Posted on 09/17/2017 12:36:55 PM PDT by Pelham
For decades, individual inventors were granted 25 percent or more of all U.S. patents. This creativity was the foundation of dozens of new industries, thousands of new companies and millions of new jobs.
Yet beginning in the early 1980s, their portion of granted patents begin to drop like a rock in free fall. By 2015, individual inventors received only 5.8 percent. A decline so great and so fast has profound consequences and is not an accident or fluke.
A useful place to begin the examination of this decline is a 1998 interview of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates who was asked, “Mr. Gates, what’s your biggest worry? What’s your business nightmare?”
Gates paused a bit and then said, “I’ll tell you what I worry about. I worry about some guy in a garage inventing something, a new technology, I have never thought about.”
Prescient and ironic? Certainly, because at that very moment two guys named Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working in a Menlo Park “garage” inventing Google, which quickly became one of Microsoft’s worst business nightmares.
What Gates really feared was described by economist Joseph Schumpeter as “the gale of creative destruction” – a process of economic mutation that “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” Inventors and their inventions most often drive this gale – a process that makes them very dangerous to established ventures such as Microsoft and Apple.
In 1776, Adam Smith described such ventures’ almost baked-in genetic reaction to this Schumpeterian gale: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
(Excerpt) Read more at ipwatchdog.com ...
I wouldn’t think google is MS’s greatest nightmare, but WDIK?
As to the patent question, how much of the decline could be due to the lower hanging (low tech) fruit already having been picked? Could it be that the more complex technology becomes, the more money and research is required to reach a new level?
The US Patent Office was instructed to harass and reject Nikola Tesla when he sent in patent applications.
Until he finally solved the situation by filing his patents in other countries.
Such a sick technique that is seen over and over.... in a different field, this is essentially what Mueller is doing and the cost for all involved as they 'lawyer up' is off the charts and crippling.
“As to the patent question, how much of the decline could be due to the lower hanging (low tech) fruit already having been picked? “
No, that’s not the problem. The America Invents Act and the PTAB kangaroo court are where the serious damage to small inventors is centered. AIA and PTAB were godsends to entrenched firms, they use them to bleed upstarts to death using an endless series of challenges to already issued patents.
“Until he finally solved the situation by filing his patents in other countries.”
This is what American firms are now resorting to on a regular basis.
A variation of this just occurred in the last few weeks- Allergan sold their patents to the Mohawk Indian tribe, with a leaseback agreement. Because of Sovereign Immunity their patents cannot be stripped by the PTAB kangaroo court- they can only be challenged in an Article III court, which is how it has always been prior to the PTAB.
NASA invented natural language searching in the early 90s. Google "borrowed" NASAs invention. I will admit the web crawler was a good idea for indexing.
“Could it be that the more complex technology becomes, the more money and research is required to reach a new level?”
I think questions like that were asked since the industrial revolution. I remember back in the 1960s the field of optics being considered a dead field for innovation. Settled science. Then came lasers, liquid crystals, LEDs, fiber-optics, optical computing, etc., etc.
I hadn’t thought of the similarity between the Inter Partes Reviews at the PTAB and what Robert Mueller is doing, but that’s an excellent comparison.
Ok. But how many of those could be invented in a garage?
I won’t tell you what’s going on in my garage. Lawyers are the bigger money worry.
The cost of patents is now prohibitive to the individual inventor.
Also, the patent attorney in one case broke a single invention into a half dozen applications to make it more likely one or two would be approved.
Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2...... “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.
Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
Have an idea? File a Provisional patent. Anyone can write a Provisional patent, good for a year (and renewable). This holds your place in time while you prepare a patent application. You can also search the USPO for patents similar to your idea, for free.
I wrote an SBIR grant for a new drug, while working in a company of three employees. SBIR grants are designed to fund the little guys. We exemplified one example of our new idea. Our grant wasn’t funded and we abandoned that idea.
You can “steal’ another companies idea if you can prove your product is a definite improvement over your competition’s product AND convince a patent examiner that your idea was not obvious to the original patent owner.
In reality most patents are written by small inventors with the expectation they will sell the rights to a larger company.
I'm thinking tech giants are patenting everything they can think of without anything working in order to establish "prior art" on things they haven't really figured out yet.
It would be interesting to know if a lot more patents are being filed today than in the past.
Once you get the patent you can no longer be certain it won’t get taken from you by the PTAB.
Large corporations are now exploiting the PTAB IPR process in their Efficient Infringement business plan- which reduces down to stealing the inventions of small firms and bleeding them to death in the attempt to get paid.
Allergan’s Indian Tribe policy may have just struck a death blow to that game.
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