Am 02.09.2021 um 16:21 schrieb Stefan Stenzel:> Reasons for a patent: > - trolling > - defense against trolls > - big patent portfolio to make company look good > - protection of original ideas
If I had to guess, it is point 2 (defense) which actually is many companys' reaction point 1. During my everyday work (signal processing hardware prototypes for new devices and methodes) I constantly experience that for long existing developments, which are apparently established, an objection comes from somewhere from a non-producing company, which conjures a patent out of the hat, where one wonders who waved it through at the patent office. Often enough, it is a newly founded company that has been given money by a competitor to hinder my customer because he has the better technology and they don't see any other chance to keep their stuff in the market. Especially in the USA, it seems to have become a sport to found troll companies. There are entire law firms that explain to the companies how best to do this. I remember around 2011 there was once a patent of a lawyer who wanted to patent the idea to build an audio platform by combining DSPs and FPGAs, and wasn't there somebody who wanted to patent Linux? The consequence is that out of the fear of being attacked, everything and anything that is somehow new is patented. And yes, there is also point 3: You patent every crumb in the patent pool that you use together with your competitors, just to keep the compensation payments low. I recently stumbled across a patent from one of my customer's competitors that patented image storage on SD card on this class of device. (These devices didn't do that until now, but you saved data with a video grabber when you needed it). Well what we simply did it to use a built in mpeg decoder of the ultrascale and used it as intended. They had seen this on ours, incorporated it on theirs as well, and quickly filed it as "new" with the European Patent Office. Great. But the only thing they achieve with this is to make themselves untrustworthy. Point 4, "protection of original ideas" is best done that way that really interesting methods, formulas and algorithms or the way a device works in detail are not published at all, but directly packaged as an implementation in the programmable hardware. The military companies only work this way and for others I recommend it to do so. One can then relax and wait until some institute of a university comes up with the idea during research work and submits it. They can then first look for which device is already doing this worldwide. If something comes up, you show the "inventor" the operating instructions, in which the function is already (hidden) explained and described. We had that several times :-)
