Since stepping down as the company's chief technology officer five years ago, Myhrvold has pursued paleontology, a long-standing hobby, by funding dinosaur digs. But Myhrvold has more on his mind these days than searching for prehistoric bones. He's also the founder of Intellectual Ventures, a somewhat mysterious and controversial start-up.
Combining the disciplines of a venture capital firm, a think tank and an intellectual-property firm, the company gathers well-known inventors for "invention sessions," hoping the get-togethers will one day result in hugely profitable patents. Investors are said to include Microsoft, Google and Intel. Myhrvold sees the company as a forum where brilliant minds will have the room and luxury to simply create.
But critics take a dimmer view of the venture. They say it will encourage patent litigation and, paradoxically, discourage innovation. Whatever your point of view, Intellectual Ventures could well become one of the central figures in the ongoing patent debate. Myhrvold spoke with CNET News.com about the decline in invention, his company, and why some people get bent out of shape when the conversation turns to intellectual property.
Q: You've talked about the difference between research and invention in the past. What is the difference?
Myhrvold: Most engineers who work for companies doing technology are paid to build products, not to invent something new. They do invent things new, but the percentage whose actual job title is inventor or whose job function is primarily inventing is very small. Almost no company has people who are really dedicated to invent new technology without worrying about whether it's in a new product or not.
Can you give an example of something in the past 20 years that is an invention, versus something that emerged from research as an extrapolation of existing products?
Myhrvold: The graphical user interface was a hell of an invention. The microprocessor was an invention. Inside every technology product is a litany of different inventions. Nevertheless, it turns out that not only are people not inventing as much, but the inventing that does occur is highly constrained, and it's constrained because companies try to do what will work within their next product release cycle. And academics do either the thing that their graduates could get a thesis on or the things that will get them a paper and get them tenure.
How did we slip into this situation?
Myhrvold: It's risky and people don't want to fund it. Frequently, breakthroughs happen outside the area that you originally started working with. The guys at Xerox PARC had some clear breakthroughs: the graphical user interface, networks, tons of stuff that totally contributed to the PC world as we know it today. But they were kind of in left field from the people who were funding them, which was a copier company.
At Microsoft I had to fight this perception in order to start Microsoft Research. The received wisdom was that it was silly to invest in research because--look at Xerox, look at Bell Labs, look at IBM Research. They invent SQL, and Larry Ellison makes all the money from it!
Being an inventor almost sounds like a 19th century sort of occupation.
Myhrvold: Exactly! The entire 19th century was about doing exactly this. Every important invention was some crazy individual, and it was an established profession. If you were an inventor, people would
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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