I've sometimes wondered if it might be worth the effort to design a tube based audio amplifier that has a few innovations and target the high end Hi Fi crowd.

Look at this, the Audio Note "Ongaku" amp:

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It retails for 250,000 bucks, you've only got to sell one a year to make very good money.

I wonder if that’s actually legal? The valves can be removed by hand, and I very much doubt that octal sockets have sufficient creepage and clearance for a B+ voltage of 400V or so.

 

Unfortunately, the value of a patent to an independent “inventor” comes when it is sold—to a patent troll who will then turn around and use it as a bludgeon to extort settlements from deep pocket corporations that calculate the settlement to be cheaper than fighting it.

Then the trolls use the settlements as “proof” of the legitimacy of the patent (often, they are not defensible) but as the trolls work down the food chain of companies the rationale for settling changes from “it‘s cheaper” to “it’s our only choice”.

The only real value of patents to the industries that file them is self-protection and defensive cross licensing.

The place I used to work had to deal with patent trolls, it's just a modern day shake down. Their angle was, in our case, they threaten to sue but offer to settle for something less than what they think it will cost you to defend yourself. So as a business, you make the business decision to either spend $X to fight it and probably win but still out $X, or $0.5X to settle and be done. The trolls hope you settle. In our case the claim was actually over a 3rd party library we were licensing so we were able to push the liability off to the 3rd party provider per our contract with them, but it still cost us weeks of labor for multiple engineers plus lawyers fees, probably well into the 6 figures. It was a small business, less than 20 employees, so that was a significant expense for us.

 

The place I used to work had to deal with patent trolls, it's just a modern day shake down. Their angle was, in our case, they threaten to sue but offer to settle for something less than what they think it will cost you to defend yourself. So as a business, you make the business decision to either spend $X to fight it and probably win but still out $X, or $0.5X to settle and be done. The trolls hope you settle. In our case the claim was actually over a 3rd party library we were licensing so we were able to push the liability off to the 3rd party provider per our contract with them, but it still cost us weeks of labor for multiple engineers plus lawyers fees, probably well into the 6 figures. It was a small business, less than 20 employees, so that was a significant expense for us.

Yep—they are not in the business of producing anything. I propose a “use it or lose it” law where you have to actually do something with a patent to keep it. And licensing doesn’t count towards the application requirement. The patent owner has to derive a direct income from the application of it, within a specific, reasonable time period or the patent’s subject matter becomes public domain.

The owner can outright sell the patent before it expires, but that transfers the UIoLI requirement to the purchaser—with no reset of the clock. The while thing has several potentially positive effects—including completely shutting down patent trolls.

Oh, and software patents can go die in a fire in any case.

 

I wonder if that’s actually legal? The valves can be removed by hand, and I very much doubt that octal sockets have sufficient creepage and clearance for a B+ voltage of 400V or so.

The specs were not stunning either, 5% THD, max power output 27W, I mean WTF.

 

Yep—they are not in the business of producing anything.

That seems to be the problem in general with our society in general. In many different areas, a layer of people have been inserted into the middle of things that siphon off money just by touching it as it moves from A to B (and sometimes back from B to A). Health insurance is one area where this is true. Patent trolls. Investment managers. REITs (companies that buy the real-estate a business is on with the promise of fast cash, only to drive that business into bankruptcy through ever-increasing rent payments – see Sears for example). Basically opportunistic organizations that profit off the work of others.

 

When "Y" actually is able to sell his creation for the anticipated value, I suggest investing the proceeds wisely and then establishing a charity to use the interest on the investment to provide housing for all of the homeless folks everywhere. So you can see that I anticipate the value to be rather large.