How do you balance the need for making sure you recoup the R&D costs that went into a patent vs fostering adoption and further innovation on ideas? What tools do you think work best for this coherently? Aggressive patent expire dates?
This is a great question!!! I don't have good answers but I have a ton of opinions :-)
I struggled with this myself because of the constant tension between the "good" side of patents (protecting those who have invested time/money into meaningful innovation - and giving them room to improve it while recouping costs) -- and the "bad" side of patents (becoming a club to bludgeon smaller startups that could move quickly to get ahead in the innovation game).
I think the patent system is flawed if not broken because
(a) choosing what/when to patent is increasingly a numbers/advantage game rather than about those goals above
(b) the examiners who actually make the decision to issue the patent (i.e., until it is "issued" it really is just paper in a pipeline) are overburdened with applications and potentially under-staffed in resources. Think about it. There are millions of innovators filing things, each of whom have had dedicated time to put into research/identification. But examiners need to have all these connections in their head to determine if that idea is in fact new & viable etc. - and as tech grows, it becomes harder to know everything and easier to make mistakes.
So in that sense, folks with resources (money, time) to pursue these get an advantage.
My hope is that the following happens:
Aggressive machine learning approaches to speed up the patent grant/no-grant process (reduce examiner burden & errors)
Contextually relevant patent expiry dates - can't be a one-size fits all. Some technologies move faster than others - getting a sense of how many research hours it takes to get solutions should be an indicator of how long that patent has value.
Tiered patents (like various kinds of licenses) - where seeking a specific type of patent should give you a certain tradeoff between coverage, cost and duration.
There is room for rethinking this.
(I had something else I wanted to say but darn it I forgot)
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How do you balance the need for making sure you recoup the R&D costs that went into a patent vs fostering adoption and further innovation on ideas? What tools do you think work best for this coherently? Aggressive patent expire dates?
This is a great question!!! I don't have good answers but I have a ton of opinions :-)
I struggled with this myself because of the constant tension between the "good" side of patents (protecting those who have invested time/money into meaningful innovation - and giving them room to improve it while recouping costs) -- and the "bad" side of patents (becoming a club to bludgeon smaller startups that could move quickly to get ahead in the innovation game).
I think the patent system is flawed if not broken because
(a) choosing what/when to patent is increasingly a numbers/advantage game rather than about those goals above
(b) the examiners who actually make the decision to issue the patent (i.e., until it is "issued" it really is just paper in a pipeline) are overburdened with applications and potentially under-staffed in resources. Think about it. There are millions of innovators filing things, each of whom have had dedicated time to put into research/identification. But examiners need to have all these connections in their head to determine if that idea is in fact new & viable etc. - and as tech grows, it becomes harder to know everything and easier to make mistakes.
So in that sense, folks with resources (money, time) to pursue these get an advantage.
My hope is that the following happens:
There is room for rethinking this.
(I had something else I wanted to say but darn it I forgot)