Wouldn't it be simpler to require that any company suing over patents must also be an active practitioner in the field(s) that the patents involve?
That would kill the asset-free trolls instantly because without an engineering staff and a product they can't very well be building anything that uses their "property", can they?
I was thinking the same thing, but then realised how easy would it be to subvert any definition of "active practitioner". The troll only needs to contract a guy (offshore?) who swears he's developing something that will come to market real soon now.
A typical patent lawsuit is so expensive that hiring a small engineering staff and tell them to go off and design something cheap that makes use of the patent would be peanuts in comparison.
I don't think we have to bring down the whole patent system just to stop software patents. Let's just stop issuing software patents and just deal with existing software patents however we can? One possibility.
If it is property, tax it like property, at 1% of value per year. All of a sudden, every trivial patent will be assigned 0 value by its owner, and then convincing a court the violation is worth $100M is hard.
Real estate, essentially everywhere in the western world. The range I have observed in multiple countries is 0.5%-1.5%, and it isn't always called "property tax" (e.g., in the UK it breaks between "council tax", and various other taxes, none of which is specifically named "property tax"; in the neighborhoods of CA I'm familiar with, it's 1.2% in the last few years)
Car licenses in many places are also essentially a property tax of 1% of the car value, or so.
Comments
Wouldn't it be simpler to require that any company suing over patents must also be an active practitioner in the field(s) that the patents involve?
That would kill the asset-free trolls instantly because without an engineering staff and a product they can't very well be building anything that uses their "property", can they?
I was thinking the same thing, but then realised how easy would it be to subvert any definition of "active practitioner". The troll only needs to contract a guy (offshore?) who swears he's developing something that will come to market real soon now.
A typical patent lawsuit is so expensive that hiring a small engineering staff and tell them to go off and design something cheap that makes use of the patent would be peanuts in comparison.
I don't think we have to bring down the whole patent system just to stop software patents. Let's just stop issuing software patents and just deal with existing software patents however we can? One possibility.
If it is property, tax it like property, at 1% of value per year. All of a sudden, every trivial patent will be assigned 0 value by its owner, and then convincing a court the violation is worth $100M is hard.
Also puts old and new patents on equal footing.
> If it is property, tax it like property, at 1% of value per year.
Where is property taxed like that?
Real estate, essentially everywhere in the western world. The range I have observed in multiple countries is 0.5%-1.5%, and it isn't always called "property tax" (e.g., in the UK it breaks between "council tax", and various other taxes, none of which is specifically named "property tax"; in the neighborhoods of CA I'm familiar with, it's 1.2% in the last few years)
Car licenses in many places are also essentially a property tax of 1% of the car value, or so.