What makes you say they've been a non-issue?

As far as I'm aware they've been an issue (outside of China) for the last 20 years.

Tostino 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sorry we handicapped ourselves and are now complaining about a competitor? Seems silly. The west made this tech unusable. I was building ebikes in 2006/7 and A123 was entirely unavailable unless you went and salvaged power tool packs.

They never became available at a competitive price, and then China bought the rights....

Now I can buy them in bulk as a consumer for 1/15th the price.

Our system is not meant for innovation by small players or consumers. We want tech easily locked away behind a contract.

▲

cyberax 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The total lithium battery patent licensing market is estimated at less than 600 million USD a year. This is approximately nothing, given that the overall battery market is estimated at about $200B.

The pace of innovation is furious, and companies are treating patents more as a way to ensure MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) rather than as a tool to get income.

I think we'll start seeing the first large lawsuits once the losers start realizing that they lost the innovation race.

▲

AnthonyMouse 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The total lithium battery patent licensing market is estimated at less than 600 million USD a year.

This is often because someone holds an important patent but either isn't licensing it to others because they're actually manufacturing it (implying they're holding back everyone else in the market), or they're asking too much and then almost everyone uses the existing technology instead of licensing the patent, again holding things back. As soon as the patent expires everyone starts using it.

> The pace of innovation is furious, and companies are treating patents more as a way to ensure MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) rather than as a tool to get income.

This is often even worse, because then you have a hundred companies with patents and as soon as one of them goes out of business the patents go to a troll who starts shaking everyone down because MAD doesn't apply to trolls who don't make anything. And then companies wary of being subjected to that will be avoiding doing anything under patent until the patents expire.

Companies in industries like this should probably start using some kind of patent GPL where you have to permanently license all your patents to everyone else who does the same, the purpose of which is to thwart trolls because everyone has to put their patents in while they're still in business or they'll be sued, and then the patents are already in by the time a failing company gets liquidated.

▲

NewJazz 12 hours ago | parent [-]

In your last paragraph you are basically talking about a licensing authority like MPEGLA is.

	▲	AnthonyMouse 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Except that they charge fees, which retains the perverse incentive to accumulate low-quality patents and for smaller companies to avoid the pool's patents instead of joining it. And then when one that didn't join goes out of business everybody's got troll problems again.

▲

modeless 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Doesn't that indicate that patents are being used to suppress competitors rather than as a direct revenue source? I don't see how that indicates patents aren't an issue.