In an interview last we he stated that his next company would be vertical take off supersonic electric jet, if he decided to start another company. He said he's not likely to start another company any time soon.
I really don't understand what you're advocating or what mechanism you hope to develop.
You basically want to put out bounties for law firms to take cases against patents? What patents would they target? What adversarial setting would they defend / attack patents in? Couldn't this result in a race to the bottom about what things people want in the public domain - ie. a bunch of people petitioning to have a law firm attack Amazon's One-Click patent? Basically if someone made something desirable enough, then an efficient market would funnel enough money into trumping their patent through your concept, destroying whatever incentive the company had to make something valuable.
I could be off on what your suggesting, so i apologize.
While there are lots of flaws & advantages in the patent system, one major opinion I have is that there should be some sort of use/active-pursue requirement. Ie. you can't claim property ownership over an idea unless you're actively putting it into product / trying to figure out how. Or maybe a shorter length of the patent (ie. 5/10 years), unless you're actively pursuing it.
This would be similar to adjustments in other types of property law. Ie. a lot of property law is based on incentives to define ownership / acquisition in a means that most benefits society. For example in the old property case Brazelton, they didn't award ownership to the person who found a sunk ship & squatted on it, but rather awarded ownership to the person who came later but actually had the technology to lift it.
"Couldn't this result in a race to the bottom about what things people want in the public domain - ie. a bunch of people petitioning to have a law firm attack Amazon's One-Click patent? Basically if someone made something desirable enough, then an efficient market would funnel enough money into trumping their patent through your concept, destroying whatever incentive the company had to make something valuable."
I see absolutely no problem with this. If the patent is defensible, then no amount of law firm action or monetary incentive should make any difference in removing the patent. Most software patents are probably indefensible which does already say a lot about software patents.
Calling for changes to patent law is where I don't understand what you're hoping to accomplish. If there was going to be any change, it would already have happened.
> Calling for changes to patent law is where I don't understand what you're hoping to accomplish. If there was going to be any change, it would already have happened.
If true, that's a pretty depressing statement, however, it sounds like fallacious reasoning to me. Just because the law hasn't changed yet doesn't mean that things are doomed to stay this way forever.
The problem is that everyone with enough economic or political power to do something about the patent situation has a strong incentive to preserve the status quo, because they benefit from the competitive barrier large patent arsenals create just as much.
So no one wants to touch on meaningful reform, because that would blow up just as many of their own patents. Even companies that claim to amass patents purely for defensive purposes have this incentive.
There's also an agency problem. To fight patents you need patent lawyers, but patent lawyers have a strong incentive to expand the volume of patent litigation. It's like asking why the NYSE doesn't implement one of the simple solutions that would stop HFT: they're getting a cut on the volume of trades, so they don't care at all how decoupled from economic reality trading becomes.
A problem I see is that companies would have to spend time defending legitimate patents just because consumers want the technology to become widely available. The scheme could cause business to waste money litigating defensible patents just because there's enough stir / money behind advocacy for opening up the idea.
I would say that the burden of proof, and accompanying legal defense costs, should rest with those who seek a state-backed monopoly of an idea, rather than with patent "infringers" as it is now.
If it's a legitimate patent, it's likely to hold up, and/or be seen as too tough of a target, and so be seen as a waste of resources to go after.
My argument is based on the premise that most software patents are bad for our economy.
Amazon's One-Click patent is a perfect example. Amazon would have developed one-click whether or not it was patentable. By granting the patent, we granted Amazon a monopoly and didn't get anything in return.
I LOVE the shorter patent idea - particularly for software patents. It wouldn't work for pharma, but that's okay.
The monopoly is supposed to be compensation for disclosing how the invention works, not merely creating it. If one-click were so amazingly hard that nobody else could have done it for another twenty years, we might have derived some benefit. But when any of us could do the same in hours, the patent is merely obfuscated drivel.
I like the use / active-pursue requirement except it seems nearly impossible to enforce. A patent troll could easily spend money to look like they're trying to use a patent.
Doubt it's about his talent (even though he is very talented). Think it's more of a PR move. It'd look pretty bad for Mayer & Co if he ditched Yahoo in a couple months, and a ton of people would notice / company would get bad press. Keep him & you never have the negative press. Plus the scope of the negative press would dwarf the type of press this blurb is getting.
Question is, is the difference between the $81 million and the amount they would have paid him strictly for talent over the course of the contract justifiable on those PR grounds?
It is for them. Mayer doesnt want Tumblr to go down the drain and for that to work she needs Karp on board. 80M to keep the original visionary on board seems justifiable given the 1.1B total transaction price.
The NRA & the gun industry have successfully marketed a product, and the NRA has successfully marketed itself as the means of protecting customer's rights to that product.
Note, the NRA doesn't have to be the one that markets gun ownership as a positive - that can come from any number of sources, inside and outside of the gun industry. The NRA just has to give the image of being the political outlet to protect that right. Thus the media and/or possibly the gun industry can throw gas on the fire to show that guns are a necessity of American life and in turn because of it's perceived credibility on the issue people vote according to what the NRA says.
Now, presently I don't think either the NRA or the industry really has to do much work marketing guns. All they have to do is hold back the tide whenever a tragic event happens and forestall action when the willpower to change is present. Then, when election season rolls around, they just remind their members how to vote.
In the case of privacy there is #1 no product, and #2 no clear "defender" of our right to privacy. Further, given the nature of privacy, I don't think there will ever be a clear product or defender for/of that right. Without that, there's never going to be the approach that markets the product as a necessity or a group people will pay attention to when voting.
Just think about the ACLU - part of their mission is privacy. But yet I'm sure half the people who care about internet privacy don't even like much less trust the ACLU. EFF - majority of the population hasn't heard of them. It's just too sensitive of an issue to have a blanket organization representing everyone's interest.
Finally, as a side note, I think I would pay for an email service like this: free email, with conditional payments. Whenever the service receives and refuses a government request, it charges a very small fee (couple cents or even a penny - will wait till x amount has accrued before charging card). Then in turn, the payment fee goes to the campaign of a pro-privacy candidate or organization like the EFF etc.
More to the point the NRA's mission statement is really freaking clear.
Allowed to have gun? C/D
Privacy is way more complicated, and an inherently psychological endeavor.
Free from government snooping? C/D
is a much more complicated question, because it is untenable for governments to know nothing about their citizens or companies (it is good that we license drivers, and that restaurants have health inspections).
Also, the NRA holds a special relationship with an industry. The NRA is the lightning rod for attention after fire arms tragedies. No one ever goes in for gun companies after something like Sandy Hook, instead they go raise money off of the NRA.
There is no similar (legal) industry on which privacy and/or secrecy is a prerequisite, and for which a lobbying proxy would be useful.
One of my takes on it is that it has to be some sort of land/underground interconnection between cities.
My reasoning behind this is that he is open sourcing the designs. My guess behind this is that if it is a ground based system that requires right of way/property access etc. then there is tons of transaction costs & government regulation that would prevent copy cats from destroying the first mover's capital investments that would normally be protected via IP law.
If it didn't have these high transaction costs associated with it, then any actor could come and undercut your system after the tech behind the open source designs becomes cheaper. Traditionally this would be protected because of IP laws. However, he's dismissing this route & letting anyone up to the challenge take on the construction challenge with him. I'm guessing this is likely because the government won't eminent domain/allow/permit etc. extra routes between SF & LA etc. if there's already a hyperloop.
I'll probably come back & post more on this later, but one thing to note is that it is not the law schools denying admission to the bar, its the bar denying admission to people who have not gone to law school. Also, it's not illegal to practice law without the education - it's illegal to practice without the bar. The ace card isn't really the law schools so much as it's the bar associations. Meanwhile the bar associations are filled with attorneys who have JD's and want to keep the value of that degree up, so they have a vested interest in requiring JD's for admittance into their profession. It's kinda a circular & self reinforcing system, but like Mark Twain said, every profession is a conspiracy against the world.
I think the focus on legal education should not be getting online right now, but to change the JD to a 2 year degree, or start offering LLM's or something equivalent without the need for a JD and allow people to practice with those degrees. I've heard many law professors talk about how the final year of law school is pointless. Unfortunately, making a JD take 3 years is like Alka-seltzer coming up with the ad where they put in 2 tablets instead of one -- they're making money off it because people think it's needed.
Law schools are over priced, but they're also producing more than enough lawyers, so I don't really see accessbility as a bottleneck that needs to be solved, which is what most of the MOOCs are solving. Price is an issue that needs to be solved, but given the self perpetuating old boys network that is the legal profession any changes need to come through slow reforms, not major disruption.
Finally, firms & government agencies aren't going to hire people with online degrees even if they are admitted. School's name recognition carries more weight than it should (in my opinion) in this profession. It will be extremely hard for grads to gain the skills and prove themselves when they're not able to plug into existing networks after taking an online degree.
I'm not as concerned about the employability for a few reasons: 1) many of these students appear to be "non-traditional students who bring extremely interesting and rare skills, and 2) online degrees, taken while working full time, will leave students with relatively low debt levels, 3) many of these students are enhancing existing skill sets rather than trying to break into law as a zero-experience associate.
I do agree that people with online law degrees would be at a very severe disadvantage in the job market if they're just the standard "history major with law degree" looking for a job with a firm or other entry level law job. If that's the case, I'd agree that they might want to avoid an online degree (honestly, you might want to consider avoiding law school altogether from what I've read lately).
But think about some of these students here... one case is particularly interesting - an earthquake engineer who (according to the article) "will take over as in-house counsel at his engineering firm, and he figures he will be among the first to understand both the mathematics and the law surrounding earthquakes." This guy has nothing to do with "entry level" law jobs. He's very unique, and it sounds like he almost certainly would never have gotten this legal training without an on-line option. Does it really make sense to deny someone like this entry to the bar, because we already have "enough" 24 year old history majors with no work experience who have decided to go $150K+ in debt to get a traditional law degree?
