<story><title>The Patent Pledge</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beagle3</author><text>I disagree that this will help, because the established companies the pledge would apply to are a secondary problem and mostly seem to fight each other (has Microsoft asserted patents against a startup? has IBM? has AT&amp;#38;T? when they asserted patents it was against multi-million dollar businesses!). The primary problem is patent trolls (see e.g. lodsys / intellectual ventures) for whom this pledge could be considered self-harm.&lt;p&gt;I will quote myself from [ &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855835&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855835&lt;/a&gt; ] here for another solution, one that actually can _easily_ go through government (except for the intense lobbying against it by whoever enjoys the current patent regime); you can read there for some discussion if it is interesting. Quoth myself (with minor editing):&lt;p&gt;Intellectual &quot;Property Tax&quot;. Have everyone declare the value of their intellectual &quot;property&quot; (patents, copyrights, trademarks) - each and every item, for that year, on their tax return, and have them pay 1% of the value as &quot;IP tax&quot;, per year.&lt;p&gt;Clarification: you can set a different value every year. The value may drop to zero because a competitor&apos;s patent solves the problem better; or it may go up because it becomes essential to something that becomes commonplace.&lt;p&gt;That amount is what one pays for a compulsory license or if successfully sued, and up to 3 times that for willful infringement, per year -- and no more. (But of course, a patent owner can always negotiate a lower payment, as is done with music recordings that have compulsory license agreements)&lt;p&gt;All of a sudden, everyone has an incentive to state a reasonable value for their patent. Copyright catalogs that are not being published (old music recordings, old books, old movies) would be assigned 0 value by copyright holder, to avoid tax - which means anyone can freely make a copy. If they believe -- at the end of the year -- that someone is making a profit at their expense, they can set the value as high as they want at the end of that year, pay the tax, and sue the profiteer.&lt;p&gt;Simple, elegant, and coffer filling.&lt;p&gt;edit: put missing link&lt;p&gt;edit: added clarification about setting value each year anew.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>A1kmm</author><text>The biggest problem with the patent system is it discourages people from using patented ideas - the more patented ideas you use in your product (even if you independently discover them), the more you pay.&lt;p&gt;A good patent system would have the following properties:
  * Investment and risk taking in R&amp;#38;D and sharing the results is rewarded above the costs of that R&amp;#38;D, so there is no disincentive to share with competitors.
  * There is no disincentive to using and building on ideas shared by others.&lt;p&gt;I think the best system is a &apos;tax&apos;-like system - alongside the existing patent system, businesses can elect to pay 10% of their revenues to a pool for immunity from all patents. Businesses using / reselling patented manufactured products are still liable even if the manufacturer pays the 10%, unless they also pay the 10%. Patent filers tell the pool the actual costs of R&amp;#38;D (and may be audited to prove it). The pool is distributed based to patent filers based on R&amp;#38;D costs (and maybe a per-industry factor for risk) - it might be better to somehow collect some rough metric of value of the each patent to their business from patent users, although there are risks of the system being gamed then.&lt;p&gt;This system would achieve the desired properties at 10% of all industry-wide research being spent on R&amp;#38;D - it would favour not disclosing R&amp;#38;D worth more than 10%, and if less than 10% was spent, it would be stacked in favour of companies doing R&amp;#38;D.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Patent Pledge</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beagle3</author><text>I disagree that this will help, because the established companies the pledge would apply to are a secondary problem and mostly seem to fight each other (has Microsoft asserted patents against a startup? has IBM? has AT&amp;#38;T? when they asserted patents it was against multi-million dollar businesses!). The primary problem is patent trolls (see e.g. lodsys / intellectual ventures) for whom this pledge could be considered self-harm.&lt;p&gt;I will quote myself from [ &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855835&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855835&lt;/a&gt; ] here for another solution, one that actually can _easily_ go through government (except for the intense lobbying against it by whoever enjoys the current patent regime); you can read there for some discussion if it is interesting. Quoth myself (with minor editing):&lt;p&gt;Intellectual &quot;Property Tax&quot;. Have everyone declare the value of their intellectual &quot;property&quot; (patents, copyrights, trademarks) - each and every item, for that year, on their tax return, and have them pay 1% of the value as &quot;IP tax&quot;, per year.&lt;p&gt;Clarification: you can set a different value every year. The value may drop to zero because a competitor&apos;s patent solves the problem better; or it may go up because it becomes essential to something that becomes commonplace.&lt;p&gt;That amount is what one pays for a compulsory license or if successfully sued, and up to 3 times that for willful infringement, per year -- and no more. (But of course, a patent owner can always negotiate a lower payment, as is done with music recordings that have compulsory license agreements)&lt;p&gt;All of a sudden, everyone has an incentive to state a reasonable value for their patent. Copyright catalogs that are not being published (old music recordings, old books, old movies) would be assigned 0 value by copyright holder, to avoid tax - which means anyone can freely make a copy. If they believe -- at the end of the year -- that someone is making a profit at their expense, they can set the value as high as they want at the end of that year, pay the tax, and sue the profiteer.&lt;p&gt;Simple, elegant, and coffer filling.&lt;p&gt;edit: put missing link&lt;p&gt;edit: added clarification about setting value each year anew.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jessriedel</author><text>To clarify: they can&apos;t adjust the value retroactively, right?  If you find out someone is profiting from your patent in 2011 which you valued at zero the beginning of that year, you have to wait until 2012 to re-value (and potentially sue them), correct?</text></comment>