Sixteen years ago, I had the idea for headlights aimed by GPS and started to make some prototypes. Then I read a patent that was basically "a plurality of inputs + processor -> headlight aiming" that covered everything imaginable. I knew the patent wouldn't hold up in court, but I wouldn't have the money to fight it.
More recently, I've been working on a self-driving wheelchair. It's a fairly obvious straight line from self-driving car to self-driving wheelchair, but someone's gone out and patented it. I still don't have the money to fight it.
This problem would be a lot easier to deal with if independent invention was a defense (as it is supposed to be, but in practice basically never is) against a patent infringement claim--particularly if the owner of the patent has done nothing to actually implement it.
>independent invention was a defense (as it is supposed to be, but in practice basically never is)
It's actually not a defense at all and isn't supposed to be. Its sort of like a prize for inventing it first.
It's only a defense if you publicly disclosed it before patentee did. Secret use was a defense if you invented it first (and didn't abandon or hide your invention when it was ready), but that was changed with the America Invents Act.
Yep, that would help. From what I can tell, the wheelchair patent is aspirational and they haven't actually implemented the majority of standard autonomous vehicle practices.
Maybe demand a working model for the patent, but also reject a patent if anybody else has something similar in development?
So you have a brilliant idea like "lets put email on a cell phone", but the infrastructure isn't in place to support it yet. A few years later you finally get it working, but now you can't patent because there are 5 other companies who started the process at basically the same time--once the prerequisite technology was in place.
This would reduce the number of patents on "the most obvious way to solve this obvious problem that only appears because the technology has advanced enough" that patent trolls love.
So many of the "do X, but now on a computer" patents wouldn't be a thing.
Requiring a working prototype would also make it hard to issue vaguely worded and extremely broad patents, so someone can't claim ownership over the entire concept of sending push notifications for example.
That's kind of similar to how copyright works - it's about whether something is "derivative work". A similar principle could apply for patents perhaps?
If you're reading (non-expired) patents, you're doing it wrong. For one thing, that opens you to claims of intentional infringement and 3x damages. For another, there being a patent only matters if your thing works as you hope and the patent holder is litigious and there's actually a market for your thing and you can't find a bigger fish to buy your thing and make the litigious patent holder go away.
In the mean time, all the work to make your thing probably gives you lots of insights into other things to do if that one doesn't work out; and patents to file, if you're so interested.
Disclosure: I'm the named inventor on a patent (seems relevant).
I think the issue is not that he would have made the best/only chair and now isn't, but that it stifled any innovation that he might have provided by putting a high legal/monetary bar on any commercial endeavor. That is a loss, but we'll never know if it was vanishingly small or extremely large.
Nick Desaulniers: About three years ago this time of the year, my father passed away from a heart attack.
Laura Sydell: Not long ago, I was at a meeting in San Francisco put on by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that's been critical of the patent system. It was an open meeting. And this guy you hear talking, Nick Desaulniers, had decided on the spur of the moment to drop in. And after hearing a couple of other people tell their stories, he got up to tell his.
He's an engineer. And his father's death had spurred him to invent a low-cost heart monitor, which he believed might have saved his dad's life. He developed a prototype in a graduate school class. And he'd started dreaming a bit.
Nick Desaulniers: You know, I got really excited about it. And I was thinking, maybe I can make a business out of this. My grandfather started his own business.
My father made his own business. I need to make my own business someday. So this was something I was really thinking, like, hey, I can make a business out of this.
Laura Sydell: But then he started a patent search to see if anyone else had come up with something resembling his idea already.
Nick Desaulniers: I was horrified at how generic some of the patents were-- "a system for remotely monitoring physiological signals." What the hell does that mean? There are so many ways, so many variables.
How are you getting the data from point A to point B? There are so many ways to do that. And this patent, it covers-- I guess it covers them all.
And seeing some of the numbers that these companies are going back and forth suing each other for, I'm terrified to create a business because of the patent system. I'm horrified. And I'm scared.
And I'm not going to create a business because of it. So however many jobs I could have created or however many lives I could have saved, that's it.
Alex Blumberg: And that is the current state of things. Something as dry as the US patent system can move somebody to tears.
> I knew the patent wouldn't hold up in court, but I wouldn't have the money to fight it.
You're not really going to be sued unless you have money to pay a judgment or settlement. If you have money, then you can pay to fight to invalidate the patent, or to pay a settlement.
More recently, I've been working on a self-driving wheelchair. It's a fairly obvious straight line from self-driving car to self-driving wheelchair, but someone's gone out and patented it. I still don't have the money to fight it.