and then finds possible uses for them, preferably applied to some kind of endeavor he/she is interested in enabling happen. But that is the actual kind of thing I am attempting to encourage through reward of any and all who participate. This is what America needs to return to the fore in innovation. And yes, the corporate controlled scientists & engineers are also needed as part of that system too ... but just not being the top level of the system. The top level of innovation is the creative individual, whether a CEO or a janitor, an explorer of the nature of things, tinkerer with concepts and/or physical stuff with their hands, whose minds are busy integrating their lifetime of experiences to find matches of patterns produced in their mind, with patterns of needs and benefits that civilization would better thrive with as a result.

Most likely what is needed is to create a larger system to help promote and reword innovation of any and all types; the Patent System most likely would only be a subset of that system, dealing with only the aspect of protecting the efforts of those who toiled in mind and body to make some new innovative process or device that would help civilization, protecting them from those who would simply rob the invention and make it cheaper as a rival business to make money for themselves, not rewarding those who had produced the invention at all. Or, those business interests who would grab an invention's idea and patent it to prevent civilization from utilizing it, so as to maintain some pre-existing business products and services.

Exploring the mechanisms of how ideas come to be, seems a necessary step. Oftentimes we hear of ideas being produced in a generally similar time frame in far-apart areas of the world, too. Yet a patent is awarded to only one of them, excluding the others. How about a system that rewards all of those who independently came up with the same or similar ideas? Yet there are always copycats in the world; and indeed, our education system is based on copycatting the knowledge provided by others in the past eras; we tend to be thus conditioned to do that. And each innovation is built on other innovations, otherwise, to make a new Smartphone one would need to dig the raw materials out of the ground and figure out how to process the materials and put them together all the way up to the final assembly and test of the devices, all over again each time. So the ideas in innovation are actually a flow of ideas, being assembled this way and that in the mind or hand of the creative person, like clay that is squeezed in the fingers and the eye sees what it looks like as a result, and decides if that is interesting or not.

How to appropriately reward that kind of thing, regardless of when and where and who does it, seems to be the question.