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Difference between revisions of "Inequality between small and large patent holders"

(Related pages on {{SITENAME}}: * Patent non-aggression pacts - another way for large companies to escape the problems)
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Patents held by individuals and [[SMEs|small company]] are much weaker than patents held by large companies.
 
Patents held by individuals and [[SMEs|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.)''
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''('''Note:''' not to be confused with the inequality between product developers and [[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==
 
==Small patent holders have a weak negotiating position==

Revision as of 09:17, 9 October 2012

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 and 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. Graphene is hardware, not software, but this situation shows how weak the position of an individual with a patentable idea is. 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.[1]

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

References