经济学人下载:创智财富,专利之争更猛烈更烧钱

What is going on? Some say companies are attaching more value to intellectual property. Indeed, the Google deal seems to have been priced on a cost-per-patent basis, causing the share prices of other firms with lots of patents to rise. Others, however, think the battles reflect deficiencies in the patent system forcing firms to pay vast sums to protect technologies they have developed. The answer is a bit of both.

接下来还将发生什么呢？有人说企业将继续注重知识产权的价值。此外，谷歌的收购案似乎还提高了每单个专利的平均价格，引起其它拥有大量专利权企业的股价提高。总之，其它企业考虑专利之争的缺点了——迫使企业支付大量的资金去保护自主技术。答案是各自有点。

System failure 整体失败

Kent Walker, one of Google’s senior lawyers, grouses at being forced to spend a lot of money defending the company against frivolous lawsuits by rivals. Others counter that as computing goes mobile, it favours information-technology firms that have invested in research for years and that Google was naive—or idealistic—to broaden its IT business without having a stack of patents. There is a retort to that, too: that incumbents can use patents as barriers to entry, which is why America’s antitrust regulators are showing interest in them. In April the Department of Justice demanded changes to Novell’s patent sale to protect open-source software.

谷歌的一个资深律师肯特沃克尔抱怨针对不必要的法律诉讼，将花去更多的资金捍卫其企业权利。其它的反对声音认为随着计算机的移动性能提升，这将有助于那些投资于研究多年的信息技术企业的发展，并使得没有大量专利权的谷歌在拓展IT业务时显得缺乏经验和空想主义。这里也有反驳他们的意见：行业主导者可以像跨越障碍一样使用专利，这也是为什么美国反垄断监管机构对专利之争很感兴趣的原因。四月，司法部为了开源软件，要求诺勒改变专利权销售政策。

Nowadays, innovations in IT usually rely on many small improvements involving numerous technologies, which means it is not always clear precisely which inventions a patent covers. The open secret is that everyone infringes everyone else’s patents in some way. This creates an incentive for firms to build up their patent portfolios to strengthen their position in negotiations, leading to what some liken to an arms race. The legal tussles usually end in cross-licensing deals, in which small sums of money change hands. This is considered preferable to a mutually destructive exchange of endless lawsuits.

现在，IT创新通常基于很小但包含大量技术的改善，这意味着这些专利权不总是恰如其分的明确，所以大量的创新总是被同一个专利涉及。公开的秘密是每一个人都在以某种方式侵害每一个人的专利权。这形成了企业建立他们自己的专利资产组合的激励——类似于军备竞赛——使得其在谈判中取得有利地位。这种合法的争议通常以相互授权的方式结束，其中还有少量资金的转手。这比相互毁灭性无休止法律诉讼更可取。

The patent battle has become more contentious than ever. One reason is the mobile phone has provided a new platform of computing that firms want to dominate. Also, such a backlog of applications built up at America’s patent office (now more than 1m, with a waiting time of around three years) that standards slipped. Dubious patents were granted, helped in part by court rulings that allowed patents to stand on some software and “business methods” that many thought no one could lay claim to. In Europe and Japan, where patentability standards are higher, this is less of a problem.

专利之争也逐渐变得更具争议。其中之一的理由是手机提供了一个崭新的被各个企业虎视眈眈的计算机平台。此外，在美国专利办公室内，积压的申请（大约100万件，积压了大约三年）将在新标准下逐渐获得通过。得力于允许某些软件和商业模式取得专利的法庭裁决，不靠谱的专利还在增长。许多人认为这类不应该获得专利。在专利的标准更高的欧洲和日本，很少类似问题的发生。