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Patent auction pays more in the end
May 10, 2006 -
Patent firm woos big-name inventors
April 21, 2006 -
Staking a claim in the patent gold mine
July 20, 2005
Ocean Tomo, a Chicago-based company that holds auctions for patents, copyrights and other intellectual property, will put a gem on the block in its next auction taking place in London on June 1: film footage of the Rolling Stones guitarist getting electrocuted during a U.S. concert in 1965.
"The Stones do not currently have this footage themselves; this particular piece of film lasts 10 minutes, with the electrocution scene occurring at the close, and lasting approximately a full minute," the catalog for the auction states.
The footage is part of a collection of film that is owned by Mark and Colleen Hayward and is being sold as a single lot. Other footage in the lot includes an early film of The Beatles playing in Blackpool, England, and some shots of Paul McCartney in 1966 yukking it up on a Learjet owned by Frank Sinatra.
TV stations pay around $3,000 to broadcast about 30 seconds of footage from the Hayward collection.
The Haywards will also auction off a collection of photos of rock stars over the decades: The Clash, AC/DC and The Moody Blues. You'd have to go to the Konocti Boat Harbor to see some of those acts today.
It won't be all celebrity memorabilia at the intellectual property auction. Most of the lots involve chemicals (a formula for flexographic printing from Meat/Westvaco), wireless communications, medical devices (customized bone implants--a patent with a $200,000-plus value), green technologies (an efficient way to incinerate waste from our pals at KusuKusu Industry), or electronics (anyone care for a gas composition sensor from Accentus?).
Despite early skepticism, the open auction concept for intellectual property is clearly gaining steam. In the company's April auction in Chicago, $11.4 million worth of intellectual property was sold, including two lots that went for $3 million and $2.8 million each.
Although it's not a really popular sentiment these days, I think patents, trademarks and copyrights are simply fantastic and a primary, necessary driver of the world economy. Without them, the rapid pace of technological innovation around the world would slow to a crawl. And frankly, without them, most open-source projects would rapidly wither away: without an intellectual property behemoth like Microsoft to fight, what would be the point?
Why all the frothy sentiment? Intellectual property provides one of the most dependable means toward wealth and independence in the world today. In the Dark Ages, one could obtain wealth by raising an army and burning someone else's kingdom to the ground. In the Gilded Age, those on the fast track had a secret weapon of success: they bribed state legislators to obtain canal and railroad contracts.
Unfortunately, those career options just aren't as viable as they once were. Instead, we have to invent stuff, and thus people should get compensated for the effort.
And it does take effort. Think of Larry Page toiling away on the early PageRank patents. Think of Mark and Colleen Hayward. Imagine all those evenings they had to spend listening to Donovan spout Celtic gibberish or helping get John Bonham out of hotel security custody during those years they amassed their photo and video collection. Surely some reward is in order.
I actually came to this conclusion from the other end. Back in 2005, I set out to write a series of articles on patent trolls, so-called individuals who preyed on hardworking, industrious Americans with a file of flimsy patents.
What I found instead was a gray area. Nearly every so-called troll turned out to have a somewhat persuasive story. Intellectual Ventures, a patent firm started by former Microsoft chief scientist Nathan Myhrvold, was staffed with fairly renowned scientists who didn't fit the profile of people trying to make a quick buck in court.
Another man, criticized as one of the most litigious people in the U.S., had a great explanation for his behavior. He had only sued people who had signed--and then violated--nondisclosure agreements. Two other guys I met, engineers from the Midwest, spent eight years of their lives attending meetings trying to license their invention to car manufacturers and getting stiffed. (Eventually, they sold their patents for over a million bucks.)
The most humorous encounter was the engineer at IBM Labs. He railed against patents and how people exploited them in court. I asked him if he had any. He did: three of them. Had he donated them to an open-source organization? Why no. They constituted, errr, tangible advances in science.
The difficulty in coming up with federal patent reform and the uncertainty surrounding how some recent Supreme Court decisions will play out show that striking a balance isn't easy. Copyright is the same way. Everyone likes to think that studio execs are evil incarnate. But when you steal movies, you're also whittling down the royalty checks for some old lady who had to make out with William Shatner in a bit role on Star Trek.
I have encountered many people who had strong, emotional reactions against patents and copyrights. Remarkably, though, few of them had ever been sued in court. And fewer still had ever written a book or cut an album. In short, they hadn't been hurt by so-called trolls, and they didn't own much worth pirating.
But if it makes you feel better, go ahead and reprint this for free.
Biography
Michael Kanellos is editor at large at CNET News.com, where he covers hardware, research and development, start-ups and the tech industry overseas. He has worked as an attorney, travel writer and sidewalk hawker for a time share resort, among other occupations.
See more CNET content tagged:
intellectual property, patent, auction, sentiment, footage
44 comments
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found in the literature published 10 and 20 years before the
patents issued, or if it does, there is a process for invalidating the
patents that doesnt cost millions of dollars.
Too many economists find that patents strangle innovation in some fields. Look at the research from <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.researchinnovation.com/" target="_newWindow">http://www.researchinnovation.com/</a> etc.
A great patch for the system would be to listen to the ATTvsMS decision and stop patent claims on publication. Publication claims are against spreading knowledge. So the Supreme Court was right to stop that nonsense. I cant see any of the inventions that you mention that would suffer from this either. Fix the system or the system will be in trouble sooner or later.
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/" target="_newWindow">http://www.researchoninnovation.org/</a>
On software patents: (MIT)
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/swpat.pdf" target="_newWindow">http://www.researchoninnovation.org/swpat.pdf</a>
A copyright protects your content and prevents it use elsewhere. A patent says I created this and noone else can even make anything that is similar. Saying that copyrights are like patents would be saying Joe song writer wrote a country western song where his dog died... and now no one else can write country songs that involve dogs dying. Unless Joe gets his cut.
In my opinion a Patent should protect an invention... a tangable one... not an idea (unless you can prove progress in working towards development). Patenting an idea only prevents other from actually acheiving what you could only think up.
There are patents that are on things so fundamental, they might
as well be patenting the zero. There are other patents granted
that fail the obvious test for someone in the business, or while
they may have a unique idea they are written so widely that they
become ludicrous.
I love Patents and copyrights. But that does not excuse
everything done in their name. And what I hate most about
those abusing the system is that they might kill support. The
RIAA and the MPAA already gave Copyright a bad name.
I work in Pharma, and we have actually experienced a patent that was so well written (by us) that we can not patent another compound even close to what the original's structure. The problem? The compound was never taken to market and it looks as though it performs as intended very well and very safely. There is so little patent life left on it that it is not worth developing through clinical trials. You know no non-generic pharma will touch it once the patent expires because they have no exclusivity to recoup the expense of further research. The generics won't touch it because they live off the sweat of other's work...they don't do research other than formulation...they just copy what they know is successful.
I wonder how often this happens? Can you imagine the drugs not developed because of the loss of exclusivity?
Everyone out there that hates large (or even small) drug companies should think about this!
real search for prior works before issuing a patent.
I've just been reading about Burst.com's suit against Apple.
Most, if not all of Burst's claims are based on ideas that have
long been implemented in television, compact disks, hard
drives, and many other fields. The problem here as with so many
other frivolous suits is that they've managed to get a patent on a
vague idea rather than a specific design, and that's where the
patent system is broken.
Maybe somebody should patent that idea. Just kidding, but it
sometimes takes an absurdity to adequately describe another one.
Look, this statement is false. It costs 40-60 grand to file a patent through an attorney. Patents not filed through an attorney are seen as worthless to investors. The cost of enforcing or defending yourself against a patent is a million bucks per patent, per claim.
The only "people" that the IP-everywhere! crowd helps are the multinational companies like IBM and MS who can afford to keep lawyers on retainer. Patents like "one click" that Jeff Bezeos of Amazon has exist solely to make sure that no small company can challenge them. So also wth MS patents on FAT file system and IBMs 6000 or whatever software patents. They function as a barrier to entry into the market place for small companies and individuals.
Since it was just such small companies and individuals who made the tech revolution possible BEFORE there were software and so called "method" patents, (a patent on the way of doing something, we can expect computers and the internet to start experience the stifling effects of the IP-everywhere! crowd has had on telcom (think Vonage vs Verizon here) industry.
Look, the author of this piece surely is well acquainted with these facts about the cost of patents . It's not hard to see what the fate of individual developers is under the IP-everywhere! regime. They get snuffed. This is what MS and IBm need in order to continue to dominate the marketplace. Oh, and by the way, that's just who pays the bills at CNET.
See, beliefs aren't REALLY about rational arguments- they're about who's paying for your lunch.. whose party you're being invited to and who's paying for your kids college.
For any piece of software, no matter how trivial, there are literally thousands of patents that are violated. If you're big enough, or you matter, IBM and MS will come knocking... it's a joke. We can't innovate and create in an atmosphere of terror from the IP-everywhere! crowd. Copyright protection is the right level of protection for software.You can't just rip off my code without working.
IP true-believers other Kool-Aid drinkers talk like business didn't happen before method patents and the Western world is going to go back to the Dark Ages if Jeffy at Amazon can't patent his one-click BS. Just the opposite is true. We'll go back to the bad old days of pre-software patents circa 1980 to 1998.. yeah... those were the Dark Ages....
Give me a break.
"beliefs aren't REALLY about rational arguments- they're about who's paying for your lunch.. whose party you're being invited to......"
A very example is that there is this search engine called Anoox, but do u
see big media (Such as Cnet) ever cover them? NO. Why because Anoox
is a search engine by the people for the people and not not part of the right party.
6/3/03.
Claims: moving an object around on another object in a 3-D
graphics CAD system, orienting it in a determined way on the
other object, and considering lights and cameras to be objects
manipulable in this way.
Prior Art:
Snap-Dragging, Eric Allan Bier and Maureen C. Stone
Computer Graphics 20(4), SIGGRAPH 86
More fully detailed in
Snap-Dragging: Interactive Geometric Design in Two and Three
Dimensions
Doctoral Dissertation
Eric A. Bier
May 19, 1988
These two references describe a 3-D graphics system which was
implemented around 1986, the features of which included
interactively dragging objects around on other objects, orienting
them in a predetermined way, and which considered a camera
viewpoint as being manipulable in the same way as other
objects.
I think an ACM SIGGRAPH paper would have been accessible to
the patent examiners in 2001, 15 years later, even if serches
were a bit less convenient than they are today.
I started a discussion on my own forum on this topic.
Copyright is not a binary yes/no question. What should it look like?
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/3932" target="_newWindow">http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/3932</a>
Patents? Patents should only be for manipulations of nature which are legitimately inventions, and shouldn't apply to information/mental processes. Pretty easy distinction to me.
And before patents, copyright and trademark, man solve things through fists, blades and gunpowder.
The reason they exist is to promote new ideas that will flow back
into society.
The problem with both patents and copyrights today is that they
extend for such a long time that the intellectual property is
essentially hijacked from society. In the software world, patents
last for at least 17 years. So society is getting 1990s technology
given to it. Joy! Think about how far we have come in terms of
software since 1990 (think System 6 on Mac, Windows 3.0 on
PCs).
Now copyrights, think Mickey Mouse. I wasn't even born when
Mickey Mouse was copyrighted, yet it the copyright not only
exists, it will exist well past my own death.
So when does society benefit from these ideas? Apparently
never. Companies like Disney have insured copyrights lock up
works indefinitely. Software Patents are used as weapons to
destroy competition, weapons which will be around for another
8-9 generations of computers.
Software patents are not a tool to inspire innovation. Copyrights
have been stretched so far as to lose their value in society. Some
even claim to have copyrights over NUMBERS.
Both tools were originally intended to encourage innovation, yet
today's fast pace of ideas means that these tools (as they exist
today) actually stifle innovation more than encourage it.
The only winners in this battle are lawyers, either as the filers for
companies or as litigators.
Read this book, then review and resubmit your article. Your article in its current form, it is so poorly constructed as to be dangerous.
jwwjr47
Math You Can't Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software -
by Ben Klemens (Author) "The foremost economic question surrounding patents and copyright is how much territory they should cover.
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.amazon.com/Math-You-Cant-Use-Copyright/dp/0815749422/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-5951443-8901651?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178812828&sr=1-1" target="_newWindow">http://www.amazon.com/Math-You-Cant-Use-Copyright/dp/0815749422/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-5951443-8901651?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178812828&sr=1-1</a>
Imagine the intelligent discussions that could take place were even a small percentage of participants online to engage in such an approach.
I think you should patent this idea right away! :-)
The issue with software patents is (IMO) the lack of ability or incentive for the current USPO to properly determine prior art, as well as a serious lack of enforcement of existing applicability standards.
It should take more for a software patent to be granted than taking any existing business process and appending the words "on the web" to it...
and how it is structered to work. However, we have people and
companies that ABUSE the patent system and file false claims on
items they had no hand in the development of, in an attempt to
squash the marketing of devices, or control the field with their
poor quality devices.
These cases are where I call fowl.
The sad downside of filing your patent, is you just opened the
book on your invention showing the entire world what you
designed, now allowing people to COPY your device. It is now
on your side of the tennis court to DEFEND any copy cats at
YOUR expense in court costs, lawyer fees, time away from work,
lost revenue, lost sales to those frauds.
If by some miricle you DO win the case, years down the road,
that invention may be outdated in what it was used for. Was it
worth it filing the paperwork? Going through all the hassle of
court just to chase after some copy cat who just had to do a web
search and pull up public records to see how you made your
product? Where before filing, it was only in your company
records; and you STILL had legal recourse with a history of using
that method and a history of using that.
Keeping the current system intact simply prolongs the abuses. Reforming the patent system will only likely to make lawyers richer. Getting rid of it will indeed stifle innovation as this author claims.
In any way, the humanity is bound to doom. So doesn't matter.
It's really rather sad: CNet used to be THE best site on the web for technology news; now it can't even compete enough with the five other tech news sources on my homepage to stay on it.
That's such a clearly false (not to mention insulting) statement that I'd say it deserves a retraction. Add to that the snide tone, non sequiturs, and arguments from anecdote and I'd say this article deserves the savaging it's getting.
This is to avoid the practice in the US of patenting programming steps without actually producing product, and then waiting to pounce on the first opportunity to rake in the bucks.
As for open source it would and has existed long before a behemoth such as Microsoft. It's reason for existing is not, as so many people stubbornly misunderstand, to stick it to the man. It's to give you control over your software. This has been the case since before software became closed in th 1980s. Without Microsoft, I expect there would be mroe and better open sources software.
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/2007/05/stupid-cnet-article.html" target="_newWindow">http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/2007/05/stupid-cnet-article.html</a>
1. you say "In the Dark Ages, one could obtain wealth by raising an army and burning someone else's kingdom to the ground. In the Gilded Age, those on the fast track had a secret weapon of success: they bribed state legislators to obtain canal and railroad contracts." What exactly has changed? Since I last looked at the world this is still an acceptable way to do things by many politicians.
2. The abuse of the way patents are used have brought about this discussion. To be a large company with infinite resources and wait forever to take advantage of a patent is unacceptable especially when they use that patent to destroy the competition with unacceptable conditions and royalties.
If someone has a patent and they have the suitable resources they should use it, lose it or be forced to make it available under acceptable conditions.