I was reading this article from Mark Cuban, and honestly I don’t quite understand what it’s about, but here’s a question:
What if patents were granted with a stipulation: they must be licensable on a percentage-of-profits basis with some reasonable maximum. Say 30%, like Apple is taking for app store sales.
This would mean that we could still get patents for valuable technology that would guarantee wealth for the original inventors, but allow any startup a fair shot at profiting from them as well. We could also add a non-stacking resolution for it: if I’m building off thirty Microsoft patents, they’re still entitled only to 30% of my profits. If Microsft, Apple, and Google all want to sue me, I must be doing something right. They can all split the 30%. This would also cause dramatically different ROI calculations on the kind of litigation used to enforce these sorts of patents.
Ultimately, it may not be possible to make patents work in the lightspeed technology industry. But maybe this would be a better and more palatable compromise than what we have now.