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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 | # ]
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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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