I could imagine patents limited to physical designs, with a lifespan of say 5 years to actually be beneficial to innovation.
Perhaps also a requirement to license patents at a 'reasonable rate'.
I'm thinking of the 'sawstop' and 'festool domino' woodworking tools here. Which are important innovations that were probably motivated by patents, but whose patents have run long.
I actually think that Sawstop (in general. Might be some details that are bogus) is a great example of the patent system working as intended.
The inventor reached out to several saw makers to license his new invention. None of them took it seriously. So he went and started a company with his new patent and became successful. Then other companies (Bosch specifically) tried to rip his tech off after they saw how effective it is, and he got to sue them and win.
And now competition will begin to roll out their similar saws. I think 5 years would've been far too short for him. He would've been squashed. There would've been no motivation for companies to license his tech or buy out his company. They would've just waited 5 measly years and then stomped him.
Now. If this was software, this whole thing would've played out in what? 5 years? 10 tops? So 20 years, to me, seems to be about right for some things. but absolutely TERRIBLE for others.
From what I have heard, the sawstop 'inventor' is a patent attorney first, and an engineer second. Whilst he has offered to license the technology to other brands, reportedly the terms he offered were ridiculous.
The bosch system was significantly different. Notably having the advantage of not destroying the blade when triggered. The sawstop patent removed this major innovation from the market. A clear example of stifled innovation.
Moreover, sawstop doesn't sell in Europe, nor license. Which leaves me with no option to make use of this great innovation. Not quite stiffling innovation, but still making the world worse.
With a 5 year patent, sawstop would still have been profitable I believe. But we would have safer tablesaws around the world, we would have systems that don't ruin blades when triggered, and probably have many other innovations on top of that.
I feel like mandatory licensing is the answer. Have a state ombudsman who sets a price of "marginally above reasonable" so that people are still encouraged to negotiate first, while providing a way out when it's obvious the patent-holder is not acting in good faith.
Everyone wins: the inventor gets a payday even if he can't deliver directly, consumers don't have to choose between "brand I trust" and "patent-exclusive feature I need", and manufacturers stay out of the courts.
You get the payday, whether it's your one man startup or a massive industrial that actually delivers the product to market.
Sawstop is a fabulous example. After the patent expired too, what are those other companies doing? Well, when I looked into European table saws last year, they started using it as a market segmentation tactic and putting stop tech only on their upper tier of $$$ saws. Disgusting. Felder, go fuck yourselves.
Not sure about the details of that, you can definitely buy Hammer/Felder table saw products in the USA (not that I want to, given their shitty attitude about using this feature as a market segmentation tactic).
It's frustrating because I'd much rather have a proper European sliding table saw like the Robland CZ-300 II, but I don't want to give up the safety of a Sawstop system.
You can be sued, and will probably lose in court. however that is a risk you are allowed to take. They are allowed to see such products even though nobody should. Eventually regulations will take over, but for now it is just a economic optimization problem: will the monetary loss from killing/injuring someone and losing the law suite be more money that just putting the system on the say - I hope you feel icky just reading that.
I think that exemplifies why the patent system should at the very least not have the same rules and terms for physical products as for software, if it should exist for software at all. The time and capital investments to start up are just so dramatically different.
What I see is most physical patents involve something that is actually novel--the low-hanging fruit was picked long ago. Most software patents involve something that would be the expected product (or one of a small set of possible products) of assigning a software engineer to solve the problem. (To me the clearest example of this is blinking cursors. Draw by inversion or draw with a backing store--both are obvious techniques to any software professional, both were at one time patented.)
I absolutely agree. My point was more that using Saw Stop as an illustration of the broken system is a poor one. Because I think the patent on physical tech enabled a real disruption to the status-quo. Allowing "the little guy" to establish themself as a real competitor to some huge names.
> November 26, 2012 - Innovention Toys LLC, a company headed by a Colorado professor named Michael Larson, won its patent infringement lawsuit against MGA, Wal-Mart Stores and Toys "R" Us. A federal jury in New Orleans found that the defendants had infringed Innovention's patent on a strategy board game using lasers and mirrors.
One of the things this let people do is find games that were patented, but never published.
Sid Sackson wrote in A Gamut of Games:
> The files of patents that have been granted are a fruitful hunting ground for forgotten games, although going through these files, as anyone who has ever been involved in a patent search well knows, is a time consuming job. Often the patented games are downright silly, such as a set of dominos made of rubber so that they can double as ink erasers (No. 729,489) or a sliding block puzzle with edible pieces so that a player who despairs of a solution can find collation in gratifying his stomach (No. 1,274,294). Often the patents are repetitious: There are over a thousand different baseball games.
The publishing of a patent maintains the ideas - even if they never got anywhere. If you know how to look, its an archive of decades of board games rules... written in patentease.
I'm thinking of the 'sawstop' and 'festool domino' woodworking tools here. Which are important innovations that were probably motivated by patents, but whose patents have run long.