| Great reply. My invocation of Position 1 was somewhat whimsical, and I'm not inclined to defend it much further. I'm not convinced that these Intellectual Ventures guys can justifiably be called "patent trolls" -- I think it's more likely that they're fishing for research grants, or slices of other people's research grants, using many, many pieces of bait -- but I'm not sure they're necessarily doing something useful. Based solely on the article, they look like theorists to me -- long on ideas, short on implementation, lacking in (and perhaps ignorant of) good statistics, in love with the backs of their own envelopes, and apt to gloss over any pesky details with Olympic-level handwaving. I will take note of this line of yours: I know a lot of people who've dealt with the patent system (software)... I don't know anyone who looks at the patent database as a 'treasure trove' of ideas they can put to use. Most people think of it as a 'minefield' of ideas that are already taken. I wonder whether your opinion of the patent system is colored by your experience with software patents -- a modern abomination that threatens to bring down the whole system. When you say "most patentable ideas could be reverse-engineered in a day", you sound like a justifiably frustrated software engineer. But I think patents make more sense when applied to physical machines and gadgets that are harder to get working, harder and more expensive to reverse-engineer, and harder to cover with enormously wide blanket patents (perhaps because the prior art is so much richer, the phase space so much larger, and the inspectors so much better trained). |