[vogonj]

the service is ideas. if patents are, indeed, on non-obvious concepts, they can provide the spark for new inventions, and -- if you sign a licensing agreement with the patent troll -- you are paying them for the right to build, market, and sell something they invented.

the question is whether the patent review process is working or not.

[Woost]

Ideas don't have a dollar value. I'm guessing that not one company who signs a licensing agreement with the patent troll does so because they want access to a library of ideas. They do it because they're working to build a real product, and the patent troll comes along and says "sign this and pay us or we'll make your life miserable and it will cost more"

[vogonj]

or, if you look at it from their perspective, they came up with the idea, went to the trouble of formally describing it and filing paperwork so that it could be released to the public, and then another company either independently invented it or just read their description and built one.

say IV had the patent for a burr coffee grinder. even if they never build a non-prototype grinder, they went to the trouble of conceptualizing, prototyping, and writing down their idea for an invention so someone else could build it. that invention has merit, even if Intellectual Ventures doesn't build one.

the question is whether (ignoring particular types of inventions like computer software, which is legitimately tricky to reason about) all of the inventions are legitimately novel inventions which go through an inventive process of discovery (for lack of a better phrase), or whether they are rote improvements on concepts which are already state-of-the-art, or shots in the dark hoping to land some profitable patent litigation later. and nobody but Intellectual Ventures knows what their intention is.

[VladRussian]

>if you look at it from their perspective, they came up with the idea, went to the trouble of formally describing it and filing paperwork so that it could be released to the public

they went for all this trouble only for such a noble cause?

>they went to the trouble of conceptualizing, prototyping, and writing down their idea for an invention so someone else could build it.

you just made my day.

[vogonj]

no, obviously they went to the trouble for the licensing fees. but they did, as a side effect to the licensing fees, agree to make their invention freely-practicable -- as opposed to the default, where it would be protected by trade secret laws in perpetuity -- after their monopoly period ended.

so that's worth something, I guess.

[VladRussian]

>the service is ideas.

the service is what i ask for. If i don't ask for it, it is extortion ("tax" when extorting entity is some kind of government)

[vogonj]

a) nice "taxation is theft" dig in there.

b) the entire purpose of the patent system is that ideas can be entered into a register and time-limited monopolies granted by the government in exchange for their public release at the end of the monopoly period.

the only weird part about non-practicing entities -- and I say this from the perspective of a Microsoft employee with no patent cubes yet to his name, who works in the same room as people with 15 -- is that they are effectively outsourcing the entire process of reducing their inventions to practice.

[VladRussian]

>"taxation is theft"

extortion and theft are different :)

>is that they are effectively outsourcing the entire process of reducing their inventions to practice.

no. I have a few myself. The best purpose of these sh!tty "invention patents" is to protect yourself from somebody patenting that stuff and coming after you later. The worst - it to poison/booby-trap "Monopoly"-style the mental space of ideas so whenever somebody accidentally stumbles across or have no other way than to pass through they would be forced to pay. The trade secret laws wouldn't prohibit me from coming independently on my own with the same or similar idea and executing upon it :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret#Protection