(Epistemic status: I know next to nothing about patent law, I'm just sharing some thoughts. I would love to be corrected by someone knowledgeable.)


If you think that some technology has a significant chance of ending the world (or having other huge negative externalities that outweigh the benefits), you might wish to postpone that technology. Convincing regulators or pressuring companies not to use a technology are two ways, but could another be to develop the technology first, patent it, and go to court to prevent anyone from using it?


“...patent trolling or patent hoarding is a categorical or pejorative term applied to a person or company that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art,[1] often through hardball legal tactics (frivolous litigation, vexatious litigation, strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP), chilling effects, etc.) Patent trolls often do not manufacture products or supply services based upon the patents in question.”

-Wikipedia, emphasis added.

A quick search couldn't find any examples of inventors doing this, though there are plenty of inventors who regret their inventions. There's an alternate history where the inventors of vaping or pop up ads realized that their inventions, although technically legal and extremely profitable, would cause huge harm, patented them, and prevented any copycats. 

If activist patent trolls can exist, then supporting them can be a hugely beneficial thing to do. By definition, an activist patent troll must:

  1. In order to invent a valuable technology, they must be among the most knowledgeable in a certain subject. The activist patent trolls for biology must be master biologists, for computer science they must be master computer scientists, etc.
  2. In order to give up the profits of the technology, they must be extremely altruistic.

Both of these qualities make activist patent trolls among the best decision makers when it comes to the future of technology. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the political philosophy of ethicotechnotrollocracy.[1]

Activist patent trolls can contribute substantially to every major Effective Altruism priority:

  1. Animal-welfare activist patent trolls can invent new ways to profitably worsen the lives of animals and patent them. If the horrid inventions powering factory farms like battery cages had been patented by an animal lover and denied the farms for twenty years, then billions of animals would have been better off.
  2. Global catastrophic risks can be mitigated. For example, if a researcher designed a technique that makes AI more dangerous, then patented it, then that would reduce AI x-risk. (I’ve personally ideated a few ideas that might fall into this category.)
  3. Inventing new polluting technologies and patenting it can prevent countries in the intersection of “has patent enforcement” and “does not have pollution controls” from using it, improving global health. India falls into this category.

Issues with activist patent trolling:

  • There’s a thing called a “Research Exemption” which may prevent activist patents from having much effect on academia. Despite this, if a research direction doesn’t have industry backing and cannot be applied usefully, research usually diminishes. For example, since mirror life is mostly an academic pursuit and not an industry one, activist patents would not have much effect. On the other hand, if for example Flash Attention was patented by an activist patent troll, then transformers would be much slower to use, AI technology wouldn’t be so profitable, and so there would be fewer researchers working on potentially dangerous capabilities, even if the researchers themselves were allowed to use flash attention.[2]
  • Patents only last twenty years, so if an inventor is more than twenty years ahead of her time, then her attempt to slow down the technology by inventing it first backfired. There are large debates about which inventions would have been invented soon anyways even if a particular inventor had not invented it. My (uninformed) position is that most profitable inventions are invented within twenty years of them becoming possible. Each expert, when considering whether to invent something to activist-patent it, should consider how soon someone else would create it.
  • With AI technology, labs are secretive and could likely get away with using capabilities-increasing patented technology. Thoughts?
  • Patents mostly only apply within countries, so activist patents would have limited scope. Since right now the US is the lead in research and industry, US-based patents can still have significant influence over the use of technology in the rest of the world.
  • There’s a sense that activist-inventing-and-patenting is not a neglected issue, since there are countless people trying to make any profitable technologies they can. Even so, I think it is a problem that inventors are not aware of this option, so raising awareness and making it easier to be an activist patent troll could be significantly neglected cause areas.[3]

What can be done now?

  • Nonprofit organizations can buy patents from inventors. This would involve the inventor filling out an application to convince the nonprofit of the profitability and negative externalities of the invention. The nonprofit can then go to court if someone infringes the patent. Altruistic inventors would be willing to sell their patent rights to the nonprofit at a discount relative to industry.
  • It makes sense that few people have tried to be activist patent trolls, since good people will rarely consider that a career of “design the most harmful yet profitable inventions possible” can actually be a significant force for good. If activist patent trolling is possible, then spreading the word among the people most likely to create harmful inventions can be hugely impactful.
  1. ^

    ethical (ethico), skill/craft/expertise (techno), troll rule (trollocracy)

  2. ^

    Assuming that Flash Attention can be patented. Software patent law is tricky. Is "Flash Attention" an 'abstract idea' (cannot be patented) or 'a product of engineering' (can be patented)?

  3. ^

     Again, assuming it is an option. I’m no expert in patent law.

New Comment
7 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

This idea kind of rhymes with gain-of-function research in a way that makes me uncomfortable. "Let's intentionally create harmful things, but its OK because we are creating harmful things for the purpose of preventing the harm that would be caused by those things."

 

I'm not sure if I can formalize this into a logically-tight case against doing it, but it seems conceptually similar to X, and X is bad.

That's fair enough and a good point. 

I think that the key difference is that in the case of profitable-but-bad technologies, someone, somewhere, will probably invent them because there's great incentive to do so.

In the case of gain-of-function, if there stops being grants and the academics who do it become pariahs, then the incentive to do the gain-of-function research is gone. 

A bit of a tangent, but economist Alex Tabarrok has talked about buying coal mines in order to not mine coal

One of the challenges until recently (as outlined in that link) was:

There are also some crazy “use it or lose it” laws that say that you can’t buy the right to extract a natural resource and not use it. When the high-bidder for an oil and gas lease near Arches National Park turned out to be an environmentalist the BLM cancelled the contract!

I’m pretty sure there’s no such use it or lose it law for patents, since patent trolls already exist. 

Patenting an invention necessarily discloses the invention to the public. (In fact, incentivizing disclosure was the rationale for the creation of the patent system.) That is a little worrying because the main way the non-AI tech titans (large corporations) have protected themselves from patent suits has been to obtain their own patent portfolios, then entering into cross-licensing agreements with the holders of the other patent portfolios. Ergo, the patent-trolling project you propose could incentivize the major labs to disclose inventions that they are currently keeping secret, which of course would be bad.

Although patent trolling is a better use of money IMHO than most of things designed to reduce AI extinction risk that have been funded so far, lobbying the US and UK governments to nationalize their AI labs is probably better because a government program can be a lot more strict than a private organization can be in prohibiting researchers and engineers from sharing insights and knowledge outside the program. In particular, if the nationalized program is sufficiently like top-secret defense programs, long prison sentences are the penalty for a worker to share knowledge outside of the program.

Also, note that the patent troll needs to be well-funded (with a warchest of 100s of millions of dollars preferably) before it starts to influence the behavior of the AI labs although if it starts out with less and gets lucky, it might in time manage to get the needed warchest by winning court cases or arriving at settlements with the labs.

The non-AI parts of the tech industry have been dealing with patent trolls since around 1980 and although technologists certainly complain about these patent trolls, I've never seen any indication that anyone has been completely demoralized by them and we do not see young talented people proclaim that they're not going to go into tech because of the patent trolls. Nationalization of AI research in contrast strikes me as having the potential to completely demoralize a significant fraction of AI researchers and put many talented young people off of the career path although I admit it will also tend to make the career path more appealing to some young people.

Both interventions (patent trolling and lobbying for nationalization) are just ways to slow down the AI juggernaut, buying us a little time to luck into some more permanent solution.

[-]Double120

Your argument about corporate secrets is sufficient to change my mind on activist patent trolling being a productive strategy against AI X-risk.

The part about funding would need to be solved with philanthropy. I don't believe that org exists, but I don't see why it couldn't.

I'm still curious whether there are other cases in which activist patent trolling can be a good option, such as animal welfare, chemistry, public health, or geoengineering (ie fracking).

As a quirk of the US patent system, patenting an idea doesn't actually require implementing it or proving that the implementation works. As a result, if you want to try this, you should patent ideas that seem good or bad to you in a scattershot manner, but should not do the actual underlying capabilities research. Then, you get to sue if someone else independently comes up with the patented idea and actually finds success with it, but you don't contribute to actual capabilities advances any more than an ideas guy posting to /r/singularity.

(Source: I have actually patented a thing, but do not really endorse this decision and haven't sued anyone about it.  I am not a patent lawyer)