My office mate just pointed me to an article from MSN,
Factory of the Future? It's an article about
Intellectual Ventures a company that produces ideas.
The five-year-old firm's plan is to create or buy new ideas, accumulate patents—exclusive rights to use the inventions—and rent those ideas to companies that need them to do the gritty work of producing real products.
The key word here is “accumulate patents.” Let's face it. Ideas are a dime a dozen. You're probably sitting on a handful as you read this... Accumulating patents is the hard part. For anyone who's been involved in this process, you know that it can be an expensive and time consuming to say the least. The fact that companies like this can profit really irks me. They don't have better ideas than the rest of us out there... They're just taking advantage of the fact that our legal system around Patents is horribly broken.
Especially in the software industry, the barrier to entry for creating a new product is extremely small. On top of that, ideas are easily thought up. Think about it, just in this small .NET blogging community we have all these great product ideas, .TEXT, Regulator, NUnit, Dot Net Nuke... These were created in people's spare time, and we rely on them every day. But is anyone making money on any of this? Not really. You may say “You can't patent a blogging application“ but, there may be aspects of the application that you could patent. Big companies with lots of money get multiple patents to cover every possible aspect of their systems.
To me, the barriers involved in the patent process is really what hinders competition. This is what makes companies like Microsoft so hard to compete with. In my opinion, open source is not going to be a great win for competition in the grand scheme of things. Sure, it's working for Firefox, but that's because people are really motivated to have a better browser. The biggest reason that the big companies are so hard to compete with is that for the average Joe, patents almost impossible to get. You can't protect your intellectual property anymore, unless you have a 50 MM startup like Intellectual Ventures. It takes so much more than a good idea, or even a great product to be successful.
Now, even if you have a patent, some big companies will infringe just because they know you can't afford to defend yourself in court. My grandfather was an inventor. He invented the “Self-ejecting Plug Cutter“ and some other tools for companies like Stanley. He supported his family, but toward the end of his life, his patents were infringed upon by multiple big tool companies. They made millions on his ideas, and he died penniless.
With all this talk about legal reform, how about doing something about patent reform? We should be able to have an idea, and patent it, for a minimal charge. We should then be able to defend ourselves if companies infringe on the patents. I mean, if the RIAA can enforce copyrights by looking at my home computer, certainly someone could check up on someone selling an infringing product on the open market.