The Meaning of Independence
Essay Preview: The Meaning of Independence
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August 2011
I realized recently that we may be able to solve part of the patent problem without waiting for the government.
Ive never been 100% sure whether patents help or hinder technological progress. When I was a kid I thought they helped. I thought they protected inventors from having their ideas stolen by big companies. Maybe that was truer in the past, when more things were physical. But regardless of whether patents are in general a good thing, there do seem to be bad ways of using them. And since bad uses of patents seem to be increasing, there is an increasing call for patent reform.
The problem with patent reform is that it has to go through the government. That tends to be slow. But recently I realized we can also attack the problem downstream. As well as pinching off the stream of patents at the point where theyre issued, we may in some cases be able to pinch it off at the point where theyre used.
One way of using patents that clearly does not encourage innovation is when established companies with bad products use patents to suppress small competitors with good products. This is the type of abuse we may be able to decrease without having to go through the government.
The way to do it is to get the companies that are above pulling this sort of trick to pledge publicly not to. Then the ones that wont make such a pledge will be very conspicuous. Potential employees wont want to work for them. And investors, too, will be able to see that theyre the sort of company that competes by litigation rather than by making good products.
Heres the pledge:
No first use of software patents against companies with less than 25 people.
Ive deliberately traded precision for brevity. The patent pledge is not legally binding. Its like Googles “Dont be evil.” They dont define what evil is, but by publicly saying that, theyre saying theyre willing to be held to a standard that, say, Altria is not. And though constraining, “Dont be evil” has been good for Google. Technology companies win by attracting the most productive people, and the most productive people are attracted to employers who hold themselves to a higher standard than the law requires. [1]
The patent pledge is in effect a narrower but open source “Dont be evil.” I encourage every technology company to adopt it. If you want to help fix patents, encourage your employer to.
Already most technology companies wouldnt sink to using patents on startups. You dont see Google or Facebook suing startups for patent infringement. They dont need to. So for the better technology companies, the patent pledge