1. 17-06-2008 19:09

In Defense of "Patent Trolls"

Sigh. Once again, I'm obligated to defend the patent system (and by extension, my profession). First, let's clarify what this patent was for. The patent, filed in 1992 (U.S. No. 5,283,81, is not for "visual voicemail," but instead for "Telephone answering device linking displayed data with recorded audio message." It could be text, video, or whatever, but the idea is that you have ways, other than audio, to identify and browse through your voicemail. Apple's visual voicemail is just one way of doing this; as Comcast and Vonage and AOL know (since they've already settled with Klausner), there are many other ways of doing this. 
 
Now that we understand what the patent is about, consider this--if the patent was really something that was simple and obvious, why have we had voicemail for decades without this feature? We've had telephones linked to display devices for a very long time, and yet to this day, I still have to listen to my darn messages sequentially without any visual feedback. 
 
Second, let's consider this story from a different angle. Judah Klausner and a friend, back in 1992, have this great idea for making voicemail less annoying. Through the U.S. government's patent system, they publish the idea to the entire world, in exchange for the U.S. government granting them exclusive rights to the technology for 20 years. Judah Klausner then tries to get other people to use this idea in exchange, of course, for licensing fees. 
 
15 years later, some big company named Apple with a monopoly over MP3 players decides they also want a monopoly over cellular phones, and decides that Klausner's idea will help them achieve that monopoly.  
 
Whether they found out about the idea through Klausner is anyone's guess, but the fact remains that as part of doing business in the U.S., Apple has agreed that people should be able to get 20 year rights over technologies in exchange for making the ideas public. Knowing this, Klausner approaches Apple several times and politely asks for licensing fees, since he has such rights to visual voicemail. Apple, like most big companies, says "screw the little guy." Klausner brings them to court. Apple finally decides to pay the little guy licensing fees. 
 
OK, so I'm not saying that this is exactly what happened (though it's pretty close), but the point is no one seems to care to ask how it happened. Everybody just says "another patent troll--those greedy bastards, taking money from my favorite company." 
 
Now you may argue that Mr. Klausner doesn't deserve anything because he sat on his idea for 15 years. Well, first of all, I've seen no evidence that he did sit on his idea--he could have been peddling it around every day of the last 15 years for all anyone knows. But nobody's asking what he did with his idea. People would rather spin things from a "poor Apple" standpoint. 
 
More importantly, the law shouldn't impose on Mr. Klausner such a duty. Maybe the cost/benefit ratio of implementing Mr. Kalusner's idea in 1994 was excessively high, so that it wasn't practical at that point, and thus no one would license it from him. Should we penalize Klausner because he didn't spend every day of the next 15 years trying to make his idea practical?  
 
By publishing the idea to the entire world, the U.S. patent system provides a way of making sure Klausner's idea isn't lost in the meantime. Except, Klausner would never just give away his idea for free--so the U.S. patent system offers a reward of a 20 years monopoly over the idea so that Klausner has an incentive to disclose it. 
 
Is this too big a reward for an idea? Perhaps. But perhaps not. I'd hate to think, for example, that someone was sitting on a working idea for harvesting energy from cold fusion because there was no or very little incentive to tell anybody. 
 
Now maybe you can argue that the patent system is broken, because nobody actually goes through and reads those published patents. Well, the fact is, companies have the opportunity to read those patents. Their failure to read those patents represents a market ineffeciency--R&D time that could be spent improving upon ideas rather than reinventing the wheel. Companies could and probably should develop ways to better mine patents for ideas, instead of reinventing the wheel in their R&D departments. 
 
So there's my defense. And yes, there are patents over that list of missed calls. They probably are expired, but I can guarantee that the first person to think of providing a list of missed calls to a telephone also thought to patent the idea.

http://karlrees.com

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2. 18-06-2008 13:51

In Defense of "Patent Trolls"

I'm not saying that people should be sorry for "poor Apple" or that Klausner doesn't deserve to be paid for his patent, I just think it's silly that something so simple is even patentable. Perhaps it didn't seem so simple 15 years ago, but what it really boils down to is A) displaying visual data that B) corresponds to some other data C) on a particular device (in this case a "telephone answering device"). Now I'm fairly certain that people have been displaying visual data that corresponds to other data for a lot longer than 15 years. That's what bothers me, that all you need to do is specify some specific combination of A, B & C and you can be granted a patent.  
 
I'm not particularly against patents, just against patents for things that are so simple - applying an already known process to a "new" or particular device. In my opinion patents should be reserved for things that are truly novel. I'd hope that if I ever come up with a unique invention that I could patent it and make money from it, but things such as Auctions on the Internet, Email on a Phone and Visual Voicemail are not particularly novel ideas. 
 
PS Wow! Someone actually still reads this site.

http://cutterpillow.com

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3. 18-06-2008 23:56

In Defense of "Patent Trolls"

Well, I have to admit I don't exactly go to your blog every day. But thanks to the modern miracle of RSS readers, I'm always up to speed on the news here at Cutterpillow . But yeah, you should post more.

http://karlrees.com

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