I strongly believe that the pursuing of patents gets in the way of the collaboration that helps science progress. It creates evidence of innovation (ie patents), but slows actual innovation.
Anything that gives universities more of an incentive to pursue the patent angle, which this judgment does, will therefore be bad for science. :-(
(In CS, whole areas have become minefields for this reason. For example go out and implement a wavelet compression algorithm for images without violating any patents. Are you sure you didn't violate patents? Really sure? Exactly!)
> I strongly believe that the pursuing of patents gets in the way of the collaboration that helps science progress. It creates evidence of innovation (ie patents), but slows actual innovation.
See the mess around CRISPR patents for an excellent example of this.
The CRISPR debacle is a funny story because on one side you have a public institution and on the other side you have a private institution.
However, both in reality are publicly funded whether that be through government grants or tax breaks on endowments. I think we should do a trade: an institution that in someway benefits from the public should get credit for the discovery but patent goes back to the public.
Edit: I realize there’s a chance that whatever I just said, there’s a small European country that already has implemented this idea.
Patents are a gigantic scam and the entire system should be scrapped. True free market would allow competition. This is just an artificial monopoly and it's needless and does not help competition.
What’s crazy is universities don’t fund research. That’s a more central issue. They both directly profit from research and want to then own the results of that research, it’s a parasitic relationship with funding agencies.
When a university’s are extracting more money from doing research on net then they invest in research that’s not funding. They do get rather creative with accounting, but that’s irrelevant to this discussion.
EX: A students tuition paid for by a research grant does not count as R&D spending by the University or even R&D.
Was the bulk of CRISPR research mostly funded by private emtities or was it government funding in EU, US and others? Where the private emtities even going to undertake CRISPR research if there was no public funding?
Would be interesting to see a study that showcases which was the major factor to research on that field is.
But in this case, a research institution is getting more money, presumably to be able to fund further research.
It seems like a perfect counter example of what your worries are about slowing progress.
I bet that the money that they get will largely go to lawyers, administration, and increased efforts around finding/litigating patents on current research.
I am extremely dubious that it will result in research that advances the state of science. Science flourishes best when you share results and hypotheses early and often, then get feedback/inspire others. But that type of communication threatens patents, so inspires people to put their research into black boxes until the legal paperwork has been filed.
what "black box" are you talking about? Caltech is a major research institution -- their invention was published and widely cited (according to Google, by 840+ papers), so others clearly benefitted from their work. It seems only major tech companies making billions by selling wireless gears didn't know about it.
Patent litigation is expensive but you would hardly need a billion-dollar war chest to monetize a portfolio with a successful litigation history. Between contingency fee arrangements and litigation financing, you could essentially print money with little downside risk, albeit with far less upside potential than if you paid sticker price to litigate.
This judgment sounds big but it can be appealed and Caltech may never collect a penny. A $200 million judgment against Apple was thrown out less than 2 years ago [1].
Most tech transfer programs at universities don't break even, they usually lose money [2]. This is even more insane than it sounds because the research is already paid for. Tech transfer deals don't even cover the university lawyers.
If the patents were so valuable why wouldn't the universities be starting unicorns left and right with actual investors or actual revenue? Instead they try to get the money through litigation.
It's sad (and a waste of money) that universities have become fixated on being get-rich-quick patent trolls instead of doing transformational research.
Sure, if VirnetX's ordeal with Apple is any indication, Apple/Broadcomm would drag out the suit as long as they could -- and I predict that this can last 5-7 years easily.
>If the patents were so valuable why wouldn't the universities be starting unicorns left and right with actual investors or actual revenue? Instead they try to get the money through litigation.
Not sure where you are coming from, but there are many University research tech spinoff's in the US, especially in the SF Bay area.
Yea, there is this company called Google. Stanford licensed them the PageRank algorithm for stock and later sold it for a total of $336 million in the mid 00's. Check out this for info[1]
"But that type of communication threatens patents..."
Patents, for all their downsides, are designed to get scientists to share results. Without patents you have enormous disincentive to sharing repeatable results: you can't charge money for it if anyone can go and copy you. With patents, you can freely share results and still charge money.
Should patents last as long as they do? Should there be a cap on how much companies can charge for patented medicine, since it's effectively a temporary government-granted monopoly on curing disease? All reasonable questions, but I don't think abolishing (non-software) patents would improve communication between scientists.
Did CalTech's filing of this patent help Apple or Broadcom's engineers create their devices? I sincerely doubt it. This is just patent trolling, and Caltech should be shamed for it.
>Did CalTech's filing of this patent help Apple or Broadcom's engineers create their devices?
No but Apple's patent for rounded corners didn't help Samsung engineers from creating their devices...and yet Apple filed the patent and sued Samsung for patent infringement.
Caltech should be championed for trolling a troll.
> No but Apple's patent for rounded corners didn't help Samsung engineers from creating their devices...and yet Apple filed the patent and sued Samsung for patent infringement.
It's unfortunate that this story has now been twisted into "Apple suing Samsung over rounded corners", when in actuality Samsung deliberately produced a 132-page report comparing the iPhone to their current phones at the time and pointed out hundreds of features and design elements they should steal from the iPhone user interface.
>Samsung deliberately produced a 132-page report comparing the iPhone to their current phones at the time and pointed out hundreds of features and design elements they should steal from the iPhone user interface
But that doesn't really matter, you can adopt concepts and designs from 3rd parties (including competitors) so long as the same is not protected.
The "rounded corners" was patented and infringement of the patent was a count on the lawsuit, and Samsung was found liable for infringing that patent.
What is unfortunate and "twisted" is claiming a research university is a patent troll. Research universities develop and patent new technology all the time, you could say its part of their business model, and historically they are happy to license their patents to commercial entities to take to market...very rarely do universities actually develop their new inventions for commercial purposes. Most would consider it a win-win to shift costs of development to universities, not universities being patent trolls.
> But that doesn't really matter, you can adopt concepts and designs from 3rd parties (including competitors) so long as the same is not protected.
Maybe it's legal but I don't think it's ethical. And while implementing someone else's concept in your own way is one thing, point for point copying of a user interface that someone else designed is entirely another.
> What is unfortunate and "twisted" is claiming a research university is a patent troll.
You don't seem to use the common definition of a patent troll. Caltech very clearly is in the business of inventing real, new technology. You can disagree with their filing of infringement lawsuits, but they're not a troll in the way the typical NPE is.
I think you can be a "real" inventor in the sense that NPEs are not and still be in violation of the nominal intent of the patent system. Caltech is here. You can call that trolling or not; OP never claimed that Caltech was literally an NPE. It's absurd that parallel invention of similar techniques, without awareness or observation of the filed patent — which USPTO often grants for extremely trivial software constructions — puts you in violation.
It's especially absurd that 4x damages were awarded against Apple here when Apple is just a customer of the allegedly infringing party. 4/5 of Broadcom's customers were not assessed damages — why pick on Apple in particular? (I mean, we all know why — they have cash.)
It sounds to me like you're the one purposely changing the definition to discredit them. It's obvious from social cues that they're not using a strict legal definition.
I'm not trying to discredit them at all. I think the question of patents and trolls is a very important one. It's worth making sure we are not confusing the seriously awful behavior of patent trolls _exploiting_ the system with the intended functioning of the system.
(We can have a rousing debate about whether the intended functioning is something we think is societally advantageous or not, but the changes to that are different than the fixes we need to prevent patent trolls from causing so much harm.)
I completely disagree. If I invent a new technology I should have the right to sell it. It is not fair for the inventor to create a novel technology only to have a huge corporation steal your idea. It is similar to China stealing US IP, it ruins the incentive to actually invent new ideas. If I create something novel, I deserve a short term monopoly so I can compete against established corporations.
For example, look at the Wright Brothers. They invented the airplane and didn't make any money. They spent their entire life suing people for stealing their idea. The system should encourage and incentivize creating ground breaking inventions.
> If I create something novel, I deserve a short term monopoly so I can compete against established corporations.
I agree, but I don't think the current patent system does this. I think the length of patents should be reduced dramatically, 5 years sounds reasonable.
It's crazy when you think about how patents last for 20 years, which doesn't really work with the current pace of technology IMO (as an example, the iPhone wasn't released until 2007). So you can't use anything Apple patented to make the ORIGINAL iPhone work until... 2027? That doesn't seem good for humanity to me.
If the lengths were reduced, and the requirements much more strict, I think the world would be a better place.
Not gonna work. getting a new patent in genetic sequencing takes 10 years of research. then in 5 years you sell only a couple of products, especially if you're not the market leader. Then your competitor can use your idea while you invested billions in it.
Think about oxford nanopore and illumina for example. if illumina could just use their patents after 5 years and given that they already have 90% market share, they would be dead.
It’s not at all unheard of for a patent to take 5 years to be granted. Do those folks just lose out? Or do we base patent term on issue date instead of filing date? (NB: it used to be that way, and it invited all sorts of gamesmanship.)
Their problem was that other engineers didn’t actually use the novel tech the brothers invented in their airplanes. The basic idea of putting an engine with a propeller on a winged vehicle was not novel, it had been tried many times before. It was simply a matter of power to weight ratios and aerodynamics knowledge crossing the right threshold.
Their key innovation was wing warping for control, but the industry rapidly switched to flaps and ailerons, leaving the brothers’ main innovation behind. Their aerodynamic concepts were advanced, but again others pushed beyond their concepts very quickly.
So their technical innovations were brilliant, but not used extensively by later engineers.
No, this is not correct. Actually, they also patented flaps and ailerons or anything else that could manipulate the wings outer surface to adjust roll.
Their real contribution was coordinated flight control. That is, rotation or roll (via warping or whatever) in coordination with rudder. This is what really made stable air flight possible. They figured this out through tremendous personal expense, scientific method, and personal risk. A sustained multi-year effort. Seems reasonable to get at least some licensing revenue when others copy it.
So really, the only benefit is the actual patent ending up in the public domain, at the cost of further slowing down the field when someone ends up with patent rights assigned andisfeeling particularly litigous.
I agree somewhat. The problem is that there are so many bullshit patents in the world that mostly just create a minefield for those trying to create new things.
A proposal (in “Radical Markets”) I agree with is to charge a property tax of, say, 2% for each year that a patent holder wants to keep the patent. The value of the patent is whatever the owner decides it should be but (to prevent claims of $1 values) the owner must sell the patent to the first entity willing to pay more than the declared value.
This, in theory, would ensure that only patents that were genuinely useful would be kept around rather than being used as tools to stifle innovation or rent seek for those that actually create great works.
The problem seems to be that the bar for "novelty" in software patents is extremely low. (Amazon's patent on 1 click ordering is probably my favorite example).
My (least) favorite example is that Microsoft got at least 3 patents out of Exfat in the late 2000s for trivial extensions of FAT32, which incorporated long-public, in-no-way-novel techniques to FAT in basically the most obvious possible way to add the features. (Basically: hashed directory entries for speed of lookup; a single extent design that only works for 100% contiguous files; and a free bitmap.) These things were easily predated by the same techniques in, e.g., ext3 (2001) and classic Berkeley FFS from the 80s, but MSFT gets to prevent unlicensed 3rd party ExFAT implementations until 2029, if not further.
Is this why we don't have any progress in the wavelet world? When I first heard about wavelet compression, it was supposed to be so much more impressive than DCT based algorithms. The only wavelet encoder I'm familiar with is JPEG2000, and it's adoption has not really been too wide.
Are the patents for wavelet more oppressive than H.26[4-5]?
I personally think that patents are necessary to promote independent (i.e. non-corporate) innovation. If an individual has a novel idea they should be entitled to some of the money that a corporation makes using that idea.
Of course, the US patent system is pretty deeply flawed. I participated in a study involving patent infringement allegations between two big companies, and my opinion was consistently "Why was this patent approved?"
> If an individual has a novel idea they should be entitled to some of the money that a corporation makes using that idea.
Absolutely not. Suppose I, Mr Independent Inventor, come up with some idea and convince the patent office to grant me a patent, and then proceed to do exactly nothing with it. Five years later, Ms Employed Engineer working at ABC Corp comes up with the same idea, and they manage to turn it into a product, which becomes successful. I contributed nothing to their product. Why on Earth am I owed any money for their work?
You’re twisting the GP’s comment. They never said you should be able to sit on it; They said, if you invent it, you should get something. If it’s invented by two different people with no relation or knowledge of each other, the winner takes all approach is wrong.
> Why on Earth am I owed any money for their work?
And what about when ABC Corp steals Mr. Independent Inventor’s idea and makes millions on it? How is that fair?
How about patents created by public universities should automatically be in the public domain so every one benefits. After all, they are government funded.
Patents and code licensing rights are not related. You may release your code under GPL and if it violates some patent, the owner may sue you or whoever uses your code.
I agree that research institutions shouldn't pursue patents, but I think patents in general have some value, because they discourage companies from relying on trade secrets, which used to be the norm, and is why certain ancient and medieval inventions were lost once the guilds dissolved and took their trade secrets with them.
If it were any other company I'd get depressed and say it's another victim of the tragedy of software patents. But Apple deserves every post-Creative Labs patent victory ruled against them.
For anyone that doesn't know, in 2006 Apple was caught off guard and sued by Creative Labs over the iPod, resulting in a $100 million settlement. It was total nonsense and Jobs was right to be pissed, but what does he do? Does he get fired up to bring about patent reform? No! He doubles down on software patents himself and goes on to sue Samsung in the same shitty way in 2011.
I mean, it's too late now to turn the ship around on software patents. It's never going to change. But 2006 - 2011 were prime growth years for Apple, where they could have made a great case to the public for how software patents were bad and used in a totally bogus way against a well liked American company.
And if he didn't want to do that, he could have built up a library of patents to squirrel away for defensive purposes on a rainy day.
But no. He got burned by Creative Labs, hated the experience, and turned around and did the same exact thing to a totally unrelated company.
When it comes to software patents, fuck Steve Jobs and Apple.
Thank you. You're correct, I've wondered why this isn't mentioned more often, and maybe that's why.
However even after realizing that, I personally still consider a design patent about rounded corners to be on the same level of B.S. as a software patent, and still stand by my conclusions. But I'd be interested to know why I shouldn't do that, and if you have more information I'm honestly all ears
You make it sound like Samsung was quietly doing their own thing and then were blindsided by a lawsuit from Apple. But actually after the iPhone was released Samsung deliberately went through it screen by screen and produced a 132-page report on what features and interface elements they should steal from the iPhone.
I don't have a great opinion of the patent industry in general but in this situation Samsung's behavior was pretty blatant and unethical (IMO), and went well beyond "rounded corners".
> But actually after the iPhone was released Samsung deliberately went through it screen by screen and produced a 132-page report on what features and interface elements they should steal from the iPhone.
Did you know competitive analysis is something that is frequently done across many industries? GM/Mercedes/Toyota are among the first customers to buy[1] their competitors latest models and they disassemble them to the last bolt to figure out/estimate materials, methods and costs per component, sub-assembly and unit level. I see nothing unethical or nefarious about that.
1. Often they pay companies like Munro & Associates (https://leandesign.com/) do the analysis on their behalf
Competitive analysis is different than cloning the look & feel of something. "They have a unified design style with very nice rounded corners throughout the OS, we should have our own unified design style with our own nice touches" is not the same thing as "we should copy their style wholesale". GM isn't making cars that look like Toyota's.
Competitive analysis is one thing, point for point copying of another company's user interface is unethical. Apple put in the R&D to make the iPhone interface more intuitive and easy to use compared to other phones at the time. Samsung copied Apple's homework.
Design patents are basically like trademarks. They're not meant to embody useful new inventions the way utility patents are, and they always involve a greater degree of subjectivity. Even if you believe Apple's iPhone design patents to have been too obvious and unoriginal to warrant protection, they aren't as an egregious perversion of the purpose of the law as the most notorious software patents.
> It was total nonsense and Jobs was right to be pissed, but what does he do? Does he get fired up to bring about patent reform? No! He doubles down on software patents himself and goes on to sue Samsung in the same shitty way in 2011.
I realize Jobs and Apple were/are big, but what makes you think he had any hope in hell of doing anything about patent reform?
The America Invents Act was signed into law in September 2011. This was exactly the time to do something about patent reform. There was a lot of discussion about it among tech companies at the time, but little leadership and no unified message on anything beyond, "Trolls are bad." Congress was not likely to (and did not) revisit the issue for some time afterwards.
Yup, I've got stories of some really shady shit Apple pulled with the FTC around their "design" patents.
Put them in the same class as Oracle as far as I'm concerned. After it happened I swore off developing another piece of software for Apple or supporting any of their products.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. I wonder when Apple, Broadcom, etc., will have enough of these pyrrhic patent lawsuit victories and start lobbying for an end, or at least a major curtailment, of the patent system.
According to economic theory, the ability of a company to sustain profits in the long term is based on having barriers to entry to their market. This kind of patent threat is a barrier to entry, and suffering on the losing end of them is rent on the profit margin that they have been able to sustain.
Therefore, even with these losses, the patent system is worthwhile for them.
Why would Apple care? A billion dollars to them is a speeding ticket. It hurts smaller companies more. One hostile patent lawsuit can tank a startup or sink a small, established company that can't afford to fend it off.
It's the smaller companies that should care and lobby as a collective.
Heck, they even copy/pasted from a Caltech statement which includes "Caltech" twice, so they had the correct spelling literally right in front of their faces on their screens as they wrote the story:
> “We are pleased the jury found that Apple and Broadcom infringed Caltech patents,” CalTech said in a statement. “As a non-profit institution of higher education, Caltech is committed to protecting its intellectual property in furtherance of its mission to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education.”
Pretty much any case requiring non-trivial evaluation of evidence is unsuited for a jury trial. Outsourcing the adjudication of justice to a dozen random people is stupidity on a par with deciding complex policy issues by popular referendum. There's a reason the non-Anglo-American developed world doesn't do it this way.
Worth mentioning that one (or both) side(s) will try to make the hurt be full of people who are stupid and easily swayed. That makes it even worse because whoever can throw the most buzzwords or be most confident will usually win in those cases. For examples, see the many jury cases regarding pop song writers “stealing” music
There are tons of ways to avoid a jury panel. You find any sort of prior art and patents, along with any suits, simply vanish; you file a challenge with the patent office for reexamination, an expert there decides it's invalid, the case disappears.
You make it sound easy, but the patent office is severely overworked. Also, does the case just “go away?” Or do you have to file a motion to dismiss on the grounds that the patent is invalid?
IMO you shouldn’t need experts; The jury should (in the first place) consist of people who understand the issue. Not people who are swayed by buzzwords.
If an industry is small enough, the only people who can understand an issue without expert testimony are people who are probably going to be highly biased, by virtue of working with one of the participants.
And regardless of the size of an industry, people who have a high understanding of an issue are likely to have preconceived biases about a dispute. Stuff a jury full of tech people, to resolve a tech issue, and odds are, an Anyone versus Oracle dispute is not going to have a fair trial, regardless of the merits of the case. Most tech people hate Oracle.
If the patents were owned by a single individual instead of caltech, would the verdict be as large? They’d instantly be in the top 3000 richest people in the world.
Possibly. However, very few "single individual[s]" would have the resources to fund such inventions AND the associated patent procurement AND fund such a litigation. Moreover, this will be appealed and the final outcome could take a decade.
That's not how trolling works. Your out of pocket cost for patent prosecution is maybe $20K or $30K per. If you want to litigate, you enter into a contingency or mixed-fee arrangement with a plaintiff firm and possibly also a litigation financier, depending upon the size of your pocketbook and your appetite for risk. Your lawyers build up a war chest by shaking down easy targets until it's big enough that they can lay siege to a big opponent. It's become more difficult to do this than it used to be due to recent developments in patent law, but it's still eminently possible and happens all the time. This is, in fact, how plaintiff litigation works in a number of other civil case types.
Your last point has me thinking - hypothetically if an individual were in this situation, could they sell 'equity' in the eventual settlement in order to take money off the table now, rather than go bankrupt from legal expenses etc and get nothing?
E.g. Sell 50% of the initially ruled $1.1B settlement for, say, $100MM.
The patent game more then a 100 years ago was great for the sole inventor. Now it's a game that's insanely & wrongfully stacked against those folks. Nowadays you need a war chest behind you to secure patents and even worse fight for your rights in court against another war chest that will litigate for years and years until someone's war chest is depleted or almost depleted.
What's wrong with that? If the idea behind a company is worth say 10 or 20% of the company, then the idea of limiting a blogging service to 140 characters, or the idea of blurring people's smartphone pics to make them more "artsy," have been rewarded to the billions of dollars as well.
The Caltech endowment fund seems to be $3.2B. It seems like they're already pretty rich... and I suspect that lets them actually pursue these cases successfully.
They’ve managed to be broke twice in the last 20 years despite receiving three of the four largest donations in higher education history. I wouldn’t put it past them.
Does anyone have information about what the patent is for? Google search shows 500 general news articles with no specific information about the lawsuit.
I remember this from a previous conversation on (what I think was) NYU medical school being tuition free for an incoming class, and that drove the admission rate way down because with no tuition, it got super competitive. I wonder if there’s a good trade off between competition and the amount of needs based tuition.
Shouldn't Broadcom be solely responsible for this? If apple buys a product, why would apple be responsible for details that went into the hardware on BC's end? Not trying to troll - but genuinely trying to understand the logic/law here.
There is also the idea of patent exhaustion, which is that you get your royalties when the thing is implemented (ie the chip) and you don't get any more when that chip is re-sold. Of course Broadcom has some really wild patent "license" deals where they make you license the patent and buy the chips (that is also the subject of a court case)
Then there would be a loophole where you make an independent entity that “makes” something that shields infinite liability. It makes sense to go after all beneficiary owners and parties.
I see. So I guess, assuming appeals don't overturn the decision, then Apple needs to sue Broadcom for damages? I don't see Apple left holding the bag in this. Unless they would rather use it as a stick when negotiating future deals with Broadcom.
Yep, it's called secondary infringement. Apple knows how to play the game -- Apple sued Samsung for Google Android specific features found in Samsung smartphones a few years ago (though the jury found no infringement).
Will either company stop recruiting at CalTech as a result? Probably still worth it for CalTech, but very few schools are willing to take on Big Tech. Would Stanford ever do this?
I strongly believe that the pursuing of patents gets in the way of the collaboration that helps science progress. It creates evidence of innovation (ie patents), but slows actual innovation.
Anything that gives universities more of an incentive to pursue the patent angle, which this judgment does, will therefore be bad for science. :-(
(In CS, whole areas have become minefields for this reason. For example go out and implement a wavelet compression algorithm for images without violating any patents. Are you sure you didn't violate patents? Really sure? Exactly!)