Following the popular last blog post on patent trolls, I have found very interesting data and reviews on arstechnica.com.
The first paper is titled: “Study: patent trolls have cost innovators half a trillion dollars since 1990”.
Let’s repeat: the cost of defending innovation has been 500,000,000,000 (500 billion) dollars for publicly traded defendants since 1990! And it has increased over time to a staggering 83,000,000,000 (83 billion) dollars per year in the last four years!
And some researchers (Bessen and Meurer in their book Patent Failure) have shown that showed that, outside the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, the cost of patent litigation had already begun to exceed the rewards to inventors by the year 2000. Their new work suggests that the problem has gotten much, much worse since then. And that the intellectual property system is definitely broken. It is supposed to bring wealth to society; actually is stymies it!!
The book “Patent Failure” is reviewed here. I can’t help copying in this post – with all due respect to copyright – a stunning graph from the book (other industries refer to other than chemical and pharmaceutical – mainly software):
No doubt. The intellectual property system is deeply broken and needs to be mended. Otherwise innovation might just be scared away by a bunch of parasites.
And… what better illustration for the Fourth Revolution ignition?!?
No doubt – that’s an area where the Fourth Revolution is already there and deep institutional changes are required, and fast.
