The Road To Stagnation Is Paved With Patents

All of the large corporations spend a lot of time and money telling anyone who will listen that patents are a vital component to innovation. They use it in PR for the education system to indoctrinate kids, the political system to extend IP laws and treaties. Patents in fact are the path to stagnation.

Instead of dealing with a specific example, I'll take a hypothetical one with the photo industry. For decades the industries around taking and printing photographs were used to one path, with various income streams like paper, ink, cameras, film etc. If you want an image of your child's 10th birthday party on the mantelpiece for posterity you paid money at various parts of the chain to these companies.

Enter the world of the digital camera, then the digital photo frame, and you no longer need film, processing, ink or paper to get that same image on the mantelpiece. The fact that you can set the digital photo frame to be a slideshow is an added selling point. This is one of many examples of disruptive technology. It arrives through innovation from people who want to do things a little bit different, and it's enough to capture the imagination of enough people, both company executives and customers.

The photo industry have ridiculous patents for lots of things like "printing an image on a page" or "adding text to an image" or "using an image in a promotional context" or "resizing an image for promotional use" where they're getting paid licence fees when people use those things. It's in their interests to thwart any digital moves, make them illegal, or reach out to patent everything not nailed down in the digital realm.

When new technology arrives that bypasses their patents, they're suddenly in the position of losing money because people no longer use the stuff they own patents on. This is natural, technology moves on. Patents and the system which turns it into a business model actively try to stifle that innovation, while it's promoters claim it's essential to it.

Think about petrol fuelled cars, all of the major vendors have the patents covered for every aspect of the petrol fuelled car, so as long as petrol is the norm, they get paid. When others enter the market with more efficient fuel sources, the industry effort is to kill it, either by extending their own patent pools and sending the lawyers in, buying it with the intention of "losing" it, spreading a fear campaign that the technology is over-hyped, that it breaks safety laws, or to refuse to let it be stocked at all. The other side of this is at government level to lobby for a change in various laws to ensure these new products can't be legal, to extend the threat of the patent hammer to insist that existing patents do in fact cover this new technology and they better get their chequebooks out and start writing.

The result of this is that more efficient cars never see the production lines or forecourts, so customers never have the option of moving and why? Because the established players have a financial stake in the status quo continuing. With that in mind, it's not in their interests to innovate to improve anything they already make a lot of money from. They may accidentally trigger an idea in their customers minds that their competitors do better, that loses them money, instead of the planned switching of customers from one of their products to another of their products.

Back on the photo industry, when camera manufacturers also make a lot of money selling and processing film and the move to digital cameras brings that income stream down to almost zero they seek to recover that income elsewhere.

One way to do it is to try and find some way to ban digital photography, again not for the customers benefit, but for theirs. While some industries can do this easier than others, the other way would be to put the PR out around the professionals that "digital just won't cut it if you wanna do it professionally", so that anyone seeking to work as a photographer won't even consider digital, no matter the quality because the industry sees it as an amateur's tool.

Look at how the music, movie and book industry are reacting to the disruptive influence known as the internet around their own hallowed revenue streams. Everywhere you look there's lobbyists browbeating politicians and journalists with made up "poor me" studies as excuses to outlaw anything that even resembles innovation to benefit their customers, because they're unable to become part of the solution themselves. They have no clue about what their customers want, so they demonise those who seek a way to consume their products in a way they don't approve. Plenty of start-ups have tried, but failed because of established players demanding HUGE fees upfront to licence their IP.

ACTA, DRM, DMCA, Digital Rights Act, MPAA, RIAA are only a few of the industries responses to outsiders innovating around their cash cows. They rely on extending and expanding the status quo to cover a wider range of things to maintain their businesses without having to evolve.

Part of that is to continually lobby to expand the acceptance of patents to every jurisdiction, and the patent troll / extortion model to be legalised around the world, so there is nowhere that any outsiders can innovate without paying them. When third world countries are pulling their citizens up in the world, educating them with key skills, winning investment contracts, they enter a world where ideas themselves are already owned by the super rich, and the super rich have a well oiled legal machine ready to squeeze every penny out of it. Their own countries governments have been forced to choose to either accept this system of control applying to their people and economy, or face being pariah status where their products are considered illegal in the large economies.

Look at the major household names in the mobile phone market. Everyone is either suing everyone else over software patent infringement allegations or signing cross licensing deals to use each others "IP", Apple, Google, HTC, Motorola, Microsoft and Oracle. At every turn, the tactics these companies use, particularly in the US, is to apply to have their competitors blocked from sale in the US. Yes, this is what patents bring you, demands that your competition be removed from stores, so that potential customers can't decide they like the competition better than you, and again, over what? Ownership of ideas.

These are the very same companies who like to claim they're all about the capitalist ideals, where competition makes for better products. These are also the very same companies who claim their practices are better for the economy while at the same time having accountants the Mafia would be head hunting to evade taxes at every opportunity, and moving as much of their manufacturing costs to slave / low wage countries to make a bigger profit.

The idea of a patent is to protect and reward the inventor of something unique with an exclusive time in the market to recoup his or her investment and make a profit on it. The system is broken when ridiculous patents are accepted, and when companies can patent stuff they didn't spend any time of money creating. It's also broken when it's used as an offensive weapon to close out any sniff of innovation by outsiders. It's broken when it's used as an extortion "pay up or we 'll sue over these un-named patents that we claim you're infringing, and it'll cost you millions of dollars to even fight it". It's broken when the patent office grants patents in the broadest terms to cover a whole vague area of ideas and / or non-unique "inventions".

There is very little "unique" in this world, almost everything is a re-spin of other things already in existence, or a blending of ideas in a novel way. "Hey my printer is great, it can print stuff, my PC is attached to the network, wouldn't it be cool if the printer was too, so I could email my document and it'd print." Not exactly unique, just a blend of two ideas into one "new" product. MP3 players are just an evolution of the Walkman but with digital files instead of cassettes or CDs.

It's also broken when industries agree on "standards" which are then patented technologies, where companies insert their own profit stream into a process designed to be beneficial to consumers. It's even worse when the companies involved do it covertly. Every removable storage device on sale now is formatted in FAT, SD cards, digital cameras, mp3 players etc because various corporate players pushed for FAT to be the standard they all use.

After it's been adopted and companies around the world have built their product lines, income streams etc from them, Microsoft suddenly announce "oopsie, did we forget to mention we own the patents on FAT, you might want to get out your chequebooks and make them out to Microsoft PLC", so the shakedown begins.

They tried the same again with OOXML, by stuffing the ISO with Microsoft people under lots of different titles, many non-Microsoft, who'd turn up to vote Microsoft's way without debate. The other part of OOXML is to ensure governments, businesses and schools use it as their standard document format, which only Microsoft Office works properly with it, which means they have no choice but to continue using both Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, hence further entrenching the status quo.

The irony here is that OOXML was bought with an undercooked product that even Microsoft Office doesn't support in practice. It was bought on the promise of "just accept it, and we'll fix it later, we'll address all the concerns you all have later, we promise".

FAT is a very old filesystem, it's not very efficient but where is the incentive to look at the many alternatives? Microsoft will refuse to support any non-Microsoft patented filesystems in Windows natively, which means any device like an SD card sold pre-formatted in a modern filesystem will need extra drivers to be even recognised in Windows. This is a barrier to consumers. Unless it's done as a concerted move by many vendors at the same time, with the same patent free choice, it's going to be seen by consumers as a broken device, because it doesn't work when they plug it in.

Keep in mind that many of the mainstream vendors also play the patent game themselves and have been worshipping at the Church of IP. Not only that, but many are Microsoft partners. It's cheaper for them just to sign a cheque for a licence than to disrupt their production lines and have the PR burden to educate people, along with the backlash in reputation from people they fail to reach. They also have patents which they licence to others for use of their IP.

Printer manufacturers design their devices so that it's very difficult for generic ink refills to be used, they also use the patent system to make it illegal, so customers have no choice but to pay inflated prices for official refills.

For those who say "well, it's a defensive system where companies need to protect their investments" I say this, various companies all claim Android infringes on various patents they own, but to protect them do they go after Google? No, they target the handset vendors, HTC, Motorolla, Samsung etc. If it was truly defensive they'd target the source; Google. It was designed as a defensive system, but has long ago evolved into a very hostile aggressive one where innovation and consumers are increasingly being ignored, not only that, but for every patent deal made to bring a product to market, do you believe the companies take the hit on the cost? No, they pass that cost onto us when we buy it, meaning everything is more expensive, more locked down to support the status quo, and anything even remotely new and cool never makes the shop shelves because it upsets some rich corporations existing revenue stream.

What happens when they back the wrong horse? If they have the patents for something that has been the industry norm for decades and some newcomer has patented everything to do with a new technology that has caught the imagination of consumers, it means the licensing money will flow from their bank accounts, to the newcomers. They can't even jump in afterwards to patent stuff they didn't invent to take a piece of the pie that they didn't earn. They don't even have the solace of revenue moving from one licence to another. It's then in their interest to ensure that new technology is killed before it can get established.