Mark Cuban on patent law: who wants to make lawyers happy anyway ?
Within a post on his blog, Mark Cuban talks about current issues in patent law.
Right at the beginning, there is a theme right out of Harvard Business Review's "plagiarize with pride" paper:
If you create a new process, use it. The benefit is from creating the idea and using it in a business to your advantage. Afraid that some big company might steal the idea ? That is life. When you run with the elephants there are the quick and the dead. That is a challenge every small company faces. A process patent is not going to make your business successful. The successful execution of business processes will.
And, there is an implied "be like China" theme:
Pick any country that is currently doing well, China is a perfect example. In China the Intellectual Property Laws are so weak that someone thought it was a good idea to completely replicate Apple retail stores. Compare their economy to ours. As much as I hate to compare other economies to ours, it’s worth taking a look .
Sure, free riders can have a great run, up to the point that they run out of creators to steal from.
Toward the end of the post:
If you care about the issue of patent trolls, you have one month to encourage your Congressperson to amend S.23 and/or H.R. 1249 to include limiting damages from “non-practicing entities” (aka, trolls).
That suggestion is like patent reform 2005 all over again, and it won't happen in 2011. The only way Congress got to patent reform 2011 was by agreeing not to talk about damages reform. And the only way S.23 got a 95-5 vote was by ending fee diversion. Now, that may vanish in the final proposed bill. If patent reform does pass, it will do so because it doesn't address the important issues. A largely symbolic "feel good" effort that will assist larger companies with the "first to file" and "post grant review" provisions that favor those that have more money.
See also
Harvard Business Review article: Plagiarize with Pride
Right at the beginning, there is a theme right out of Harvard Business Review's "plagiarize with pride" paper:
If you create a new process, use it. The benefit is from creating the idea and using it in a business to your advantage. Afraid that some big company might steal the idea ? That is life. When you run with the elephants there are the quick and the dead. That is a challenge every small company faces. A process patent is not going to make your business successful. The successful execution of business processes will.
And, there is an implied "be like China" theme:
Pick any country that is currently doing well, China is a perfect example. In China the Intellectual Property Laws are so weak that someone thought it was a good idea to completely replicate Apple retail stores. Compare their economy to ours. As much as I hate to compare other economies to ours, it’s worth taking a look .
Sure, free riders can have a great run, up to the point that they run out of creators to steal from.
Toward the end of the post:
If you care about the issue of patent trolls, you have one month to encourage your Congressperson to amend S.23 and/or H.R. 1249 to include limiting damages from “non-practicing entities” (aka, trolls).
That suggestion is like patent reform 2005 all over again, and it won't happen in 2011. The only way Congress got to patent reform 2011 was by agreeing not to talk about damages reform. And the only way S.23 got a 95-5 vote was by ending fee diversion. Now, that may vanish in the final proposed bill. If patent reform does pass, it will do so because it doesn't address the important issues. A largely symbolic "feel good" effort that will assist larger companies with the "first to file" and "post grant review" provisions that favor those that have more money.
See also
Harvard Business Review article: Plagiarize with Pride
posted by Lawrence B. Ebert at 6:22 AM
1 Comments:
Watching the making of this particular piece of legislative sausage called "patent reform" has proven particularly unpleasant. The bill would never have received the support that it has, if ending fee diversion hadn't been a part of the original deal. If fee diversion remains, the bill will be nothing but a major gift to mega-corporations. Par for the course, I suppose ... but nonetheless disappointing.
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