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rest of the world wants to do. In that case what you do is either take that as a hint or you start a company or do some other entrepreneurial activity to make it happen.
Who are your investors?
Myhrvold: We don't comment on who our investors are. You need to have a very long-term perspective to invest here, because it takes you three years before you get a patent.
One thing that intrigues me about the whole patent area is the emotion it engenders. If you bring up patents to some people, they really get wound up.
Myhrvold: Yeah, it's very funny to me, and it's a cultural thing in that it depends on what industry you're from. In the medical device industry nobody gets worked up.
Myhrvold: Try it. Call somebody in Medtronics or U.S. Surgical or anyone of a hundred little start-ups that do medical devices. People generally don't have any problem with the patent system. They may argue about a specific patent being valid or not. The same runs true with biotech. Go talk to biotech guys and ask them if they want the patent system abolished. They say, "My God!"
The one exception--and frankly, if you look at the world overall, it's one tiny blip of an exception, although it's one where I set my career--is in the computer industry. In computing, there has been a strong sense that patents were not the fundamental secret of success of most of the big companies. Oracle is very up front about them, saying they copied the SQL idea from IBM. And certainly Apple and Microsoft both learned a lot from Xerox.
There are exceptions. Intel, IBM...
Myhrvold: IBM has turned them into a vast resource, and it's very hard for me to feel bad about IBM doing that. They supported R&D for a really long time when lots of other people didn't. If one of the ways they justify keeping the doors open at Watson Research Center is licensing the patents, I'd say hallelujah. I had such a hard time making the business case at Microsoft for Microsoft Research initially. The only reason I got Microsoft Research started is that I could convince Bill Gates that we would develop stuff that would go into products and make money. It turns out we did, and I think if you ask Bill today, he'd say Microsoft Research was one of the best investments we ever made.
Here's a true IBM story. People at IBM Research would fool around with lots of things in fundamental physics. They started fooling with lasers very early. Well, somebody there burned themselves on the lasers, at least as the story goes. Then they filed the first patent on the laser ablation of human tissue.
Is the patent still valid for Lasik surgery?
Myhrvold: Yes. IBM made a ton of money on licensing and then ultimately sold the patents to Lasik. And they sold the patents for, like, 20 million bucks! Now, I think that's a great story--that you can justify having some guys screwing around with the latest thing, which was at that time a high-powered laser.
And the person who got burned got a sick day, no doubt.
Myhrvold: They got a nice little plaque, I'm sure. That's actually another thing: Most inventors don't get paid for their inventions in proportion to their value.
How about the complaint that IP companies just file vague patents to generate royalties?
Myhrvold: The patent quality issue is one which does come up, but usually it comes up from people who don't like patents already. It's a rationalization for their position. The majority of patents probably are very valid. The stock market has stocks of companies that are flaky and questionable, right? But does that mean we should just avoid all public security markets?
But the subject of patent reforms seems to come up a lot. Are there particular things that you think could help to eliminate some of the conflict?
Myhrvold: The most basic one is letting the patent office keep patent fees. Instead, Congress tends to divert the fees to do other things, and that's just criminal. I mean, here you've got this government office that has got tremendous demand. The demand is measured by the number of people that pay their fees. Shouldn't you at least use those fees to plow them back into making the system better?
And the examiners aren't paid that well either.
Myhrvold: So there's lots of reform that could be done of that nature. Keep the funding there. Pay the examiners better. A whole variety of other technical points about the patent systems are things that I think would really make a big difference.
How about compulsory licensing? That idea keeps floating up.
Myhrvold: There isn't compulsory licensing in essentially any other part of American life. The only thing that would be similar to that would be eminent domain, where the government can ultimately condemn your property and force you to sell it to them if they truly need it to develop a new highway or something.
What do you think of the complaints of how patent litigation is hurting companies? Some days it sounds like the trumped-up malpractice crisis of the '80s.
Myhrvold: Well, this is even stranger. We actually did a study on this. The overall number of lawsuits for patents is growing, but so is the overall number of patents. So explain that to me.
If you then look at it and ask, what fraction of those lawsuits are due to companies that have no products, the IP-only companies--it's about 2 percent. If you look at it and say what fraction of lawsuits are due to large technology companies, it's about 2 percent.
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10 comments
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conclusions. His contention is that a focus on
invention, coupled with rigorous patent and "IP"
prosecution will foster innovation, increase
profits, and yield more inventions faster.
However, his examples refute the point quite
strongly.
He notes that SQL was developed by Bell Labs and
IBM, but claims that now Larry Ellison is making
all the money off it. Well, IBM, Sybase, MySQL,
and are all making a killing on SQL directly and
countless industries are using SQL database
backends to support their products. Nevermind
that SQL represented a standard, not an
implementation, so it probably wouldn't be
patentable even by todays low standards. If IBM
and Bell labs had locked up the "IP" around SQL
it would never have become the hugely popular
technology it is today; competing
implementations (each with their own strengths
and weaknesses) wouldn't exist, and it's wide
use would become prohbitively expensive and
complex with various royalties and licensing
schemes. Object databases haven't taken off
primarily becaus of IP, not technical, issues.
The GUI concept is another great example. If a
copier company could have locked up IP on GUIs
as Myhrvold intends to do with whatever they
come up with, Xerox would have seen a fraction
of the benefit that they received. Xerox would
not likely have focused on that part of their
business and similar implementations wouldn't
have been possible. No Windows? How would Xerox
function today without GUI-based computer
resources produced by another company (that
doesn't compete with them)?
The point is that all the technologies that
Myhrvold mentions didn't succeed on the merit
and marketing of the original idea, but rather
unfettered access to the idea being disseminated
to third parties that took the original idea and
ran with it. In each case, the result proved a
greater benefit to the inventing company than
had they followed their own project plans (even
Xerox parlayed the GUI concept into lucrative
research grants).
History is a good teacher, and it's not on
Myrhvold's side.
The reason mankind has gone so far so quickly is because of the open and free exchange of ideas. There are no original ideas left, just original extensions to existing ideas.
Too bad todays researchers and inventors are blind to this.
People who don't like patents really surprise me. The US Founding Fathers set them up to provide a way for an individual to benefit from an invention while mandating a public disclosure to further science. There has to be a trade-off and this seems like a good one.
The author's point of "who would invent if they couldn't profit?" is important. Many inventors invent for the excitement, but they should also benefit financially. There are some who benefit by giving everything away for free, but they mainly give it away because they want to and they have their reward. (Still, I wouldnt call copied a OS and Office Suite inventions no matter how cool and free they are.) As I recall, Edison held over 100 patents and his target industries don't seem to have suffered...
Uninhibited access to inventions is really cool. Still, it can be daunting as an individual inventor to go up against the "big guys" without some intellectual protection. By "big guys" most will think of Microsoft. In part, I am speaking about protection from corporations. On the other hand the OSS community also has a lot of resources namely in numbers. If I came up with an invention that I wanted to market (and didn't have intellectual protection), the OSS community would be able to usurp my invention under their proclamation of intellectual freedom just like a corporation could usurp it in the name of capitalism. In both cases, the individual loses...
True, individuals can benefit from their inventions by having better things to buy&but thats my point, the inventor should be able to benefit (even financially) from an invention and not just by being privileged to make rich someone who copied&
We need to remember that patents are not prohibitions, but rather a requirement to pay the piper for the things that others have created and that we enjoy. Its similar to what the OSS people are saying you should do only its written into law&
They try to not only put a lock on an idea, but the infinite number of implementions possible. Patents also stifle true innovation and user choice. Writing software is like writing a book. There are many ways to tell the same story, but no one can copy it exactly, due to copyright. Software is identical to that.
When people talk about some new software as new 'technology' they are just blowing smoke. There is nothing new in that software, like every other piece of software, it uses library functions and classes that anyone can use, it uses execution controls, statements, variables and everything else that makes up a program. There is nothing new in that source, much of it they didn't even write themselves, yet some short-sighted, greedy companies/individuals try to claim a patent on it. Copyright protects the code, but the ideas are in the open, free for anyone to use and expand into new applications.
Even computer hardware is similar to this. Boil it down to its basics and it is a collection of transistors that mimic logical operations. With hardware, you can patent the processes, and even the hardware blueprints, but what you can't patent is the idea. Otherwise we would have one company that makes processors, one that makes memory, videocards, ect. Imagine how bad shape the industry would be if that were the case. What if the inventors patented things like NAND and XOR logic gates?
I can patent a hammer, and a process to create a hammer. That does not mean I can stop my neighbor from creating his own. Software companies patent obvious ideas like that and take others to court, even if the others implemtaion came first or was at least develop independantly.
The thing you need to realize is that everything that has been invented, was merely an extention of what someone else discovered, and what that peson discovered can be traced back further as well. Where would we be if people like Newton and Leibniz had patented their work and not shared it with the world, or if the ideas in textbooks were patented?
We would still be in the horse and buggy days, no electricity, no conveniences.
The whole statement about taking someone's inevntion and starting a company with them is ripe ******** as well, since the boilerplate makes it clear they only consider people with patents ort patents pending. So good luck with doing all the hard work; Myhrvold will be there to exploit your efforts and do the easy part.
Remo