Comments on: Do Patents Help or Hinder Innovation?

By: Stephen Shapiro

Stephen Shapiro — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:39:40 +0000

Brendan,

Interesting perspective. There are companies out there less reputable than Qualcomm who only develop patents as a way of “extorting” companies who plan to use their ideas.

I do think you are right. Sometimes it is faster to license someone’s existing patent than it is to develop your own. But it is probably not cheaper.

Depending on what you are building, sometimes Open Innovation can be a better solution than licensing.

Steve

By: Brendan Dunphy

Brendan Dunphy — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 08:23:00 +0000

The Patent is only one-half of the process, the other is the use/licensing of it. An increasing number of patent holders have no intention of using the patent themselves (eg Qualcomm) but only exist to generate fees from its licensing to others (eg Nokia). In this case, the license fee is set by the owner at a price that encourages its use rather than forces potential licensees to seek alternatives or a way around its use. In practice this is a complex, adversarial and fractious process with patent holders looking to extract the maximum fee and licensees feeling they are being exploited by an organisation not better at innovation per se, but at the patent process itself. In competitive markets where time-to-market is key they can feel they have no alternative but to use inferior patented and costly solutions to inventing their own; how does this impact innovation, for better or worse? http://brendandunphy.blogspot.com/

By: aditya

aditya — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:01:57 +0000

I agree with Ben. Without patents, you cannot have a successful innovation. It sort of provides the safeguard for an invention to become a great innovation

By: Stephen Shapiro

Stephen Shapiro — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:24:58 +0000

Ben, true, you can’t patent an idea. But you can patent processes. I know of quite a few processes that are patented that required no investment.

I totally agree with your point on patenting designs that required investment. They do need protection. I was never debating that.

The patent office is considering abolishing patents for “business processes” like Amazon.com’s “one-click.” But you can still patent other types of processes, like my Personality Poker.

By: Ben Hoffman

Ben Hoffman — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:15:02 +0000

You can’t patent an idea — only a design. Patents actually promote research. If a company spends millions on research and then comes out with some revolutionary new product, if there were no patents, there would be nothing to stop other companies from simply reverse engineering it and manufacturing it themselves. If that were the case, what would be the motivation for research?