Is A 'Patent First, Develop Second' Approach Promoting The Progress?

Patents

from the wait,-don't-build-anything-yet dept

A few weeks back, Mike wrote a piece about the recently passed America Invents Act. One of the details he noted was that the US Patent system would be switched from a first-to-invent to a first-to-file platform under the notion that this would both bring us in line with how most other nation’s patents work and cut down on wasted time required to prove the difficult matter of who was first to invent. As the post noted, this could cause some problems:

First, it encourages inventors to file for lots of patents as early as possible to beat anyone else to the Patent Office, rather than making sure that the invention is actually worth patenting. It also seems to go against the basic principle of the patent system, if it's supposed to reward actual inventors.

Of course, this attitude of focusing on filing first before doing anything else is already permeating many businesses. BusinessWeek has the story of a company called Tactus Technology, who hired patent attorney Jeffrey Schox and managed to make its first priority the filing of twenty patent applications. It did this before getting funding. It did it before even beginning to build a prototype for their invention. And it did it because their attorney is teaching the company to use its patents not as a defense, but as a weapon:

The Schox method revolves around teaching startups to view intellectual property as a weapon. How might a rival get around those patents? What features might they think of? Schox often asks engineers who haven’t even built their first prototype to conceptualize unusual extensions of the technology, so that these ideas can be protected just in case. It’s well worth the trouble. Schox says the going rate for a hot patent now is about $1 million. “Decades ago a machine might have five or 10 patents,” says Schox. “Today, the phone in your pocket has about 5,000. It’s just a much different landscape to think about.”

This is how broad-based patent applications get written. The strategy appears to no longer be to have a great idea and invent it. Instead, the strategy is to have a great idea, patent the ever-living hell out of it, then patent every conceivable other use for anything similar to your idea, then maybe actually build something (note: Tactus is actually building something), but also get your wallet ready for all the licensing money that is going to come your way.

Now, perhaps some will suggest that all of this pre-emptive patenting is the incentive that sparks the work on inventions to begin with, but it certainly can’t be what the originators of patent law had in mind. And I think there’s a better argument made that all the time spent working with lawyers and filing patents, which the article says, in Tactus’ case, took years, is time lost on having a great invention built, marketed, and sold. After all, we might already have experienced the next great innovation if Tactus’ invention had been built three years earlier, but instead, the market only gets the fruit of their labor now because of the drawn-out patenting process resulting from a first-to-file mentality. Tactus’ owner, Craig Ciesla, even admits as much in the article:

Following Schox’s advice, the company avoided looking for new investors even during the lean times out of fear that its ideas would be exposed. “We made a choice to go with the intellectual property,” Ciesla says. “Now that choice is paying off.”

Wonderful for Ciesla, I guess. However, that certainly doesn’t sound like a mentality that fosters “promoting the progress.” If anything, it sounds like delaying the progress.

Filed Under: innovation, patents, startups

DailyDirt: Tools For The Blind

Innovation

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Visually impaired folks have access to more technology than ever before. Despite various setbacks that prevent some ingenious innovations, plenty of developers are still working on hardware and software tools to help out people with disabilities. Here are just a few examples of some interesting projects for the blind.

• An iPhone app called VizWiz helps blind users by letting them take a picture of something that is confusing — and then crowdsourcing a helpful description to make things clear. This app uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to obtain helpful people, and the average turnaround time for a description is 27 seconds. [url]
• The Poet image description tool is open source software that helps to crowdsource image descriptions for digital books. This tool is aimed at textbook illustrations that aren’t too helpful for people who can’t see them. [url]
• The Tacit project is developing a hand-held sonar device with haptic feedback — a technological take on the white cane. It’s still just a prototype device, but so far, users seem to be able to use it fairly quickly without much training. [url]
• Haptic shoes could help people navigate by vibrating different parts of the shoe to tell the wearer if there are obstacles ahead. These shoes, like the Tacit project’s handheld, are based on open Arduino hardware — allowing other developers to contribute improvements and build upon existing tools. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: arduino, blind, crowdsourced, haptics, hardware, innovations, mechanical turk, software, sonar, tacit project, tools, visually impaired, vizwiz
Companies: amazon

Boston Shuts Down Uber Because Massachusetts Doesn't Approve Of The GPS

Failures

from the no,-seriously dept

We’ve written plenty of stories about ridiculous (and ridiculously slow to adapt) government policies that simply don’t keep up with the times, which then hinder new, innovative and disruptive services. One company that seems to be running into such things all the time is Uber, who is taking on local state and city regulations around the country as it tries to offer its innovative (and quite useful) transportation service in various metropolitan areas. You may remember the big fight in DC about some regulations that would have hindered Uber by forcing it to charge high prices. Up in Boston, things are even more bizarre. The company has been effectively told to cease and desist from offering its service. This has happened elsewhere, due to various silly regulations regarding cab and livery services, but in Massachusetts they seem to do everything in an especially screwed up manner and this is no exception.

The reason Uber can no longer serve the Boston region: Because they were making use of this crazy newfangled technology called “GPS” to measure the distances that cars traveled for the purpose of billing users.

It seems that the Massachusetts Division of Standards, and its laws covering “weights and measures,” is so out of date that it has not been updated to recognize GPS as an appropriate “weight and measure” system for distance. As if to prove just how incredibly out of touch these folks are, in the official letter ordering Uber to stop service, they repeatedly refer to the iPhone as an “I phone.” They also refer to the Global Positioning System as the Global Positioning Services. These are the people in charge of killing off innovation. Incredible.

Basically, the state had someone sign up for Uber, take a ride in the car as a “sting” (one of the people in the car’s job title is — and I’m not joking — the “Sealer of Weights & Measures”) and then cite the driver after seeing that he (gasp!) used a GPS device on his phone to measure the distance traveled. When Uber pointed out that GPS has been around and widely used for decades, the Massachusetts Division of Standards argued that may well be… but since GPS is not for commercial purposes they can’t accept it. Seriously.

Global Positioning Services (GPS ) technology is not an issue as it is and has been widely used in non-commercial applications for a number of years. However, GPS has not been used in commercial applications for assessing transportation charges until Uber Technologies, Inc. introduced its use for this purpose. The major problem at this time is the fact that there are no established measurement standards for its current application and use in determining transportation costs similar to that of approved measurement systems for taximeters and odometers. Massachusetts law does not sanction unapproved devices for use in commercial transactions.

The idea that GPS isn’t used in commercial applications is silly. GPS has been widely used by the military for decades and has been used in commercial applications for quite some time as well. It’s beyond silly to think that because some clueless “Sealer of Weights and Measures” is still focused on last century’s technology that GPS is not a viable (or even common) technology for this purpose. This seems like a clear case of a totally out of date bureaucracy actively hindering innovation for no reason other than general luddism.

Filed Under: boston, cabs, gps, livery, massachusetts, rides, weights and measures
Companies: uber

Help Define How The US Government Promotes Innovation Over The Next Four Years

Innovation

from the take-part-now dept

Here’s a chance to help define how the US government promotes innovation over the next four years. Over at our Step2 discussion platform, Darrell West of the Governance Studies program of The Brookings Institution is seeking to crowdsource ideas, feedback and insights into how the federal government can go about promoting an innovation economy. The results of this effort may go into an eventual report put out by West for new members of the next Administration. Below the Step2 post linked above, we’ve pre-loaded an initial list of 96 different possible agenda items, as prepared by West, for an innovation agenda, covering a variety of proposals touching on these topics:

• the building of digital infrastructure
• the promotion of entrepreneurship and economic development
• improving productivity in the private and public sectors
• improving education and workforce development
• strengthening creativity and invention
• improving university commercialization
• improving decision making through data analytics
• protecting digital assets
• harmonizing cross-border laws to promote the digital economy
• promoting socially responsible innovation

Now we need your help:

1. Read through the list of items listed on the Step2 post
2. Vote (up or down) on the items, based on the priority you believe they deserve
3. Comment on individual items, with suggestions, thoughts, information, clarifications, etc.
4. Respond to others’ comments and discuss the various ideas being proposed
5. Add your own items if you feel there are ideas that are lacking from the initial 96 items.

Together, we can help shape a powerful agenda for innovation over the next four years.

Filed Under: innovation, innovation agenda

Entrepreneurs & VCs Tell The White House To Focus On Innovation, Rather Than IP Enforcement

Copyright

from the a-much-more-useful-plan dept

As promised, below is what I filed today with the White House in their request for comment on the upcoming “Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement.” After talking it over with a number of top entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, we decided to file the comment jointly, as a group. Among those signing on to this statement are Evan Williams (Founder of Twitter), Dennis Crowley (Co-founder and CEO of Foursquare) Erik Martin (General Manager of Reddit), Alexis Ohanian (Founder of Reddit & Breadpig), Ian Rogers (CEO of TopSpin), David Ulevitch (Founder & CEO of OpenDNS), Ben Huh (CEO of Cheezburger), Drew Curtis (CEO of Fark) and many others.

The key to our filing is to point out that if the White House really wants to deal with infringement, the absolute best way to do so is to encourage and enable greater innovation. Innovation to provide new ways to create, to promote, to distribute and to monetize content has time and time again been shown to be the only consistently successful path to reducing infringement. Legal enforcement has never been shown to be a successful long-term strategy. And that’s because infringement is, almost always, a situation where the business models and the services have not yet caught up to what the technology allows, and what the public would like to be able to do. Encouraging new tools and services to close this gap takes away the incentives for infringement.

Unfortunately, most of the focus to date, instead, has been on increasing the power of law enforcement, which actually is counterproductive in that it tends to have massive collateral damage in terms of both potential attacks on free speech, but more importantly by creating chilling effects on the very innovation that is needed to respond to widespread infringement. Similarly, we are equally worried about the nature of attempts at regulatory change (SOPA/PIPA, ACTA, TPP) developed in backrooms with little to no input from the innovation community, which will again lead to stifling of innovation.

If you have not yet filed your own comments with the White House, please do so today before they close comments (either 5pm ET or midnight ET depending on which page you believe — so I’d assume 5pm to be safe). You just need to go to this form, where you can file a short (2,000 character) comment directly, or you can upload a longer filing if you have more to say. If you want another example beyond what we filed, also check out this detailed filing from CDT. Once all the filings are in, we’ll look at highlighting a few of the more interesting ones if we get the chance next week.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright enforcement, entrepreneurs, innovation, vcs

Internet Archive Enables Over 1,000,000 Torrents Of Books, Music And Movies

Innovation

from the torrent-away dept

We sometimes hear people say that BitTorrent as a technology is only good for infringement. We know that’s not true, but then people will point to examples of how frequently it’s used for infringement. Of course, that’s meaningless when you look at both the larger picture and the nature of trends. When new distribution technologies are introduced, it’s not surprising that they’re used that way because there’s so little legitimate activity on the system. But that changes over time. Remember, when the VCR first came about, nearly all activity on it was described as “infringing” by some, because there was no legitimate content being offered. However, obviously, over time that changed and more and more legitimate content was offered.

Over the years, we’ve certainly seen an increase in content being offered via BitTorrent, but today there’s a big addition: the Internet Archive has enabled over one million torrents of books, music and movies from its collection.

The Internet Archive is now offering over 1,000,000 torrents including our live music concerts, the Prelinger movie collection, the librivox audio book collection, feature films, old time radio, lots and lots of books, and all new uploads from our patrons into Community collections (with more to follow).

And while some ignorant organizations may declare that the Internet Archive is a “rogue site,” I think most people recognize that it’s a wonderful repository of all sorts of legal content, much of which is now available using the rather efficient distribution technology BitTorrent.

Filed Under: archive, bittorrent, books, creative works, movies, music
Companies: bittorrent, internet archive

Execs From Bankrupt Kodak To Make Millions For Giving The Company's Patents To Trolls

Patents

from the this-is-not-innovation dept

We’ve written about the ridiculousness of the ongoing auction over Kodak’s patents — the final sad legacy for the once giant company. However, it’s getting even more ridiculous. On Monday, a bankruptcy court judge approved about $6 million in “performance” bonuses for execs, including some that are based on how much the company gets from these auctions. Think about the ridiculous incentive structure here. You have executives who are running a bankrupt company, who are set to make millions (in a court approved manner), for handing off the company’s patents to trolls, so they can go out and sue the actual innovators.

The execs make out like bandits. The buyers likely make out like bandits after shaking down some companies. The lawyers (of course) make out like bandits. And… who gets screwed? Oh yeah, the companies who are actually innovating successfully in the market and the public (who we thought the patent system was supposed to benefit).

Filed Under: auction, incentives, patent trolls, patents
Companies: kodak

New Patent Reform Bill Defines Software Patents; Targets Trolls

Patents

from the well-that's-interesting... dept

We’ve discussed the “America Invents Act,” a patent reform bill that passed last year after years of Congressional fighting. As we (and plenty of others) noted at the time, for all the hyperbole around the bill, it completely ignored nearly every problem with the patent system today, and seemed almost entirely useless. Our worry, then, was that this would kill off any appetite for Congress to take on the real problems of patents today. So it’s good to see that a new patent bill has been introduced — by Reps. Peter DeFazio and Jason Chaffetz, with a very, very minor change to patent law: it would allow those sued for hardware or software patents the ability to recover litigation costs if it’s determined that the suing patent holder “did not have a reasonable likelihood of succeeding.”

In other words, this is a bill targeted very directly at the pure trolls: the patent holders who sue companies with no real intention of taking a case to court, but rather just to get them to pay a settlement fee to avoid the (expensive) court costs in defending a patent infringement claim (which is quite frequently much more expensive than the settlement options):

Notwithstanding section 285, in an action disputing the validity or alleging the infringement of a computer hardware or software patent, upon making a determination that the party alleging the infringement of the patent did not have a reasonable likelihood of succeeding, the court may award the recovery of full costs to the prevailing party, including reasonable attorney’s fees, other than the United States.

But what’s much more interesting about this is that it seeks to carve out a specific definition for software patents. I know that in software circles there’s been plenty of talk over the years about the problems of software patents, and many don’t believe that software should be patentable at all. However, as defenders of the patent system like to point out, there’s no such “thing” as a “software patent” defined in the law, so it would be difficult to say software isn’t subject to patents. Well… this bill defines software patents:

SOFTWARE PATENT.–The term ‘software patent’ means a patent that covers–

“(A) any process that could be implemented in a computer regardless of whether a computer is specifically mentioned in the patent; or
“(B) any computer system that is programmed to perform a process described in subparagraph (A).”.

Given the massive fight in previous years over patent reform, I fully expect to see patent system supporters throw a massive hissy fit over this very, very minor change to patent law, but it’s so minor that I’m at a loss as to how they’ll have any compelling argument. The only reason I can think to be against the changes here is if you’re in the business of abusing the patent system to shake down innovators. I actually think that supporters of the patent system, such as pharma companies, should support this kind of change too. If the patent system can successfully slice off the problems associated with software patents, it means that there will be less pressure for massive patent system changes.

Of course, if you want real patent reform that takes on the larger issues that impact all sorts of areas (beyond just software), we’ve made clear our suggestions — though there doesn’t seem to be any appetite in Congress to make such major changes in the near future.

Filed Under: attorney's fees, costs, litigation, patent reform, patent trolls, patents, software, software patents