Patently Stupid

One of the most contentious issue in technology today surrounds patents. We've all heard plenty about how patents are causing problems in the pharmaceutical industry, but thankfully, the tech patent problem is a decidedly Western problem that shouldn't cost any lives. It's still a big problem; costing companies large and small many headaches and filling my RSS feed with new crap daily.

The problems are two-fold; patent trolls and patent wars between the major players. All of these things surround software patents. There are issues with software patents being granted for overly generic concepts in several cases where prior art exists. This has lead to a bevy of problems, with companies getting sued once they become big enough to be a target for violating a patent they didn't know existed. Essentially the root of the problem is with US law allowing such patents to be granted in the first place. That still leaves us with problems to be fixed though.

Patent wars is the easier one to talk about as it's less contentious. Essentially, the big tech companies have built up loads of patents over the years and have now decided to unleash the dogs of war i.e. the lawyers on each other. In some cases this is a defensive act, counter-suing in response to being sued. The result is chaos. Companies settle for licencing fees rather than pay for long and expensive court cases. Those that do go to court get dragged out, with appeal after appeal, and are often perused in several jurisdictions simultaneously (e.g. Apple's actions against Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 in most of the EU and Australia). You end up in a world where Microsoft make more money of a free, open source mobile OS (Android) than they do off their own, proprietary, licensed OS (Windows Phone 7). This is through suing HTC and extracting a licence fee from them for every Android phone shipped. Now they're going after Samsung too.

This is for patents referring to smartphones ONLY. It was produced in December 2010 so is a little out of date.

Is this a problem? Like, big companies fight all the time; in marketing, in product development, in hiring etc. Does this limit the innovation within these big companies? Probably not. What it does do is create a culture of fear; encouraging companies to build up large patent libraries as a defence. This translates into the company patenting any idea that gets thrown out there, just in case, thus inhibiting other companies who may be seriously developing something in that line. It also means obscenely highly priced auctions, and some rather convenient alliances forming (see the Nortel patent licence auction and the anti-Google alliance). These sort of manoeuvres may not be anti-innovation, but they almost certainly are anti-competitive.

How to solve it? The short answer is you can't. These companies would fight each other if all they had at their disposal were plastic spoons and half-rotten cabbages. We should tighten up patent issuing though, which will hopefully result in these companies only being issued with relevant patents and leave room for competitors to create something similar but different.

The other issue is much more serious. Patent trolls just sit on patents, do nothing with them and then sue the pants of anyone who encroaches on them. This has also led to the Eastern District of Texas becoming the Cayman Islands of patent litigation with several of these companies sharing their registered address in tiny offices here so that they can file in what is seen as a court favourable to patent holders.

They target anyone big enough to pay. App developers have been sued. Spotify got sued a mere week after launching in the US. They're simply parasites, sucking the lifeblood out of companies while claiming to protect innovation. This is what really annoys me. I've learned over the past year that having a good idea or having a good product is by no means a guarantee on success. It all comes down to work, marketing and more work. Without that, your product is going nowhere. Innovation without production is not worthy of protection. The only reason we issue patents in the first place is to protect companies, particularly small companies, from having their ideas copied by larger rivals. Patent trolls don't add anything of value to society. They don't ever do the work getting to the innovation in the first place either. Patents are usually purchased rather than investing in original research.

This has an easy solution though. Make patents dependant on commercial use. A straight forward "use it or lose it" rule. Give the licensee two years, and after that if they haven't done anything with it, void the patent. There's no commercial interest to protect, so all that patent is doing is stifling other innovation. I think it would work. I'm not a law-talking-guy though so I may be wrong.

Note: This post was prompted by an excellent post from Michael Mace on his blog Mobile Opportunity. Read it.

Note 2: As if to underscore my point, Google just spent $12.5bn buying Motorola Mobillity, mainly for their patent portfolio.

Net Neutrality and Why You Should Care About It

If you’ve been tuned into the gadget world, the phrase net neutrality will have been thrown about a lot recently thanks to Google and Verizon (who are an American telecom if you didn‘t know). The two giant corporations came out with draft legislation for net neutrality, the first of its kind but it has come under a hail of abuse and has placed the two companies in the centre of massive debate in the telecom industry.


In a nutshell, net neutrality is the idea that all bytes are created equal and should be treated as such. Internet service providers (ISPs) shouldn’t be able to discriminate and prioritise certain traffic over others. Sounds good in principle yeah? Like all fluffy ideas, there are issues. Enforcing complete net neutrality would prevent ISPs from filtering spam, not displaying child pornography and provide the necessary network management at peak times. As much as we’d like to think it; access to the internet is not unlimited and when everyone tries to get on at once the ISP has to do something to try to ensure everyone gets some piece of the action. A bit like the rolling blackouts they do in LA when it gets hot to reduce demand on the power so that the whole city doesn’t go dark at once (that may seem a little obscure but I was watching a Criminal Minds episode in which that featured last night. I can only assume it’s true…)


There are concerns though at the moment that ISPs will start managing their traffic a little too much, effectively stopping peer-to-peer file sharing, charging certain websites (like Google/Youtube) to ensure a quality connection for its customers who visit that site or even blocking off competitor’s websites altogether.
Like all corporate disputes however the key issue is money. Google and many other internet based companies make huge profits off the back of the infrastructure the ISPs provide. The ISPs in comparison work with very tight margins and huge capital expenditure cost. Basically, the ISPs are fighting net neutrality as it gives them power over the internet companies. Internet companies obviously don’t want to have to pay and a more subtle annoyance will be having to pick and choose their markets rather than just being open to the world once you’re on the web.


So far the ISPs haven’t been going down this road because bandwidth has been plentiful for the most part. However, there is a crunch coming. The crunch is coming in the mobile area due to spiralling data usage from smartphones. While cabled service can provide huge speeds and carry massive amounts of data, wireless is severely limited in comparison. This is specifically why Google and Verizon made an exemption from net neutrality in their legislation and is the main talking point on the interwebs.


I would like to dispel the notion that I’m turning into a corporate whore since moving to London, but the fluffy principles of net neutrality just don’t stand up to reality and not just for mobile networks. If we want ISPs to continue upgrading our networks then someone has to pay for it. Internet companies can provide that money without hurting the consumer too much. Not only that but I don’t think it’s fair that Google (through YouTube in the main) can take up such a massive proportion of the strain on the networks and not be expected to pay for the service. As long as sensible laws are enacted to protect consumers privacy and against anti-competitive behaviour, then I’ve no problem the net not being neutral.


Why I think you should care about this though is that for the internet generation that we are; free and open access to everything on the internet has been take as a given. The internet was the modern wild west; no laws, no regulations, no barriers to entrepreneurs. While it will never be fully tamed, the internet is coming more and more under control. There are more barriers now to setting up an internet start up, most of them non-financial. Illegal file sharing is being clamped down on. Governments are quickly catching up with legislation to govern the net e.g. legislation to tax online betting is in the works in Ireland. The debate over net neutrality is about what is the core philosophy of the internet, and as much as many people will hate it; it will be money that decides which way the legislation falls.

Damn you, Capitalism!

Last week, those very smart people over in MIT unveiled a design for a plane which could reduce aviation fuel consumption by up to 70 per cent, make about as much noise as a really tiny kitten and as the picture shows is quite pleasing on the eye too.

Using a blended wing body as opposed to the usual narrow body design, this is the latest in a long line of design development that aims to radically increase the efficiency of aircraft. As anyone who's worked out their own one out, regular flying leads to a crater like carbon footprint. So, this should make a massive dent in the carbon emissions of the western world, yeah?

If only it were that simple. That most dastardly of things, capitalism, comes in and ruins everything. These sort of designs have been knocking around for a while, but market forces hold them back from any sort of commercial roll out. Look closely at that picture; there are limited passenger windows. Earlier designs such as what has know become the Boeing X-48 didn't have any passenger windows and that provoked such a negative reaction in focus groups that they were dropped as commercial prospects and now exist entirely as military or NASA projects.

It's not just consumers that would be holding these designs back. The narrow body design is universal, which means that it's what all airports, ground crew and all the other various pieces of machinery that interact with a plane are built to work with. In particular, refueling in this type of aircraft takes more time and for that reason alone the low-cost airlines would ignore them.

Concorde showed that while there can be a niche for non-standard design, it also shows how difficult it is to change and how unenthusiastic many airlines and airports are for change. True, Concorde was obscenely loud and inefficient, but it had it's selling point and made a profit on its (two) routes. These planes have a selling point, and its appeal is much more broad based than high flying executives needing to be in NY in 2 hours for a meeting. There's hope that these designs will one day be the staple of our air travel experience, but without significant US and EU subsidies, that could be a long wait.