Educators may have limited awareness of the patent battles that now plague technology industries. Everyone seems to be suing everyone. Educators are more likely to be aware of copyright. They tend to understand that the whole sale duplication of content generated by someone else (music, text, video, images) is prohibited. What you may also recognize is what you can do. Perhaps you have heard this described as you cannot copyright an idea. Hence, you cannot copy and distribute what I have written, but you can identify key ideas in what I write and express them in your own words.
The problem with patents appears that you can protect an idea and the idea can be expressed in vague terms. A great piece on this problem has been generated by This American Life (listen or read). The concern is that common functionality of most Internet and phone functionality is described in these general patents even though a general function can be accomplished in many different concrete ways (kind of the opposite of copyright). Supposed to be a breakthrough and not necessarily a common sense good idea. Supposed to be. In other words, an invention and a patent are not necessarily the same thing. For example you might be surprised to learn that a 2000 patent for thermal refreshing of a bread product could also be described as “toasting” or perhaps “microwaving” (an example provided the This American Life). Clearly, multiple ways for refreshing a bread product predated the patent.
That battles among major companies further complicate the patent problem in a different way. They did not necessarily contest a given patent but purchase a huge collection of patents themselves in order to attack any company willing to challenge what they are doing by claiming the complaining company violates a different patent that they hold. It is not even about attempting to get to the point of understanding true ownership, but a threatened battle of attrition that mostly benefits lawyers and mostly fought based on the patent portfolios of the various companies. This situation is sometimes referred to as “mutually assured destruction”. So, with many ambiguous patents that can be picked up by the thousands if you have billions, you can basically keep the other big companies at arm’s length, but threaten or force any small company out of business.
It is pretty difficult to interpret this situation as protecting the rights of inventors, bettering the economy, or assuring that consumers have access to the best products and services possible. Like the lack of regulation that led to the recent stock market and banking crisis, this seems to be a failure of oversight that would seem best placed under the control of the government. There appear to be secondary businesses that built on the need to protect the legitimate rights of inventors but rather function primarily to take advantage of broad patents to make money for the companies rather than the inventors.
Example of technology patent battles
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