Patents – Page 2 – artdiamondblog.com

Serendipity May Be Source of 50% of Patents

(p. 1) A surprising number of the conveniences of modern life were invented when someone stumbled upon a discovery or capitalized on an accident: the microwave oven, safety glass, smoke detectors, artificial sweeteners, (p. 4) X-ray imaging. Many blockbuster drugs of the 20th century emerged because a lab worker picked up on the “wrong” information.
. . .
(p. 5) So how many big ideas emerge from spills, crashes, failed experiments and blind stabs? One survey of patent holders (the PatVal study of European inventors, published in 2005) found that an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process. Thousands of survey respondents reported that their idea evolved when they were working on an unrelated project — and often when they weren’t even trying to invent anything. This is why we need to know far more about the habits that transform a mistake into a breakthrough.
. . .
A number of pioneering scholars have already begun this work, but they seem to be doing so in their own silos and without much cross-talk. In a 2005 paper (“Serendipitous Insights Involving Nonhuman Primates”), two experts from the Washington National Primate Research Center in Seattle cataloged the chance encounters that yielded new insights from creatures like the pigtail macaque. Meanwhile, the authors of a paper titled “On the Exploitation of Serendipity in Drug Discovery” puzzled over the reasons the 1950s and ’60s saw a bonanza of breakthroughs in psychiatric medication, and why that run of serendipity ended.

For the full commentary, see:
PAGAN KENNEDY. “How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JAN. 3, 2016): 1 & 4-5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JAN. 2, 2016, and has the title “Cultivating the Art of Serendipity.”)

Pagan’s commentary is based on her book:
Kennedy, Pagan. Inventology: How We Dream up Things That Change the World. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2016.

Marie Curie Opposed Patents Because Women Could Not Own Property in France

(p. C6) Ms. Wirtén, a professor at Linköping University in Sweden, pays special attention to the decision not to patent and how it was treated in the founding texts of the Curie legend: Curie’s 1923 biography of her husband, “Pierre Curie,” and their daughter Eve’s 1937 biography of her mother, “Madame Curie.” The books each recount a conversation in which husband and wife agree that patenting their radium method would be contrary to the spirit of science.
It is not quite that simple. As Ms. Wirtén points out, the Curies derived a significant portion of their income from Pierre’s patents on instruments. Various factors besides beneficence could have affected their decision not to extend this approach to their radium process. Intriguingly, the author suggests that the ineligibility of women to own property under French law might have shaped Curie’s perspective. “Because the law excluded her from the status of person upon which these intellectual property rights depend,” Ms. Wirtén writes, “the ‘property’ road was closed to Marie Curie. The persona road was not.”

For the full review, see:
EVAN HEPLER-SMITH. “Scientific Saint; After scandals in France, Curie was embraced by American women as an intellectual icon.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 21, 2015): C6.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 20, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs. Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

A Swift Defense of Property Rights

(p. B1) When Taylor Swift speaks, even the most powerful company in the world listens.
Less than 24 hours after Ms. Swift complained publicly that Apple was not planning to pay royalties during a three-month trial period of its new streaming music service, the company changed course, and confirmed that it will pay its full royalty rates for music during the free trial.
“When I woke up this morning and read Taylor’s note, it really solidified that we need to make a change,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services, said in an interview late Sunday.
. . .
Ms. Swift, who last year pulled her music from Spotify in another dispute over royalties, called Apple’s policy “shocking, disappointing and completely unlike this historically progressive company.”
“We don’t ask you for free iPhones,” she added. “Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.”
. . .
(p. B5) Ms. Swift has long been outspoken on economic issues for musicians. In a piece in The Wall Street Journal last year, she wrote: “Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free.”

For the full story, see:
BEN SISARIO. “Taylor Swift Criticism Spurs Apple to Change Royalties Policy.” The New York Times (Sat., JUNE 22, 2015): B1 & B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the date of the online version of the story is JUNE 21, 2015, and has the title “Taylor Swift Criticism Spurs Apple to Change Royalties Policy.”)

Having Your Intellectual Property Stolen, Modifies Your Views on Piracy

(p. C18) Dear Dan,
My nephew has been downloading music and movies illegally from the Internet. Without sounding self-righteous, how can I get him to respect intellectual-property rights?
–Patricia
My own view on illegal downloads was deeply modified the day that my book on dishonesty was published–when I learned that it had been illegally downloaded more than 20,000 times from one overseas website. (The irony did not escape me.) My advice? Get your nephew to create something and then, without his knowing, put it online and download it many, many times. I suspect that will make it much harder for him to keep up his blithe attitude toward piracy.

For the full advice column by Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at Duke , see:
DAN ARIELY. “ASK ARIELY; It’s Risky to Rely on Retirement Questionnaires.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 23, 2015): C18.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the advice column has the date May 22, 2015.)

Hamilton Fostered the Preconditions for Capitalism

(p. 345) In a nation of self-made people, Hamilton became an emblematic figure because he believed that government ought to promote self-fulfillment, self-improvement, and self-reliance. His own life offered an extraordinary object lesson in social mobility, and his unstinting energy illustrated his devout belief in the salutary power of work to develop people’s minds and bodies. As treasury secretary, he wanted to make room for entrepreneurs, whom he regarded as the motive force of the economy. Like Franklin, he intuited America’s special genius for business: “As to whatever may depend on enterprise, we need not fear to be outdone by any people on earth. It may almost be said that enterprise is our element.”
Hamilton did not create America’s market economy so much as foster the cultural and legal setting in which it flourished. A capitalist society requires certain preconditions. Among other things, it must establish a rule of law through enforceable contracts; respect private property; create a trustworthy bureaucracy to arbitrate legal disputes; and offer patents and other protections to promote invention. The abysmal failure of the Articles of Confederation to provide such an atmosphere was one of Hamilton’s principal motives for promoting the Constitution. “It is known,” he wrote, “that the relaxed conduct of the state governments in regard to property and credit was one of the most serious diseases under which the body politic laboured prior to the adoption of our present constitution and was a material cause of that state of public opinion which led to its adoption.” He converted the new Constitution into a flexible instrument for creating the legal framework necessary for economic growth. He did this by activating three still amorphous clauses–the necessary-and-proper clause, the general-welfare clause, and the commerce clause–making them the basis for government activism in economics.

Source:
Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.

U.S. Patents and Start-Ups Fall When We Exclude Tech Immigrants

(p. A19) The process of bringing skilled immigrants to the U.S. via H-1B visas and putting them on the path to eventual citizenship has been a political football for at least a decade. It has long been bad news for those immigrants trapped in this callous process. Now the U.S. economy is beginning to suffer, too.
Every year, tens of thousands of disappointed tech workers and other professionals give up while waiting for a resident visa or green card, and go home–having learned enough to start companies that compete with their former U.S. employers. The recent historic success of China’s Alibaba IPO is a reminder that a new breed of companies is being founded, and important innovation taking place, in other parts of the world. More than a quarter of all patents filed today in the U.S. bear the name of at least one foreign national residing here.
The U.S. no longer has a monopoly on great startups. In the past, the best and brightest people would come to the U.S., but now they are staying home. In Silicon Valley, according to a 2012 survey by Duke and Stanford Universities and the University of California at Berkeley, the percentage of new companies started by foreign-born entrepreneurs has begun to slide for the first time–down to 43.9% during 2006-12, from 52.4% during 1995-2005.

For the full commentary, see:
MICHAEL S. MALONE. “OPINION; The Self-Inflicted U.S. Brain Drain; Up to 1.5 million skilled workers are stuck in immigration limbo. Many give up and go home.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., OCT. 16, 2014): A19.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 15, 2014.)

The 2012 survey is discussed further in:
Wadhwa, Vivek, AnnaLee Saxenian, and F. Daniel Siciliano. “Then and Now: America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Part VII.” Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, October 2012.

An in-depth discussion of the issues raised by Malone can be found in:
Wadhwa, Vivek. The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent. pb ed. Philadelphia, PA: Wharton Digital Press, 2012.

Predictors of Technological Doom Have “All Been Wrong”

Source of graph: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 4) JUST over 50 years ago, the cover of Life magazine breathlessly declared the “point of no return for everybody.” Above that stark warning, a smaller headline proclaimed, “Automation’s really here; jobs go scarce.”
As events unfolded, it was Life that was nearing the point of no return — the magazine suspended weekly publication in 1972. For the rest of America, jobs boomed; in the following decade, 21 million Americans were added to the employment rolls.
Throughout history, aspiring Cassandras have regularly proclaimed that new waves of technological innovation would render huge numbers of workers idle, leading to all manner of economic, social and political disruption.
As early as 1589, Queen Elizabeth I refused a patent on a knitting machine for fear it would put “my poor subjects” out of work.
In the 1930s, the great John Maynard Keynes predicted widespread job losses “due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”
So far, of course, they’ve all been wrong. But that has not prevented a cascade of shrill new proclamations that — notwithstanding centuries of history — “this time is different”: . . .

For the full commentary, see:
Steven Rattner. “Fear Not the Coming of the Robots.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JUNE 22, 2014): 4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 21, 2014.)

Open Source Guru Admits to “Mismatched Incentives” and “Serious Trouble Down the Road”

“Eric S. Raymond said that the code-checking system had failed in the case of Heartbleed.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) SAN FRANCISCO — The Heartbleed bug that made news last week drew attention to one of the least understood elements of the Internet: Much of the invisible backbone of websites from Google to Amazon to the Federal Bureau of Investigation was built by volunteer programmers in what is known as the open-source community.

Heartbleed originated in this community, in which these volunteers, connected over the Internet, work together to build free software, to maintain and improve it and to look for bugs. Ideally, they check one another’s work in a peer review system similar to that found in science, or at least on the nonprofit Wikipedia, where motivated volunteers regularly add new information and fix others’ mistakes.
This process, advocates say, ensures trustworthy computer code.
But since the Heartbleed flaw got through, causing fears — as yet unproved — of widespread damage, members of that world are questioning whether the system is working the way it should.
“This bug was introduced two years ago, and yet nobody took the time to notice it,” said Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University. “Everybody’s job is not anybody’s job.”
. . .
(p. B2) Unlike proprietary software, which is built and maintained by only a few employees, open-source code like OpenSSL can be vetted by programmers the world over, advocates say.
“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” is how Eric S. Raymond, one of the elders of the open-source movement, put it in his 1997 book, “The Cathedral & the Bazaar,” a kind of manifesto for open-source philosophy.
In the case of Heartbleed, though, “there weren’t any eyeballs,” Mr. Raymond said in an interview this week.
. . .
The problem, Mr. Raymond and other open-source advocates say, boils down to mismatched incentives. Mr. Raymond said firms don’t maintain OpenSSL code because they don’t profit directly from it, even though it is integrated into their products, and governments don’t feel political pain when the code has problems.
With OpenSSL, by contrast, “for those that do work on this, there’s no financial support, no salaries, no health insurance,” Mr. Raymond said. “They either have to live like monks or work nights and weekends. That is a recipe for serious trouble down the road.”

For the full story, see:
Perlroth, Nicole. “A Contradiction at the Heart of the Web.” The New York Times (Sat., April 19, 2014): B1 & B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was updated APRIL 18, 2014, and has the title “Heartbleed Highlights a Contradiction in the Web.”)

Raymond’s open source manifesto is:
Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1999.

Open Source Heartbleed Bug Sends Internet “into a Panic”

Opponents of patents often point to the open source movement as an alternative. The Heartbleed bug illustrates a big downside to open source:

(p. B1) The encryption flaw that punctured the heart of the Internet this week underscores a weakness in Internet security: A good chunk of it is managed by four European coders and a former military consultant in Maryland.

Most of the 11-member team are volunteers; only one works full time. Their budget is less than $1 million a year. The Heartbleed bug, revealed Monday, was the product of a fluke introduced by a young German researcher.
. . .
The OpenSSL Project was founded in 1998 to create a free set of encryption tools that has since been adopted by two-thirds of Web servers. Websites, network-equipment companies and governments use OpenSSL tools to protect personal and other sensitive information online.
So when researchers at Google Inc. and Codenomicon on Monday stated that Heartbleed could allow hackers to steal such data, the Internet went into a panic.
. . .
(p. B3) Earlier in the day, a German volunteer coder admitted that he had unintentionally introduced the bug on New Year’s Eve 2011 while working on bug fixes for OpenSSL. . . .
Errors in complex code are inevitable–Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc. and Google announce flaws monthly. But people close to OpenSSL, which relies in part on donations, say a lack of funding and manpower exacerbated the problem and allowed it to go unnoticed for two years.
. . .
The OpenSSL Project counts a sole full-time developer: Stephen Henson, a 46-year-old British cryptographer with a Ph.D. in mathematics. Two other U.K. residents and a developer in Germany fill out the project’s management team.
Associates describe Mr. Henson as brilliant but standoffish and overloaded with work.
. . .
Geoffrey Thorpe, an OpenSSL volunteer on the development team, said he has little time to spend on the project because of his day job at a hardware technology company.

For the full story, see:
DANNY YADRON. “Internet Security Relies on Very Few.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 12, 2014): B1 & B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 11, 2014, and has the title “TECHNOLOGY; Heartbleed Bug’s ‘Voluntary’ Origins; Internet Security Relies on a Small Team of Coders, Most of Them Volunteers; Flaw Was a Fluke.”)

Patent Trial and Appeal Board May Be Invalidating Low Quality Patents

One of the common complaints about the U.S. patent system for the past couple of decades is that the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has been approving too many low quality patents, that are then used by patent holders to extort licensing fees or out-or-court settlements from alleged infringers. One way in which the America Invents Act, signed in September 2011, tried to respond to the complaint was to strengthen the post-approval re-examination process for patents. The article quoted below suggests that the strengthened process may be having the intended effect.

(p. B4) The Patent Trial and Appeal Board is a little known but powerful authority that often allows a company embroiled in a lawsuit to skip the question of whether it infringed a patent–and challenge whether the patent should have been issued in the first place.

The board was launched in September 2012 as part of the massive patent overhaul passed by Congress the previous year and is currently staffed by 181 judges, many of whom have deep experience in intellectual property or technical fields like chemical and electrical engineering. Through last Thursday it had received 1,056 requests to challenge patents, far more than were received by any federal court over the same time period.
The board is part of the Patent and Trademark Office. But so far, it hasn’t shied away from upending the office’s decisions to issue certain patents. As of last week, the board had issued 25 written decisions concerning patent challenges, and upheld parts of challenged patents in only a few of them.
. . .
In recent months, Randall Rader, the chief judge of the Federal Circuit, has been one of the board’s most outspoken critics. At a conference of intellectual-property lawyers last fall, the judge called the board’s panels “death squads…killing property rights.”
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Rader said the board is too quick to toss out patents that demonstrate only modest innovation. “The board needs to incentivize human progress–and understand that it often happens one small step at a time,” he said.
But many company lawyers think the board is doing exactly as it should–taking a skeptical look at patents that have added little to the world.

For the full story, see:
ASHBY JONES. “New Weapon in Intellectual Property Wars; Panel Can Upend Patent Decisions, but Some Say It Goes Too Far; ‘Like Getting CAT-Scanned, MRI-ed, and X-Rayed’.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., March 11, 2014): B4.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs, added; ellipsis inside paragraph, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 10, 2014, and has the title “A New Weapon in Corporate Patent Wars; Patent Trial and Appeal Board Can Upend PTO Decisions, but Some Say It Goes Too Far.”)