Rambus: Most mobile phones use memory interfaces that infringe on our patents

[arjan de lumens]

Indeed it is quite pathetic, information should be free, we should give credit where it is due, but we should encourage information to be freely used and shared.

It's just BS that if I discover something in parallel or even later on my own, that I've somehow infringed on someone else's discovery, just plain BS. They're called inventions, but from what we now know, they're more like discoveries.

One possible way to patch the patent system could be to introduce a rule such that if one person makes a patent claim but the idea he tries to patent is published or attempted patented by someone else before his patent application becomes public knowledge, the patent should be auto-rejected. Without such a patch, it is in fact IMPOSSIBLE to know whether your new idea is going to be blocked by someone else's patent, introducing substantial risk to every player in every market where innovation happens.

However, even with such a patch, you have only reduced the effort of establishing non-infringement from 'theoretically impossible' to 'insanely cumbersome', and the situation still remains that if I write 100 lines of code, I might very well have to spend 100x more time on cross-checking it against other people's patents than I actually spent on the code itself.

Even still, what I have mentioned here are merely practical considerations; there are a whole bunch of ideological arguments to make in either direction as well here, most of which I will leave to others. It's a bit interesting to observe that the process of innovation in a competitive landscape looks like it must end up in Prisoner's Dilemma both with and without a patent system in place (for the Dilemma, if you don't have a patent system, you "defect" by grabbing other's ideas; if you do have a patent system, you "defect" by patenting ideas that others need.)