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Validity findings... | 158 comments | Create New Account
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Validity findings...
Authored by: PJ on Tuesday, July 17 2012 @ 10:28 AM EDT
I am intrigued by something in your paper. Why do you suppose there are no trolls going after pharmaceutical companies? You write:
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) database classifies patents into six coarse groupings. The six classes are: chemical, computers, drugs/medical, electrical, mechanical, and others. These classes convey little information in themselves, but they are helpful for comparison. Quite simply, the distribution of NBER classes of NPE patents is different than the classification of all patents involved in litigation filed in 2000 and 2002.

The primary differences are the relatively infrequent patents in chemical and drugs/medicine categories enforced by NPEs as compared to the number of such patents enforced by all patent plaintiffs.

The lack of chemical and pharmaceutical patents is corroborated by NBER’s slightly more detailed technology sub-classifications. NBER classifies ninety-three of the NPE patents as “communications,” sixty-one as “computer hardware and software,” thirty as “information storage,” thirty as “electronic business methods and software,” and twenty-four as “miscellaneous electrical & electronic.” Notably missing are biochemistry and pharmaceuticals.

That's on pp.22, 23. So trolls focus more on software than on drugs? Why might that be?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Validity findings...
Authored by: PJ on Tuesday, July 17 2012 @ 10:34 AM EDT
Well, surely there is a difference between a productive company seeking to protect its products in the marketplace and an NPE just trying to suck someone's blood.

The former is at least offering the public a product they presumably want to have, so the patent bargain is at least operative, in that the public gets some benefit.

But with trolls, the public gets nothing but more expensive products, because when you have to pay a troll to make your product, the price goes up. And while you might say that the public benefits from the original invention, which now has fallen into NPE hands from a productive company or inventor, if you look at how it plays out in real life, that isn't how it works. If you read Barnes & Noble's narrative a bout how Microsoft went after them, trying to get them to pay for trivial stuff B&N either didn't use or didn't wish to use and totally didn't need, it's eye-opening.

Patents, sadly, don't represent inventions worth paying for, most of the time. And even when you may think they do, they invariably increase costs of products. If everyone who has a dog in the smartphone fight gets a small royalty, no one will be able to afford a smartphone, so the patent system is now eating its own children, so to speak.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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