Patent Hypocrisy (and a proposed solution)

Check out this excellent short piece by Philip Elmer-DeWitt on the patent war heating up between Apple and Google (via Daring Fireball). Here's the gist:

The difference is that Apple actually invented the technology it accused HTC — and by proxy, Google — of “stealing”.... One of the patents Apple cited in its 2010 suit...is a 358-page document signed by Jobs himself that covers everything from the way a finger touches the screen of a smartphone to the heuristics that turn those touches into commands.

HTC and Google, by contrast, are accusing Apple (whose smartphone designs they have plainly copied) of violating patents they bought fourth or fifth hand.

"Patents were meant to encourage innovation," Google's chief legal counsel David Drummond wrote last month in his famous open letter "When Patents Attack Android." Google's enemies, he complained, were using "bogus" patents to try to "strangle" Android.

"Fortunately," he added, "the law frowns on the accumulation of dubious patents for anti-competitive means."

Indeed.

The endless repackaging and trading of patents has had a disruptive and distortional effect on the tech sector (much like derivatives re: the financial sector). What if law were changed so patent ownership could be transferred only once? Inventors ought to be able to sell their inventions, but further resale drifts society further and further from the original impetus of patent law...while stifling innovation and competition.

It strikes me as high time that we firmed up intellectual property rights for those who actually innovate, and stripped them entirely from litigious trolls.

The Frank Zappa Cafe (sic)

I'm staying two blocks from a place called the Frank Zappa Cafe here in Budapest. Having been a Zappa fan since high school, I've been in such a trembling state of awe and excitement that I waited a few days before making my first pilgrimage, to be certain I was fully primed for the head rush. One part of the overall superior culturedness of Eastern and Central Europe is the fact that there's always been a strong undercurrent of Zappa fans here. And Hungary is somewhat outside the reach of most intellectual property actions, hence the continued existence of this Cafe in spite of Frank's widow's notorious tightness with the trademark.

Well, it's 11pm, and I just walked over. The well-lit room was filled with well-groomed yuppie couples sitting at nice blonde wood tables. Some music was playing over the sound system, too soft and too tinny to identify (though it may well have been Zappa). No jukebox full of bootlegs, no Zappa connection whatsoever aside from a pretty poor mural of the original Mothers of Invention painted on an interior wall, which I imagined to be decorated with potted ferns.

I headed to the bar, were the vacant-eyed server told me to sit at the tables, because the bar, with three stools, isn't "nice". So I sat down at a large table table for four, reached for what I assumed to be the drinks menu, and found myself staring, instead, at a shiny card listing peppy-sounding Bailey's-branded drinks. Because, after all, what says Frank Zappa like a Bailey's Latte?

I fled, and am still rattled and traumatized as I write this.