Inequality between small and large patent holders

Patents held by individuals and small company are much weaker than patents held by large companies.

(Note: not to be confused with the inequality between product developers (big or small) and non-practising entities (patent trolls), whereby the former's patents cannot be used to counter-sue the latter. That's a different problem.)

Small patent holders have a weak negotiating position

A very clear example is Andre Geim's discussion with a large electronics company. Geim won the 2010 Nobel Prize for physics for his discovery of graphene, but he didn't patent it. Geim explains:

We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed. Then I had an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy at a conference and said, "We've got this patent coming up, would you be interested in sponsoring it over the years?" It's quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years. The guy told me, "We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it's really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us." That's a direct quote.

Less interest for the public

Consider two word processor formats. Imagine that Microsoft and I both develop separate file formats. Everyone who develops a word processor has to be compatible with Microsoft's format, and no one has to be compatible with mine. Their patent is massively valuable and mine is of no value - the technical quality of the formats is of no consequence.

Related pages on ESP Wiki

• Software patents harm SMEs