Let's. Microsoft is the biggest spender on R&D amongst software companies and they sponsor a lot of research without clear immediate benefits. This is in stark contrast to all the other big companies who largely only sponsor projects driven by product requirements. They regularly publish research papers in the best conferences and journals. MSR is the last bastion of well-funded, blue sky industrial R&D and the closest (though still a far cry) approximation we have to the precedent set by Bell Labs and Xerox Parc.
I don't begrudge them a few patents in exchange for that.
Or, asserting their legal right to protect their investment in R&D that latecomers like Linux and Android simply ripped off. Just a matter of perspective, really. Is just that given open source is the dominant religion around these parts, that perspective is in the minority.
Honest question, what do you think was ripped off from Microsoft? I wouldn't think Linux or Android took much from them, really. (When I think of innovation at MS I think of developer tools, research on programming languages and distributed systems, and stuff like Photosync.)
IIRC, the only areas that have been specifically mentioned have been surrounding filesystem access and structure, which MS has done a lot with, most of it outside patent protection now though. Not sure what else, as most articles can't/won't say as part of the non-disclosed parts of these contracts.
One of their most potent patent that they're using a lot is the FAT patent.
Basically there are filesystems out there that are superior to FAT and not encumbered by patents, but device makers are forced to use FAT because of interoperability reasons.
This goes to show that the innovation argument is bullshit.
FAT is out of patent protection, I believe FAT32 is now too... exFAT is newer, but imho undeserving of an extension patent. Not sure where NTFS is, but with larger external storage, that's my preferred format these days, even using the devices with mac/linux. The BS with the commercialization of ntfs drivers on osx is kind of weird as well... I usually use the macfuse/free/oss driver.
Of course it does. The claims define what a patent covers. Noting that the vast majority (95%+?) of patents go unused, it's reasonable to assume that they have some correlation with market usage. What other hypothesis would you posit for the over abundance of value-less patents? Mine is that most ideas have no market value terrible, hence most patents don't either.
And then it covers all of them. The whole market. It's like if you owned a ranch house on a beach and that caused you to become the owner of every ranch house on every beach, and if someone built a new one somewhere else on some land that isn't yours then you would become the owner of it too. That's not how real property works.
And you're confusing the value of the market with control over it. It's possible to have a total monopoly on some useless junk nobody wants.
In the antitrust sense, the standard set upthread, market power requires pricing power, which inn turn requires that there is both some market demand and inefficient competition from market substitutes (which need not be identical) to constrain the monopolists ability to set prices and extract rents.
Pricing power doesn't actually require demand, it's just that nobody cares about the markets where there is no demand. But it's still a monopoly, which you would notice immediately if any demand ever came to exist, the hope for which is why people even bother applying for those patents.
Without demand, the test for pricing power (the ability to raise prices from some level at which there are nonzero sales without losing sales) cannot be satisfied -- you can't have market power with no market.
> Without demand, the test for pricing power (the ability to raise prices from some level at which there are nonzero sales without losing sales) cannot be satisfied -- you can't have market power with no market.
In theory that's the test, but it doesn't actually work. In practice market power isn't binary. There is always a substitute for anything if you jack the price up high enough. And a monopolist would jack the price right up to that point, so that increasing it any more would cost sales.
But the zero volume case is the divide by zero case anyway. A test isn't going to give you a yes or no, it's going to give you NaN. That doesn't mean there is no market power, it only means you can't tell without a buyer. And in the patent case, as soon as there is a buyer there is market power.
In fact, the MP3 patents are directly responsible for spurring the development of Ogg Vorbis, which is arguably superior in some ways (see other comments). From Wikipedia:
> Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery.[8][9] Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format.[10][11]
This is interesting because "innovation through forced workarounds" has long been one of the ways patents are said to be beneficial. Ogg is a prime example.
> In what way is it "doing harm" to the patent system?
Well here's a study showing that the user of the term "troll" had become widely used by media without any evidence to support their negative views. This has led to judges forbidding the use of that term at trials as it is unfairly prejudicial.
If it is improper in the court of law, one can reasonably assume it is improper in the court of public opinion as well. The effects of this bias can be seen in the usual comments on patent-related threads here and other forums, where the USPTO is regularly derided by people who don't know the first thing about patents. These people know only what the media tells them, and as the paper shows, media is highly biased. This bias is being spread to a large audience and is also being used to push for reform that may not necessarily be balanced. I'd say, yes, such rhetoric is hurting the patent system.
Yes, and this speaks to the problem our laws have. The public has, by its behavior, manifestly rejected current copyright law. Many break copyright law daily without understanding that they're doing so. We should amend the law to be something that normal people can conform with.
EDIT: Also, it's improper to classify all BitTorrent traffic as piracy. It was specifically designed to transfer large files. Applications like World of Warcraft use it internally to distribute game files.
The main reasons Netflix, Spotify and their ilk exist are a) piracy is still not user-friendly enough for everyone, and b) people vastly overestimate the risk of getting caught for piracy. Both of these are largely due to the incessant efforts of copyright holders exerting their legal rights. We are, in the large, homo economicus.
> TV and Movie owners already have copyright laws and DMCA laws giving them legal control on who gets their content and how it is used.
And you have property laws giving you legal control over who gets your physical property and how it gets used. You could, for instance, loan your car to your family all you want, or agencies can rent their cars out as they wish. But the moment some stranger makes off with it, the government law enforcement agencies are obliged to help.
The legal distribution of content is a free market -- there is no government price setting agency and no monopoly more than other forms of ownership -- the public only needs to be better educated about what they are paying for.
I've been thinking about it, and perhaps the conclusion could be that the moment you start loaning, you are by definition in a special situation. I guess in the wider sense of the term it is still a market, but it doesn't behave like how we use to think about markets.
With your exemple about cars for instance, if every car maker decided to refuse to sell their cars, and only accepted loaning them, they'd have a lot more control than they have now, as long as they collude to all go loaning only.
They could block reselling, forbid you by contrat from using your car for specific uses (or you'd need an extra fee for professional use for instance), they could get rid of all the second hand market and force old cars to retire prematurely. You are right that we'd fall exactly in the situation we discussed with Netflix.
The main issue is not digital property or not, it's basically that we have a model where there is no tranfer of property, and the producer only lends to the consumer instead of outright selling. As it was said in another comment, Netflix could own the physical DVD while now they only rent the digital copies.
