What A Waste: Taiwan Plans To Create A 'Patent Bank' To Protect Taiwanese Companies Against Patent Lawsuits
from the without-the-aggressive-suing? dept
Tim Swanson was the first of a few of you to pass on the news that the Taiwanese government is planning to put together a "patent bank" that would basically seek to buy up patents around certain technologies, and local Taiwanese firms share in the patent pool and effectively check patents out to use against others if threatened. Of course, this is similar to the original pitch that Intellectual Ventures made... and also similar to the claims of companies like RPX which basically tried to recreate the Intellectual Ventures model. Of course, IV also went on the offensive, rather than just the defensive. And, as Stephan Kinsella has pointed out, all the patent banks in the world won't save you if you get sued by a non-practicing troll who is immune from return patent lawsuits. Really all this demonstrates is how ridiculous the patent system is, when governments (and the article notes that South Korea and Japan have similar things) have to create special institutions to protect their own companies from the patent system. Shouldn't that raise questions about the patent system itself?
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Filed Under: patent bank, patents, taiwan
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Patent Abolition FTW
The patent system is going to go right on delivering no net benefits at all, plus it is going to cost more and more vast sums of money. The answer is to either abolish the thing altogether, or at least de-fang it by taking away the monopolies. When are the pollies going to wake up?
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I believe that's within their rights as a sovereign nation, no?
They'll have to deal with any retaliatory action of course but that's a cost/benefit analysis operation.
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IMO, TW court does not have that power. The law would only be effective for the companies never bother to enter US market.
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Imagine other countries forming a consortium to buy a lot of patents and create a bigger pool than the IV Ventures and sue each and every one remotely involved with them.
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http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=468333
This will be good.
The US is getting scared and I believe the government will start to do some crazy things in the future.
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The future is now.
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It's so crazy...
I can dream, can't I?
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another biased article
Call it what you will...patent hoarder, patent troll, non-practicing entity, etc. It all means one thing: “we’re using your invention and we’re not going to pay”. This is just dissembling by large infringers to kill any inventor support system. It is purely about legalizing theft.
Prior to eBay v Mercexchange, small entities had a viable chance at commercializing their inventions. If the defendant was found guilty, an injunction was most always issued. Then the inventor small entity could enjoy the exclusive use of his invention in commercializing it. Unfortunately, injunctions are often no longer available to small entity inventors because of the Supreme Court decision so we have no fair chance to compete with much larger entities who are now free to use our inventions. Essentially, large infringers now have your gun and all the bullets. Worse yet, inability to commercialize means those same small entities will not be hiring new employees to roll out their products and services. And now some of those same parties who killed injunctions for small entities and thus blocked their chance at commercializing now complain that small entity inventors are not commercializing. They created the problem and now they want to blame small entities for it. What dissembling! If you don’t like this state of affairs (your unemployment is running out), tell your Congress member. Then maybe we can get some sense back in the patent system with injunctions fully enforceable on all infringers by all inventors, large and small.
For the truth about trolls, please see http://truereform.piausa.org/default.html#pt.
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Re: another biased article
Is there a noun like "troll", but more pejorative?
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