A recent article caught my eye, apparently Yahoo is suing Facebook over patent infringement, now this seems pretty major, one huge internet giant suing another but really this is a lot more common than you think. Samsung and Apple have had a notable set of lawsuits filed against each other recently, Samsung sued Apple in South Korea, Apple and Samsung sue each other in Germany but both get dismissed, and Apple trying to stop Samsung from selling their products through a lawsuit Apple and Samsung seem to constantly be in a series of lawsuits against each other over patent claims, a pretty disturbing trend if two big tech giants seem to have been infringing on each other so frequently. The patents over which the two are suing are also quite disturbing: Samsung suing Apple over issues with the 'Wideband Code Division Multiple Access' standard, battles over ownership of the 'slide-to-unlock' features found on iPhones and other devices, patent infringement of using a software keyboard with a stylus and a bizarre claim over using a reference time signal to display times in multiple cities.
Information technology patents seem to be in a very negative state, small but important elements like Amazon's '1-Click' ordering system or browser plugins are patented and held on to for years, tech giants are constantly suing one another in various regions over claims of infringement of their property, and companies are even created and run just for the sake of holding patents. This trend is quite unsettling as patents are meant to be a way to protect the creator's ability to control ideas that they have expended effort on to but in the digital world this seems to be abused by companies hoarding ideas that are crucial to the world we live in.
How is society supposed to progress when there is a system in place that prevents the use or enrichment of an idea because someone has patented it, stopping others from using it without paying a potentially impractical fee?. The even bigger danger is if another company just buys this patent for the sole purpose of hoarding it and profiting off lawsuits and preventing anyone from using this technology, while an entity that holds a patent and uses it at least puts that idea in to application an entity that hoards a patent can stop all progress from that invention just to profit off preventing that idea from being used.
However there is another viewpoint in this, those ideas which cannot be used (because of intellectual property and patents) will be replaced by other ideas that could be even better. People will not stop inventing and improving and if one path is closed another one will be taken. This viewpoint holds that patents can prevent ideas from being used but that those ideas could fall by the wayside as people circumvent them and provide new opportunities for invention.
Where I stand on this is that patents are very useful and are no doubt crucial to progress however abuse of the patent system is quite evident and needs to be stopped, there should not be some way to transfer patents as they are not out to protect whoever has the power to hold that entity but instead those who created it and any other potential holder of that patent has no claim to be the sole person to profit off of it. The current patent system just needs to be changed, so that it is restored to its original basis of protecting inventors and away from its current application fo preventing progress and allowing people to profit off of the abuse of invention.
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