Patento Absurdum
X is a really smart computer geek. Dropping out of college he gets together with a bunch of like minded nerds and together they write the next generation search engine; an engine which can take audio clippings either directly from a mike or stored earlier and returns results text and media both from the web. Amazing innovation and a great leap on the existing technology done, X and friends think they can sit back and soak themselves in the ephemeral glory till it lasts and roll around in moolah till probably the end of their lives. Suddenly out of the blue comes a troll on their sylvan beaches and chases them out of it. They are back into the dreay world but only with broken dreams and empty pockets. They don’t even have a degree for backup. They now wish they had atleast finished them.
I know the above example is kind of an extreme scenario, but I think it elucidates why the patent system as it exists today has become a hindrance rather than a motivator for innovation. Recent court judgements in the Blackberry case and the earlier fracas created by Amazon in the 1-click case, have brought these unsavoury aspects of patents, as they exist today especially in the software industry, into limelight.
It is informative at this stage to recollect why patents exist in the first place. Patents are a barter that governments agree to allow faster dissemination of information and subsequent innovations; the inventor is allowed a restricted monopoly in the market and in return he makes the knowledge leading to the innovation public. So while the inventor gains in monetary, social and intellectual terms, the market gains by greater competition in the long run. To be granted a patent there are two established ground rules - the invention has to be new and it has to be non-obvious. It is the later term that is the cause of a great many problems todays, since there is a very thin (but distinct) line between non-obvious and simple.
Almost everybody except the so called patent trolls agree that a major revamp is needed. Paul Graham, Greg Blonder, Brad Feld, Fred Wilson are amongst the many who have called for such reforms. And then there are others who believe that patents should not exist in the first place though what motivation will somebody then have for taking risks I cannot understand (I can see allusions being made to the open source movement here but I have a different theory on that). Neither do I agree with Paul Graham’s view that small time innovators should not really worry about patent infringement, since they are just small fish. But their aim is to become a big fish one day and with the current system in place, they are just lambs being fattened for slaughter. I personally believe that the patent system is not without its merits but it does need a major revamp. Firstly granting of patents and their expiry should keep pace with the innovation in the field. Also their should be a clear distinction between a generic paradigm (threads for parallel processing) applied in a novel way and a new invention (a face detection algorithm that matches profile views). Also a patent before being awarded, must, like a IEEE paper, be rigorously peer reviewed.
While pointing out the inadequacies of the system, many restrict themselves to the preceding discussion. However there is a bigger problem. I read somewhere (cannot recollect the link or remember the breadcrumbs) that many of Google’s top innovations are infact not patented. They remain fairly sure that even if discovered otherwise, they only can get the full power out of those innovations; added to it the fact that they would not want facts about their super-parallel, super-fault tolerant and super-fast infrastructure to be made public and open for free use after some years. This is the basic problem that the patent system was designed to prevent. If we start having islands of knowledge then it will lead to a market with great knowledge divides; the knowing and the lesser mortals. The amount of innovation lost, not just in terms of standing on the shoulders of giants but also varied applications of common principles in different domains, would be truely staggering. And as for the X and his friends; they would never even take the plunge in the first place.
