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The Solution to the Patent Problem

Today I realized that the solution to the failing patent law system in the US and abroad is not to eliminate patents, or prevent patents in certain areas. Nor is it to have more or better patent examiners, or stricter guidelines for prior art analysis and appeals. No, the solution is to keep the current patent system with one big change: Limit the lifetime of a patent to 5 years instead of 20 years. Secondly limit the lifetime of first continuation patents to 4 years each. Thirdly any further successive continuation patents have a lifetime of 1 year less than the patent continuation they continue. Five years is ample time in this economy for a company to make use of the advantages that a patent gives them in gaining a market foothold. It is fair that the party who invests to develop something should be given the first right to capitalize on it. But after 5 years they should no longer have that protection. The theory is that if they were successful within that 5 year grace period in which they had exclusive rights to the patent, then they will have gained enough competitive advantage and scale to continue being successful without having exclusivity. If they haven't made it to that point in 5 years, then they shouldn't have further exclusivity. This is a better form of natural selection of companies -- it weeds out those organizations that were not successful in monetizing a patent and frees up the knowledge encapsulated by that patent for other parties to utilize. This has the effect of facilitating progress by rewarding successful organizations yet preventing anyone from limiting the spread of knowledge. When the patent system was created the world was slower; 20 years was the time it took to do anything big. Today that time is down to 3 years. So 5 years is generous protection. Another benefit of cutting the lifetime of patents is that even if a bad patent is granted, or a patent is simply taken out to block others, the negative impact of that mistake on society, technological progress and the economy can be quickly expired. The problem is not the idea of intellectual property. Indeed intellectual property rights provide necesssary protection which makes it safe for parties to invest in new ideas. In any ecosystem there must be a way for participants in that ecosystem to compete for resources. But if the ecosystem is structured such that participants can gain unfair advantage that is based not on their adaptive success but rather on an artificial advantage granted from outside the system, this has the effect of amplifying the large players and dampening the small players. In other words such an ecosystem tends to destroy diversity. The diversity of companies, the diversity of ideas, is just as important to the health, prosperity and evolution of societies and economies as biodiversity is to biospheres. Our present patent system promotes cancerous companies when it should be killing them off. Cutting the patent lifetime to 5 years is just what is needed. Even the most malignant companies simply cannot continue to harm the system after 5 years. Ideas are still generally useful in 5 years, at least at this time in history. Thus my proposal strikes a new and healthier balance between intellectual property control and the freedom of knowledge. This is good for society in general, and that is good for the global economy.

Shocking Healing Effect of LED Light on Wounds

Wired reports on a phenomena I found out about quite a while ago. LED light can dramatically decrease wound healing time, and also has interested DNA effects. This is supported by several clinical trials. Nobody knows why it works yet, but the hypothesis is that light may supply extra energy to cellular organelles.

Update from Palo Alto. Plus a Cool new Optical Computing Chip

Sorry it's been a while since I last posted. I've been on the road a lot. Currently I'm in Palo Alto meeting with a number of the top 10 VC firms in the world about what we are doing at Radar Networks. So far the reception has been extremely positive and I am optimistic about what the future holds. I haven't had much time for blogging lately, but I'll get back to it in about a week. In the meantime some interesting news to check out includes a new Israeli optical supercomputing board that does 8 trillion operations per second and is about the size of a Palm Pilot and is about 1000 times faster than today's chips. Wow. I want one. Here's the info...

New Way to Generate Electricity, Using Water!

After 160 years the first new technology to generate electricity has been announced. A novel nanotechnology technique for generating electricity has been discovered. It uses the movement of ordinary water! This could be a revolution.

Is the Universe Tiled Up Like a Soccer Ball?

More on the big news today -- scientists hypothesize that the shape of space-time resembles that of a soccer ball. But wait -- this brings up several BIG questions. First of all are they claiming that only SPACE is wrapped back on itself, or SPACE and TIME??? To understand the significance of this question consider this example. If space wraps back on itself, then if you travel far enough in any direction you will eventually get back to where you started from. The same is true for TIME. If time wraps back on itself like this, then the distant future is also your distant PAST!!! This leads to a lot of problems with the nature of causality: if the future actually causes the past, then what causes the present??? Yikes! Here's another conjecture: If indeed the universe is a sphere made of tiled pentagons, is there anything different about the regions of space-time on the edges of the individual tiles, or at their intersections? Perhaps this might explain black holes or other anomalies -- I wonder whether the distribution of black holes, pulsars or quasars can be mapped onto this model -- that might lead to some discoveries about the actual role that black holes play in the universe -- for example, we might find that black holes are always located at or near the intersection points in space-time.

Secrecy Orders on Private Inventors Rise

This just in from [email protected] -- a list that tracks secrecy in government ---

ORDERS IMPOSED ON PRIVATE INVENTORS RISE

Over the past year, 133 secrecy orders were imposed on new patent applications, limiting or preventing their disclosure on grounds that they could be "detrimental to the national security." More than half of the new orders affected private inventors who developed their inventions without government funding or support.

The legal authority for patent secrecy orders derives from the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, which provides for government review of patent applications related to a wide range of military technologies, and authorizes the government to regulate or prevent their disclosure.

At the end of fiscal year 2003, there were a total of 4,838 secrecy orders still in effect, according to statistics released this week by the Patent and Trademark Office under the Freedom of Information Act.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/invention/stats.html

The Invention Secrecy Act and the Atomic Energy Act are the only statutes that assert a government right to prevent the publication of privately-generated information, a provision that appears to be at odds with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Secrecy orders imposed on such private inventors are termed "John Doe" orders. Last year, an unusually large 75 of the 133 new secrecy orders were John Doe orders. The nature of these secret inventions could not, of course, be ascertained.

Further information on the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, including the declassified 1971 edition of the "patent security category review list" (newly posted) which defines the technology areas subject to patent secrecy, may be found
here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/invention/index.html

Aliens in Gemini?

Scientists are focusing their search for extraterrestrial life on the Gemini system. Cool; I'm a Gemini. I've always felt a bit like an alien too. Maybe that explains it?

Is Reality Really Real? The Late Philosopher Donald Davidson's Problematic Answer...

Here's an article about an interesting modern theory that purports to "prove" that "reality" is not just an illusion. It's a bit of a complicated appeal to the basis of language, but makes some good points. However, I think there may be a fundamental flaw at the very root of the argument.

Strange New Evidence That Universe is Finite

Does the universe loop back on itself? Is the universe laid out like a computer game? Read this article citing new evidence and experiments into the shape of space and time.

Ya, Looks Like It's The Governator...

Yah, Ahnold wins in California. Yah, He is now the Governator, yah. What is this world coming to, yah?

Using Quantum Entanglement to Make Quantum Holograms of Hidden Things...

This is really cool -- the idea is to use quantum entanglement to make holograms of things that cannot be seen easily. For example, suppose you have a sphere with a tiny hole in it. You create a pair of entangled laser beams -- one goes into the sphere and bounces around. The other remains outside the sphere and is used to produce a hologram of what the beam that is inside the sphere encounters. In other words, even though the light from the beam inside the sphere never comes back out of the sphere, we can image what it "sees" in there using the external beam (because the external beam is locked into quantum entanglement with the inner beam). For more on this read this article

Raising Funds for Breast Cancer Research ... Using a New Stamp!

I received this in email today -- it's a really cool idea. The US Postal Service plans to release a new stamp that is just a few cents more expensive than normal. The extra pennies will go to raise $35,000,000 for breast cancer research. This is really smart. I would pay a few cents extra per stamp to fund charities, I bet everyone would. Very good idea. Here is the text...