TheBigUpshot

There’s a company in Seattle that invents things. That’s what they do. They get together a bunch of super-smart people and they invent. They don’t produce the inventions, just the ideas. Malcolm Gladwell wrote up an interesting article in the New Yorker about it. It sounds like my dream job: no need to do the development part, just suss out cool ideas and get them to the level at which a person could apply for a patent, then hand the whole mess off to staff to go through it.

I’m not sure I agree with that on a societal level, though. It seems like poaching. Someone coined the term ‘patent troll’ and it seems to fit. The company, Intellectual Ventures, gets together an idea factory, patents all of the best ideas that they can derive, then waits around for someone to want to license them. That someone probably would have invented it themselves, but now they have to buy it from I.V. and develop it for their use.

The idea behind a patent was to protect capital-poor inventor from losing the time and resource investment that goes into the development of an invention. A firm with a large capital base could reverse-engineer an idea and make it themselves and cut out the inventor who made it happen. That possibility would stifle innovation; there would be little reward for doing something that could just be copied.

The impulse to protect producers so that production is economically viable is the driving need behind all intellectual property law. So these ‘inventors’ are short-cutting the system. They are the big, capital-rich people who are getting the patents that they don’t need so that they can sit on them until someone else does need them. Then, when the need is noticed, instead of a person saying ‘I’ll fix that problem, patent my idea, and get rich!’ the prospective inventor says ’someone already patented it? Ah, well, I’ll look for a different problem.’

Which would be fine, except that in the latter scenario, the problem didn’t get solved. The entrepreneur didn’t actually do anything, because he didn’t see a profit in it. Someone else already owned the patent. He doesn’t want to license it from them because then he wouldn’t get rich. And Intellectual Ventures, the company that owns the patent, is not solving the problem, because they are waiting for someone to license the patent so they can get rich. I’m not the first to notice this issue.

By locking up that intellectual capital, we will slow down process of solving problems, not speed it up. Alas, I don’t have much of a solution. It looks like a legal morass to me.

-Peter