America's broken patent system has recently attracted a lot of attention. The main goal of the patents is to reward innovators and give them means of protection while they are growing their businesses. However, the system has been hijacked by patent trolls, whose main goal is to sue the companies for violation of their obscure, vaguely worded patents.
A lot of tech giants stepped up and offered their initiatives on fixing the system, and creating the "patent peace" and increasing the transparency of patent system to reduce patent litigation costs and time. Twitter, for instance, made a promise to use its engineers inventions only for defensive activities. Google promised to work with companies on defensive patent licenses and recently pledged not to sue open-source users for some of its patented technologies.
Microsoft as well made a step towards increasing transparency in patent system by offering the searchable list of Microsoft's patents. However, many critics claim that this movement solves the problem that doesn't exist - meaning that the patent system's problem lies not in the lack of transparency.
In fact, Microsoft is tightly connected with some of the patent trolls, and a lot of its patent related activities involve patent privateering - selling and transferring patents to entities that pursue patent litigation rather than innovation. The main goal of privateering is to increase the costs of the rivals and distract their resources from business development. Microsoft often transfers its patents to some of its subsidiaries and partners, among which there are three biggest patent trolls - MOSAID, Intellectual Ventures, and Rockstar.
Microsoft, for instance, has transferred 2000 of its wireless patents from Nokia to MOSAID. Notably, these patents won't be listed in Microsoft's searchable patent list.
Microsoft made a very contradictory movement by offering a searchable list of its patents. But in fact, this list won't answer a bigger problem, which is how to fight against the patent trolls. The best solution to this is to refrain from equipping patent trolls with patents or stop transferring patents to patent trolls, thus limiting them with sources of their growth.
Original Article at US news
These companies have such large patent databases and they often lend them to other companies to help sue them.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to see that Microsoft partakes in privateering. I was writing about them last week talking about how they're so much more transparent than Google, when Google pledged 10 patents to open source software, but now I see that in fact they are privateering and in some cases possibly arming the patent trolls, which as we talked about in class, ultimately serves as a barrier to innovation.
ReplyDeleteMicrosoft is old enough in the industry to own many patents that do not worth the effort to develop. So instead of letting those patents go expire, it's not hard to tell that Microsoft would give those "useless" patents to other companies for privateering.
ReplyDeleteI don't blame Microsoft for this. Yes, the system is broken, but if they don't take advantage of it then they are simply falling into the same traps as their competitors. Perhaps they really would prefer if it was different, but while it exists, why not use it as a means to distract their competitors with lawsuits?
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