Episode: 812
Title: HPR0812: Are they a patent troll
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0812/hpr0812.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 02:54:14

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Thank you very much.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, this is Mr. Gadgett, and this is an episode of
Are They A Patentrol?
Okay, so this week on Are They A Patentrol, as we always do, we are going to be discussing
a real life situation, and you, the lifters, get to the side, Are They A Patentrol?
As we normally do, we will reveal more and more information about the partying involved to see
whether you change your mind about whether they are a patent troll.
Yes, it is situational ethics put to the past, okay?
So for those of you who believe there is a black and white and wrong, it may put to the test your feelings about such things.
So this week on Are They A Patentrol, we have, as a typical, there is an organization.
This organization has patented something, which we all know how it is with patents, okay?
You cannot patent an idea, you can only patent the process which implements that idea, okay?
And they have done that. In fact, they have patented an idea that is a fundamental change in how this particular technology has worked previously.
And history has now told us because this all happened back in the past.
Once again, like I say, real life situation with real life parties involved.
And this idea has really fundamentally changed the way that this particular technology was implemented through this patent has fundamentally changed the particular aspect of the world that revolves around this technology.
They then never manufactured a single thing. They licensed their patented technology to a manufacturing company.
And this manufacturing company had never particularly been known for manufacturing anything related to this particular technology, but they were known in this particular field.
And so they took on this patent and started making phenomenally successful devices implementing this patented technology.
Now, once again, the original group of people never actually created a physical object.
They came up with the idea of how this process could work differently. They implemented a process that brought that idea into fruition.
And they patented that process and then licensed it for somebody else to manufacture that.
Now, as it always is in patents, and I learned this a long time ago, ironically by reading a very interesting series of articles by a guy named Don Lancaster.
He wrote about the history of microcomputing. Don Lancaster was a very important person early on in the whole process of getting microcomputers out there into the world unusable because he wrote something called the TV typewriter cookbook.
I talked about that in previous episodes here on HBR.
And he used to write regular kinds of columns for various computer magazines back in the day when one bought physical magazine printed on paper.
And this is all during the era of you bought the magazine because it had a bunch of programs that you're going to type in to your computer even back in that kind of time frame.
And one of his things is talking about the patenting of ideas. And he's actually totally gives patents. He thinks patents are stupid.
And basically this is because you have to tell everybody what your patented device is. You actually have to give them a schematic or a mechanical plan.
Whatever it is your patenting you have to tell them in the patent how to build the device.
So it's the antithesis of industrial secrets. It's the antithesis of intellectual property that you are trying to keep for only your own purpose and keeping your competitors from knowing how you do stuff because you have to tell them how to do it.
You have to tell them how to create the device. Okay. In thought your patents. I know expert on this, but I wouldn't suppose that you know it would be you'd have to give them the code that implements whatever you're trying to get a patent on.
See if to tell somebody how to write the program to do whatever it is you want to patent on.
And so he says that it's plainly stupid because really the only thing you get with a patent is legal redress. In other words, if this group of people that I'm talking about here who invented this patent of idea and patent the bowl idea and patent to ditch, then it works with this manufacturer, this manufacturer manufactures devices.
If somebody else during the duration of their exclusive agreement with this manufacturer for the patent, if somebody else makes a similar device that uses the and infringes upon the patent, what redress does the initial group have?
They have an exclusive agreement. Sorry, I didn't mention that before. They have an exclusive agreement with this initial manufacturer. And so only that manufacturer has the right to build those things.
The original people on the patent, let's say it's even when the patent has expired because this is back during a time period when patent expired. They don't seem to ever expire now. Copyright seems to go on forever.
But there may be an expiration on the patents, but it's longer than it originally was. I'm trying to remember I think it was something like 20 years back then if I'm remembering correctly.
So for this 20 year duration, it might not be exclusive the entire 20 years with this one manufacturer, but let's say that it's no longer exclusive or let's say it wasn't exclusive in the first place.
So if somebody else starts making a device based upon the same patented implementation, the same patented process or something extremely similar, right?
And no prior art, no nothing, right? So what redress do they have? They can go to them and say we believe that this is our patented process that you're using it as our patented way of doing this.
And you should buy a license and give us a check of change for each device that you sell just like this other manufacturers doing.
And if they say no, what can they do? They can take them to court. They have legal redress. They can sue them for the violation of the patent.
Everybody gets all upset about patents and says, oh, it's all about lawyers and making money and why does everybody sue? That's all a patent gives you.
You've already told the world how to build it. They can just go to the patent office and it's color knowledge and they can find out how to build the device.
The only thing you have is use your lawyer to sue them if they are fringe on your patents. So stop winging.
That's what patents are. Don't patent your idea if you don't want to get involved with lawyers.
Okay? The Lord knows you got to get involved with lawyer to get the patent and to protect it, it's all about lawyers. That's what a patent is.
Legal redress for the stealing of your implementation of your idea.
Sorry, don't meet around. I know I go through that every week, but just so we're clear. Okay?
So here's this organization. They've never built a device. They just invented the process.
Okay? And they licensed it. Are they a patent troll? Okay, extra piece of information here.
It really wasn't this organization. It was somebody who worked with the organization and some other people who really weren't employees of the organization who actually came up with this idea.
But because of the way that the contract with the employee is written and the way that you know the other people who were not technically employees of the organization were working on it and things like that.
It belongs to this organization. Okay? Are they a patent troll? They've never made anything. They just sold that to someplace else.
Okay, extra layer of information. This is really a great place to work. In fact, this is take Google, do no evil kind of a thing and put it on steroids.
It's smart people. It's people who are passionate about this particular pursuit and life that this technology is related to and people would practically pay to work there.
Okay? In fact, this whole idea of they would work there as the equivalent of an intern, right? They're not getting a dime to participate in this.
But they are so into it and the technology is so fascinating that the money that they receive from the manufacturer is used to pour back into that whole process of developing new ideas.
And yes, some of those might be patentable and no, this group is never ever going to manufacture a single thing. Okay?
But they are going to actually have that great camaraderie of developing the new technology and people can come there and like I say, they don't even have to be on the payroll.
But they learn things there that they can then take in life and apply that in ways that do not influence on this patent, but will help them make their way through life, pursue this kind of love that they have for this particular pursuit in life and maybe even develop other technologies and maybe they can patent those.
Okay, extra piece of information. The specific group I'm talking about is the music department of Stanford University.
I had a friend who moved in the middle 1980s out to Stanford to go to graduate school and he went to school at Karma, which was the electronic music department of Stanford University.
Stanford University invented FN synthesis, frequency modulation for the synthesis that we think of now on keyboards.
And they licensed it to Yamaha, who had never made, as I remember it, a synthesizer previous to that.
But this is a time frame in the 80s where synthesizers up until this point have been analog and they've been very, very difficult to keep in tune and take on the road.
I've mentioned before the move synthesizer that was a set of modules that was 5 feet tall and 12 feet wide, not exactly what you can take on tour if you're playing in the rock band.
And it was monophonic. You could only play one note at a time. If you wanted to do multiple notes, unless you had multiple synthesizers and multiple people playing at once, you were playing multiple notes on a single keyboard.
You were doing sound-on-sound or multi-track channels to put together the chords that you wanted to have.
And it was all monophonic. And part of FN synthesis was not only going away from analog and going to frequency modulation, so it was more stable and you could build smaller devices.
I believe it was the FN7, the frequency modulation here. I think it was the FN7, it was the popular Yamaha synthesizer of the time, and it was unbelievably popular.
And it was portable and it was used by everybody. And it totally funded Carva, which was the fantastic building on the Stanford campus, kind of up on the hillside, and they had unbelievable stuff.
This is the middle 80s, where we're only about four years away from you. You have to build your own computer from scratch. When I say build, I don't need flood parts together. I need spotter things on to a board.
And the IBM PC is two years old, and the IBM PC is three years old, and it's really just starting to get the real inroads into business.
And the Macintosh is out there, but still the 128K Mac, the GUIs are barely even coming on to anybody's consciousness. Heck, there were a whole lot of businesses that didn't even have networks, okay? It was just individual PCs.
And yet they had unbelievable technology there, things that we think of, and we don't think of how truly wondrous it is, but this was when they were all that kind of wondrous stuff that we just take we're going to know of being invented.
The fact that they had a way to sit down and play on a regular piano, not an electronic keyboard, but play on a piano, and they had a computer that could just transcribe all of those notes that were being played on the piano onto a standard music notation, a standard piece of music that any person could sit down and read that piece of music notation.
And just all kinds of wonderful, fantastic things related to music. And of course, the people who would practically pay, well, they did pay, Susan's paid to go there to school.
Graduate students got paid a stipend, but Lord does, people, come on, grad students, right? Only officially saying should form of indentured servitudes still accept to the Western culture.
All right. So, you know, grad students got a little pittance of something to do some teaching along the way, but most people paid to go to school there, but of course, they loved it, they learned things there, and they went on to do a lot of things that have revolutionized music, and even if you've never heard of these people,
they've done things that have been used by people who you have or not.
Okay. But they never invented, they invented the patentable process, but they never manufacture anything.
Now, yes, it's a private educational institution, but it is a recognized university. Does that change your outlook?
Does that change whether they're a patent tool or not? And then this less thing, okay? Say that Stanford got an offer from a group of people that said, okay, here's the amount of money that you are getting on a regular basis from Yamaha for every single synthesizer, the Yamaha manufacturer.
If you get this much money, and that ends up being so much money per year in your coffers, and what we're going to offer to do is we think we can take that patent, and we can license it to more people, and we can spread that technology in a wider basis, and we will set up a permanent way to fund the, you know, and this is part of making up.
I don't know whether or if, or if the suffer was ever made, okay? This is the non-true part of the whole process.
What if a independent group of people came to them and said, we'll buy this patent from you, and the amount of money that we will pay, we will set up a trust fund to fund the karma in perpetuity.
You will have that, and you will have an equivalent amount of money coming in as if you're getting sailed, and it's up to us to license that technology, and further develop that to give you equivalent funding.
And if tomorrow somebody comes out with some new synthesis process, and it's not you guys, and then we'll talk about, you know, buying that patent from you too,
we're going to promise to pay you that equivalent amount of money so you can keep on doing all this cool electronic stuff like you've been doing, and we'll spread it out to other manufacturers.
Is that company who did that and bought the patent from karma, a patent troll? They didn't invent the idea, and they didn't manufacture anything.
They bought the patents and implemented it.
And then the last question is, are they a patent troll just because they didn't, they gave them the fixed amount of money, and they said, we'll buy this patent for you for X amount of money.
Stanford and Karma said, great, we like that, we'll sell it to you, and they're not funneling that money back in, they're not, you know, it's a one fixed price.
This is what we think your patent is worth, take it or leave it, karma takes it.
Does that make that other company a patent troll?
All you have when you have a patent is an idea that is a process that you have implemented, and you have the right to say when people are using that process,
or something that is virtually exactly the same process, you can say, okay, I have a patent on that process, you should pay me a royalty, and if they don't feel like paying a royalty to you, or you can't come up to an agreeable sum for that royalty, then you have the right to sue them.
That's it.
And if you can sell that patent to somebody else, and they have the hassle of going out legally and pursuing the patent and protecting that patent, is that a wrong thing to do when you're the inventor?
Somebody has to have rid of it.
Do they have to hassle with the lawyers the entire time?
Are they a patent troll?
Thanks for listening, and of course we'll be talking to you in the future on the next episode of Are You A Patent Troll?
Bye now.
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