I wrote last night about the guys who are suing Facebook, and this morning did some more digging before I left for work. Gary Stewart pretty much hits what I was trying to say spot on with a few choice quotes:
Likewise, if the Winklevoss brothers had paid Zuckerberg for his work -- if he had been their employee -- they would have some claim to it. But given the lack of compensation and/or employee status, Zuckerberg's work all belongs to him.
...
I know that most start-ups think that lawyers are a waste of money, and money is often tight, but as the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In other words, it's better to pay a lawyer a few dollars today, than end up like the Winklevoss brothers, watching a former collaborator make billions of dollars off of your idea.
To paraphrase the judge assigned to the case, "dorm room chit-chat" does not a contract make.
Also, there is serious need for patent reform in this country. The USPTO has a well-documented shortage of qualified examiners, and reported here before, has the very case which many of their questionable "software" or "process patents" are based upon being review by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. For those of you with short memories, NTP, a Virginia company half owned by a dead man which manufactured nothing but applied for a patent on a system for sending email to wireless devices, successfully sued Research In Motion, maker of the ubiquitous BlackBerry device, and won a gigantic judgment from a jury.
Despite the fact that on review, USPTO found the patents to be invalid and obvious, various courts upheld the jury verdict, leading to a massive settlement for NTP, a company which has no products, no employees, no assets except a few pieces of paper in a desk drawer, waiting for someone to come up with a similar idea and do it.
What do the WInklevosses and NTP have in common? They're not do-ers. Mark Zuckerberg and the RIM folks were successful in creating products because they put the time and effort into doing so. The Winklevosses and NTP had ideas, but never put their full force behind them for one reason another, either because it was more important to win rowing races (for the Winklevosses) or because they had other priorities (NTP).
Meanwhile, the U.S. patent system is clogged with inane patent applications for software processes, and things which any idiot could think of in a million different ways. If you invent something new, something real, you patent it. The idea behind patents is to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" by increasing the depth of human knowledge, since if you patent something, it has to be publicly available and other people can build on your design (after paying a fee, of course).
The worst offenders, though, are pharmaceutical companies. For instance, one medication I get prescribed went down in price from $30 (with insurance) to $10 per month, because the patent expired and companies could make "generic" versions. Keep in mind, the manufacturing process may be different, but the chemical formula at the end is the same. I still do not understand how you can patent a chemical. Perhaps a unique method of producing it, but not the final product. What if you owned the patent for a device that traps and kills mice, and I built a better one using a different idea? You could possibly sue me for patent infringement if any part of my idea was similar to your idea, despite the fact that we both do the same thing but reach the goal by different means. So what if we both use a widget?
People should take a look at the patent reform bill currently bottled up in Congress. It would change many of the ways that damages for patent lawsuits are awarded, and not in a good way.
It's Monday. Wake up.
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