Vectis IP Announces Call for Patents Essential to the Opus codec
On one hand I believe the theoretical patent is very important to promote innovation. If you, the inventor, can get guarantees on your sales for 10 years (which is reasonable, imo) then it'll encourage people to make more stuff. I don't think patents are <i>wrong</i>.<p>However, the <i>way</i> patents are filed is wrong. There's so many issues with first to file. It's a good system when your office sees 100 patents a year. All of them are likely to be novel, and likely to be made by independent inventors. The problem we have now is there are entire companies (IBM, Google, RAND, TI, etc) that exist solely to farm patents. In fact, there are so many patent farms disguised as businesses I challenge you to sit, think of something, and search for a patent for it. I guarantee you one exists. Moreover, pursue the patent office if you never have. The definition of invention, especially in tech, is so vague it may as well not exist. Vomit some smart sounding stuff on paper with drawings and you've got yourself a patent that, if written correctly, will almost certainly produce a profit. Hell, take a cat and draw a stereo speaker on top of it. Call it "animal sound machine". I guarantee you if it hasn't already been done someone will do it. Better, draw a cat with a USB stick duct taped to it and call it "IP over Feline". Devise a stupid protocol. Then sue every idiot who thought it'd be funny to make one. This is seriously how lame modern patent law is. You might even be infringing on a patent with IP over Feline because someone already "invented" transportable storage.<p>I don't have a solution to the problem. Part of me wants to say one patent, per inventor, per term (10 years). You have the option of canceling a patent to put a new one in. But this seems like it's <i>too</i> strong. Maybe there's another way that legitimate inventors for an appropriate amount of time, and also disincentivizes patent trolls through some measure. Maybe we could start with "common good" patents (as determined by a board of smart people) being invalidated.