If all patent litigations were adjudicated in 2008 the total cost would have been $31,224,000,000.
Click to Enlarge:
Source:
Focus, The Patent Lawsuit Economy
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
"Dollar depreciation leads to higher inflation and ultimately forces foreign creditors to question their rationale and indeed their sanity for continuing purchases of U.S. Treasuries." -Bill Gross
Signs continue that European markets are getting tired. The Spanish and Italian stock markets, big beneficiaries of the sharp decline in their bond yields over the past few months are falling to the lowest since Feb 1. The European bank index is at a 1 1/2 week low after earnings reports from Commerzbank and Credit Ag (RBS bouncing although reporting weaker than expected earnings) were disappointing. This market action is in spite of the German IFO business confidence figure which rose to a 7 month high coming in a touch above expectations and Italian consumer confidence which bounced more than...
read more »
Tweet
Facebook
Reddit
Digg this!
August 27th, 2011 at 5:51 pm
Check Techrights.org for more on the IP battle in the computer business.
August 27th, 2011 at 7:07 pm
knowledge wants to be free
it is the free lunch
trap it and bind it with thousands of patents at your risk
some patents and trademarks needed
but way less and better thought out than we have
August 27th, 2011 at 7:11 pm
I’m sure a strong argument can be made that NPEs contribute as much to the economy as HFTs
August 27th, 2011 at 7:49 pm
Smart-phone lawsuits: The great patent battle
Nasty legal spats between tech giants may be here to stay
http://www.economist.com/node/17309237
This article includes a clarifying graphic of who is suing who and why. However it was written Oct 2010, so much has changed and I expect the battles fiercer.
August 27th, 2011 at 9:11 pm
IP “Rights”, to begin with, are a/n (interesting/fascinating) Topic..
http://search.yippy.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&v%3Aproject=clusty&query=mises.org+IP
http://search.yippy.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&v%3Aproject=clusty&query=mises.org+IP+Rights
http://search.yippy.com/search?query=mises.org+IP+Rights+Fallacy&tb=sitesearch-all&v%3Aproject=clusty
should, really, be (perused/read/understood) to begin with..
how “We” handle the Idea, of Ideas, is, rather obviously, of great/grave Importance..
Simple Chart(s/-alism) Fail to bring, any, Scope–to the Issue..
August 27th, 2011 at 10:13 pm
in the area of smart phones especially
patent law has become a huge fraud
where a few mega corporations
play a game of being first to file paperwork on ideas
a lot of other people near and far also had
at pretty much the same time.
did they actually ‘invent’ anything?
i many cases no.
they simply were able to afford to be able
to claim they did.
August 28th, 2011 at 1:06 am
If you don’t like the idea of patent protection, you can try the default human nature alternative of hiding and retarding developing knowledge.
August 28th, 2011 at 1:13 am
Not sure what the solution is, if any. But I have a vastly different view of litigation involving two companies of equal size, than I do when a plaintiff of minimal financial means sues a big company just to extract some money. In such cases, the jurors are only too happy to play “Robin Hood”.
August 28th, 2011 at 4:25 am
I wonder is they read this blog in Chiana? They’ll be loving this!!
August 28th, 2011 at 4:50 am
[...] create economies of scale that feed on themselves. For more on this, click here and [...]
August 28th, 2011 at 7:11 am
irene pictures hitting New York
http://capital3x.com/?p=405
August 28th, 2011 at 11:44 am
Taking that $31 billion settlement versus ~ $14 Trillion US GDP gives us about 0.2%.
Of course, settlements would be transfers, so wouldn’t directly affect GDP. So there must be some important leverage to individual companies or individuals for this to be headline news all of a sudden.
Indeed. Witness Sun Micro ($1.2 billion mostly for its portfolio), Nortel ($5 billion), Moto Mobility ($12.5 billion). Would Carl Icahn have backed MMI in the absence of IP value? How about all the money that went into Nortel, which apparently was used to develop much of the standards base for 4G communications in the world (LTE). Who would back an engineering-oriented firm these days if its profitability was determined only by its ability to offer new products for six weeks or so until copycat products cut them off at the knees?
So an attack on IP is an attack on investment itself, an invitation to destroy innovations. Funny, patents were written into the Constitution with the idea of encouraging innovation; they have done that for a couple of centuries (imperfectly, but it’s not as if courts exist only because of patents); and now, some extremely self-interested individual firms are starting Astroturf campaigns to discredit the value of IP they are arrogating for themselves.
I’ll recognize the ad hominem aspect to my argument if people want to first deal with the concerns about what destroying the patent system would create (pace ToNYC).
August 28th, 2011 at 11:49 am
Of course, corporations going public about how “bogus” patents are, can be counted on the thumbs of your left hand.
I find it interesting that said firm spent $12 billion for an aging patent portfolio that has nearly nothing to do with products that it distributes, while it passed on the opportunity to buy for one-tenth as much, patents that it is being sued for unlicensed use.
Seems like a colossal destruction of shareholder value; we get this garbage junk that all IP disputes should be resolved in favor of the defendant as a destruction of public discourse and trust in institutions, as well.
August 28th, 2011 at 4:34 pm
Say someone was granted by USPTO the pathway under Interstate 80 and by virtue of the existing patent system was granted patents that every other player thought could not be patented so they built on it anyway……Are they not entitled to charge a small toll (less than 5%) on the traffic on their granted right for the decade or so that it might have taken being ignored and legally$$$dominated in defense by the takers-for-granted corporations?
War is on the exiting stakeholders being attacked for what they took for granted.
PR gets paid by whiners 24/7 365; get over it.
Our Patent system is why scientists from pirate countries come here: to be allowed to own their ideas.
Patent wars before Gold or Oil/SUV wars.
August 29th, 2011 at 5:05 pm
The current patent system has next to nothing to do with innovation
(which isn’t even mentioned in the constitution) or with promoting
“the progress of science” (which is mentioned). I used to work for
a very large scientific research organization and here’s what often
happened. Although people did real research and made non-obvious
discoveries deserving a patent, at the urging of the patent lawyers
a group of scientists would sit around a table to suggest ideas off
the top of their head. Something along the lines of, “when you order
online we’ll store your information so the next time you don’t have
to enter it”. Then the patent lawyers decided which ideas had the
best chance of getting a patent and made the filing. The purpose
was to have as many patents as possible in our war chest, regardless
of their validity, to scare off anyone from suing us.
At one point I tried to find out from the legal department how much
money the corporation made yearly from all their patents versus the
total cost of obtaining, defending, paying licensing fees, lawyers
salaries, etc. That is I wanted to know if the company would be better
off without a patent system. Needless to say, I never got an answer.
I really would like to know how many corporations (if any) benefit
from the current patent system. Does anyone know?
September 2nd, 2011 at 2:20 pm
Patents are crucial in areas such as medical progress, where investments are huge and payoffs would be nil without them. Of course, the patent system can still be abused there, but at least it is a vital part of the system.
In many other areas, patents often still serve their old purpose. I agree that there has been a lot of abuse lately, but it’s more centered around abusive companies like Apple and Microsoft than around a particular technology.
In my view the main point is whether patents serve their original goal in the current world economy. Originally, the idea was to replace “proprietary” information – the old system where innovation happened ineffectively because it was kept secret within a company and therefor had to be discovered multiple times. It made sense to make the knowledge public, allowing innovation to spread faster while still being profitable to the first inventor to file the patent. However, the problem always was enforcement, as you need to be able to find out that your patent is being violated before you can sue. That is pretty dang hard, and has become harder in a global economy. Right now, patenting something may no longer be a good idea as it may allow bad actors worldwide to use your idea, leaving you with the job of hunting down violations. Even when you establish a violation, it may be hard to sue successfully.
I suspect that one of the reasons German manufacturing has been so resilient is that they are still much more enamored of the old model, where know-how is built up inside long-lived, specialized companies, which do not share it publicly through patents. It makes it much harder to copy a German production process than an American one.
Perhaps we should look at the proliferation of BS patents and conclude that nowadays it only makes sense to take out patents on nonsensical matters, and to keep the real innovations under wraps…