Comment by amluto
2 hours ago
If the US cared about remaining competitive with China, the government would attack this. Example approaches:
a) Smallish hammer: disallow priority based on Chinese patents.
b) Big hammer: if anyone wants to manufacture anything in the US and sell to the US market, give an automatic patent workaround. For example, there could be compulsory licensing, at enforced and genuinely reasonable prices, for all patents, foreign and domestic. If someone wanted to build an SLS printer or an e-ink display here ten years ago, they should have been allowed to while paying a small amount (small enough that the whole enterprise remained profitable) to the respective patent holders. Submarine patents should be completely inapplicable: if I opt to buy compulsory licenses, there should be a limited period for any patent holders to announce themselves, and then the patent holders could fight over the (capped) royalties while I continue to manufacture and sell the product.
c) b, with the system built in a way that works for open source too. I should be able to publish open source things with zero risk regardless of patents. I should be able to sell them and other people should be able to deploy them on their own under terms like (b) that make it economical to do so.
Requiring an annual patent maintenance tax proportional to pre-declared fair licensing fee will ensure fairness for everyone. Including foreign patents. So whichever jurisdiction, patent holders want to retain the rights, can pay the tax annually. We can even come up with a public domain threshold as well. If 1000 people / company paid your pre-declared licensing fee, it becomes public domain. And no more per device license fee. 1 Patent, 1 Fee, 1 Annual Tax.
Same for copyrights.
I think I agree with you.
That being said, I have doubts anything will change because I have a feeling that this system is continuing to "work as designed".
These failings are exploitable and since the US government is somewhat bought and paid for, this is how it works. The intent might be to keep it this way.
I run a company in this space...
First, China patents ~5-10x more than the US does currently on a given month. Further, China has made it required for companies to patent.
The US definitely could not respect the Chinese patents, or they could treat Chinese patent's differently. IMO there's a ~1% chance of that happening. Patent law is pretty well defined, there are a multitude of treaties and if the US wants their patents to be respected, they have to respect the worlds.
That said, I will say, I suspect a lot of these patents can be invalidated. My company works heavily in this space and we work with some of the top US law firms. We sell a service that's used to identify prior art and invalidate patents in ~15 minutes -- https://search.ipcopilot.ai/
There's a lot of prior art in the open source community that can be used to attack these patents. Further, if folks publish their innovation it'll provide a solid layer of prior art.
If you can find prior art to invalidate the nemesis system held by Warner Bros, that would be a great way to get some free press for your services.
At least for and via gamers.
> if the US wants their patents to be respected, they have to respect the worlds.
The Chinese market is notorious for not respecting patents, though, so clearly that isn't working.
I recall reading 10+ years ago that Chinese economists were calling for stronger IP laws in China to accelerate their technical progress. Maybe the government listened.
This matches the economic literature [1] about the historical development of other industrialized nations as well, including the US. The theory is: when a country is starting to industrialize, they prefer weak IP rights to reduce friction in copying and learning rapidly ("knowledge diffusion".) However, when their industries mature, develop a strong technical base, and start competing by pushing the state of the art through their own inventions, they tend to prefer strong IP rights to protect their investments in R&D.
It is pretty clear China has reached that stage.
[1] There is a lot more out there, but this is what I could find offhand: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jid.3844?ms...
I do think there needs to be reforms about non-practicing entities holding large patent portfolios. Maybe we should have some kind of FRAND (or FRAND-like) requirements for their portfolios.
I gave the e-ink example quite intentionally. The patents were held by a practicing entity. You could buy their mediocre implementation of their excellent underlying invention at an outrageous price and probably not with the specs you wanted.
I’m all for rewarding inventors like this for their inventions. I do not think that the reward should include any sort of ability to stifle use and further development of the invention.
The law should make it possible to build, sell, and profit from a better e-ink product at a lower price. The law should make it possible to sell things that use H.265 at a credible price without needing to be involved in the mess of figuring out who owns what patent. If patent holders, practicing or otherwise, want to sue each other, fine, but I don’t think there should be any requirement for the companies building and selling products to be parties to those legal messes at all.
As far as I know, radio in the US actually mostly works this way. To broadcast a copyrighted song, you pay a fee, and that’s it.