“Last Week: Tonight” host John Oliver on Sunday explored the dark, duplicitous and costly world of patents, particularly the types of companies that try to take a cut on inventions they have no role in producing.
They go by the name, “patent trolls.”
“Most of these companies don’t produce anything, they just shake down anyone who does,” Oliver began.
“So calling them ‘trolls’ is a little misleading — at least trolls actually do something. They control bridge access for goats and ask people fun riddles,” he said. “Patent trolls just threaten to sue the living shit out of people.”
Of the 4,700 patent lawsuits filed in 2012, 3,000 were the work of the trolls, according to Bloomberg.
One example is Uniloc, a company saying it has a claim on every Android app in existence.
“That techinically means they could show up at the headquarters of Tinder and demand a cut of everything Tinder has created,” Oliver said, referencing the popular dating app.
“Which, I assume, would be a pile of STDs, sad orgasms, and shards of human self-esteem,” he said.
The litigation patent trolls thrive on has reportedly cost $500,000,000,000, or half a trillion dollars, since 1990.
Watch the clip, courtesy of HBO:
The fact that we get anything done with all this shit going on is truly amazing.
Congress would do something about this except for one likely fact. These patent trolls probably contribute large sums to strategic committee member’s campaign operations (and related PACs), the very legislators capable of crafting laws to effect change.
I recall applying for a trademark and then having it revoked because I did not pursue the idea and could not show the USPTO that the trademark was going to be used in the manner described in the application. This prevents people from squatting on trademarks like they do with web domain names. Similarly, they need to prevent people from squatting on ideas in the form of patents. If you are not actively pursuing the idea, the patent should be revoked.
I get the value of having patents to protect people from copying your work, but if you aren’t actually working on anything related to the patent, then you should have to forfeit the patent.
The first problem is that too many inappropriate patents are issued in the first place.
The second is that we have deluded ourselves that patent rents are somehow earned market rents instead of government enforced monopoly rents.
The third is that monopoly rents are always popular with businesses and with the granting authorities, especially if no one seems to notice that the enabling bit (the patent) is a government granted monopoly. No wonder that the legal profession would catch on eventually and get their snout in the trough.
For people not familiar with the high tech industry, many large companies have bonuses for filing patents of any kind, whether it is something you are working on or not. Some of these bonuses can be thousands of dollars per patent. So this gives people incentive to come up with any idea they can think of and cash in on the bonus program. There will often be brainstorming sessions where people sit in a room and just come up with ideas and the patent lawyers take over from there. It doesn’t matter whether it is something the company is planning to build or not, it just matters that it is somehow related to the companies business and pad their patent portfolio.