A patent gives its bearer the exclusive ability to produce and sell a specific piece of intellectual property. The main driving force behind granting patents is economic; patents encourage innovation by providing additional incentive for entrepreneurs to innovate. Socially, this makes sense as well. People want to live in a society with more technology, more comforts, better products, etc… In a way, the spirit of patents can be understood as protecting an individual’s moral and ethical rights as well. It wouldn’t be fair for someone to spend years inventing a revolutionary product, only for a big company to steal their invention legally and with no compensation for the creator.

I think patents are useful in most cases, however, the actual implementation of such patents could be improved for the benefit of society. For example, software patents are currently being abused to stifle creation of more innovative software.

Patents on software is a gray area, not because of the ethical or legal implications, but because of a lack of technical understanding by judges and the courts. The Supreme Court does not allow abstract ideas to be patented. Specifically defined within the category of “abstract ideas” are mathematical algorithms (i.e. all software, ever). This means that software should not be patentable by the court’s own definition, and this is a stance that I would agree with. I would consider software and code in general to be more akin to creative works by authors, composers, and artists than innovative work by inventors. One doesn’t invent code, they simply rearrange data to produce new results. Much like one doesn’t patent a book, code shouldn’t be patented. Imagine if a program was patented tomorrow allowing for “virtual reality devices to interact with general purpose computer devices.” Now imagine this patent was bought from a poor grad student by a patent troll company such as Intellectual Ventures for an undisclosed sum, and Intellectual Ventures uses this patent to prevent any other company from producing VR technology. So many possible applications of VR have just been removed from society at large. And maybe this single patent is too broad, but with more than 30,000 patents at their disposal, Intellectual Ventures and other similar companies are working against the very innovation that patents were created for in the first place.

Patent trolls are specific examples that show the value of patents, while simultaneously their very existence is detrimental to the system and a sign that the end results don’t reflect the original intentions. As Yarden Katz explains in “Universities have turned over hundreds of patents to patent trolls,” these patent trolls would “sue companies for patent infringement or bully them into paying with litigation threats…” without actually producing the product or software that they have a patent on.

My solution is to modify the system as it exists. First, patents should be changed so that they don’t prevent the use of the patented intellectual property in other systems, but rather, should come with predetermined royalty fees that could be determined based on industry, cost of materials, and other factors. Second, inventors are not allowed to sell their patent or their rights to it. This allows for the invention to benefit society even in the event that the creator doesn’t have the means or desire to produce what they invented. Someone else can come along and produce the product or software, and both the producer and original inventor would benefit monetarily. As a result, there is still monetary incentive to innovate (perhaps even more than with the current system), and more importantly, this eliminates the possibility of patent trolls purchasing patents for the purposes of suing producers of infringing designs.