Planet Money did a great episode on this patent, using it to talk about the state of the patent system in general: <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/31/187374157/episode-462-when-patents-hit-the-podcast" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/31/187374157/episode-...</a><p>It has interviews with the patent holder, and it's amazing to hear his perspective. (Which I do not agree with.)
Patent systems are definitely broken. I think that’s the conclusion of most neutral observers starting fresh and that digging past the purely abstract or ideological level. The reason it’s hard to do something about is that patents are property and the legal setup for property is foundational to an economy.<p>Patents are absolutely fundamental to the way medical research works today, especially the search for new treatments and medicines. That’s a tricky thing to mess around with. There are obvious problems. There are speculations about what fixing them could yield on one hand. In the other hand is a massive industry producing a lot of technology, science and actual treatments for diseases.<p>What seems (to me) to be missing in these debates is some humility about knowing the answers. While our culture is speeding through “movements” at a higher rate than ever before, we still tend to approach these big political/philosophical/economic issues with an early modern/modernist perspective. Our most popular philosophers for these matters are old dead guys who liked to think of big organic things like society and civilization in terms of how we should set things up if we had snapped into existence today, a clean slate. That’s a fairly pompous perspective.<p>In any case, I think the patents and intellectual property problem is a very tricky one to solve. Experiment with possible solutions is almost impossible. IP legally mimics regular property in a metaphor-like way. That metaphor is proving increasingly inaccurate. At the same time, we have huge pieces of our economy and whatnot built on it. At the same time our legal systems are showing signs that they might need a reimagining. Many of our legal constructs such as ‘legal entity’ or ‘jurisdiction’ are being pushed to extremes, and metaphors eventually break. Does the concept of a company legally approximating a person hold up when we have impenetrable layers of ownership across jurisdictions? Does the metaphor fray?
The fact this patent was granted in the first place seems completely absurd. But then again, we live in a world where Boeing has a patent on certain trajectories that use the moon's gravity (<a href="http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US6116545" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US6116545</a>), so it shouldn't really surprise me.
> Personal Audio continues to seek patents related to podcasting.<p>It's unfortunate that the Patent Office can't ban trolls who have abused the system.
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When a patent gets overturned, can those who already paid license royalties typically sue the patent holder to get their money back? (I know that the entity can file bankruptcy, so the chance of getting money is slim). Or do the license agreements typically include a clause that money is not refundable if the patent is invalidated?<p>Or, even worse, do license agreements typically include language that says the licensee agrees to continue to pay royalties even if the patent is later found to be invalid? I can see someone being strong armed into signing an agreement like that.
the USPTO is a laughing stock, they should consider some serious reform quickly or just being completely disbanded. they serve no valuable purpose other than to retard the whole of society for the future as far as i can tell...