It definitely has some good points, but there are a few issues to consider:
* Compulsory licensing for trademarks doesn't make sense; their purpose is to ensure that the consumer knows who manufactured the product. If you can't exercise control over the people that use your trademark, it's useless.
* Patent litigation is too expensive for small firms and too cheap for large ones; figuring out how to fix this would be a big win. That can be done by adjusting the actual cost, the outcome probability, or the judgement amount. Time until judgement is also a big factor.
* This system doesn't address the problem of submarine patents, that are kept hidden for years until a lot of firms are unknowingly infringing, and then get sued for large damages. It needs to address how a company knows whether or not it needs to license a patent for its technology. Perhaps holding a patent on a technology should give you "clear to operate" approval, and existing patent holders must review and challenge patent applications before they're granted.
> Compulsory licensing for trademarks doesn't make sense; their purpose is to ensure that the consumer knows who manufactured the product. If you can't exercise control over the people that use your trademark, it's useless.
Perhaps it is wrong to bundle trademarks with the rest of them. The consumer protection angle is what makes them different than the copyright and patent monopolies.
Trademarks are sometimes used defensively - only Google Inc can lay claim to be the device you use to "google stuff". However, they are sometimes used offensively - e.g. Cisco vs. Apple on the iPhone trademark, and the still ongoing Apple vs. Chinese-company-whose-name-I-don't-know iPad trademark.
The "use it or lose it" status of trademarks makes the current situation a little better than patents, but still, offensive use of Trademark should cost the user in proportion to their benefit.
A really crazy idea: "compulsory hostile trademark takeover" - you'd be able to take over anyone's trademark for 100x the value they assign to it (And on which they pay 1% tax or whatever). e.g. I can register a trademark 'iJoke' for $75, but if I want to keep it, I need to say how much it is worth to me on my tax return and pay 1%. Let's say I declare $1M. Then I need to pay $10K in tax, and Apple can forcibly take it away for $100M (paid in advance, in escrow) and waiting 12 months for me to lose my trademark rights (although they gain shared trademark right away). A non-government "eminent domain", if you will. Might also work well against domain squatters. Same underlying idea: make cost-of-carry proportional to value.
> Patent litigation is too expensive for small firms and too cheap for large ones; figuring out how to fix this would be a big win. That can be done by adjusting the actual cost, the outcome probability, or the judgement amount. Time until judgement is also a big factor.
I agree, although I have no specific suggestion about how to adjust that. In Finland, traffic tickets are a percentage of your yearly income, with a minimum but no maximum. So a speeding ticket isn't cheap even for big earners - a $60K ticket happens a few times a year. (They are still cheap to people who already have a fortune but not come, though).
Perhaps there's someway to make that depend on value too -- e.g., there is a progressive tax on income to be able to sue; e.g. when you sue someone, you pay 0.01% of your yearly income for every day in court, whether you win or lose. So 2.5% if you spend every workday in court suing people. Obviously, court services are more valuable to you if you have more income.
> This system doesn't address the problem of submarine patents, that are kept hidden for years until a lot of firms are unknowingly infringing, and then get sued for large damages. It needs to address how a company knows whether or not it needs to license a patent for its technology. Perhaps holding a patent on a technology should give you "clear to operate" approval, and existing patent holders must review and challenge patent applications before they're granted.
On the contrary. Now you'd actually have an incentive to do a patent search, and lock down low fees by private agreements so that they cannot be inflated later the way submarine patents are used today.
Although it might help to codify this somehow; e.g., if you hold a patent, declare value $1M (paying $10K/year to maintain). I offer you $10M upfront for 5 years license (Twice what you declare it is worth). You decline. I document my offer, and use it anyway, paying only the compulsory $1M/year for the first year. On the 2nd year, you declare it worth $10M (in an attempt to extract more money from me). I'll have to pay up or stop using it. But you can get in trouble with the tax authorities for (allegedly) reporting a much lower value.
Basic ideas:
1. Tie cost-of-property-carry to real world value
2. Use tax authorities to coerce everyone into estimating values sensibly and defensibly.
re: the iPhone and iPad trademark disputes; they arose because Apple launched their product without bothering to secure the trademarks first. In the Cisco case, they were a legitimate competitor (producing and marketing telephones in the United States) and Apple really didn't have any right to the name. The other one is a dispute over how Apple can market the iPad in China; no change in US law is going to affect that.
Making people pay taxes on the value of their reputation, which is what this sort of trademark tax would be, doesn't sit right with me. Economically, it probably works fine.
For patent litigation, one problem is that legal costs can drive most small companies out of business before they ever get a judgement. Even if they would have won the case, they don't have the resources to make it to the finish. This is a problem for all kinds of civil cases, but I haven't thought about it enough to have a viable stance.
The problem with submarine patents is that even with a good-faith patent search, you're likely to miss some relevant ones. They are deliberately written to be as broad and hard-to-understand as possible; the only way to be reasonably sure that you're not infringing is to be an expert on all the patents that are currently in force.
* Compulsory licensing for trademarks doesn't make sense; their purpose is to ensure that the consumer knows who manufactured the product. If you can't exercise control over the people that use your trademark, it's useless.
* Patent litigation is too expensive for small firms and too cheap for large ones; figuring out how to fix this would be a big win. That can be done by adjusting the actual cost, the outcome probability, or the judgement amount. Time until judgement is also a big factor.
* This system doesn't address the problem of submarine patents, that are kept hidden for years until a lot of firms are unknowingly infringing, and then get sued for large damages. It needs to address how a company knows whether or not it needs to license a patent for its technology. Perhaps holding a patent on a technology should give you "clear to operate" approval, and existing patent holders must review and challenge patent applications before they're granted.