Mandatory licensing would be wild. If LG invent something that makes TVs better should they have to licence it to Samsung? Or should they just be able to make better TVs and use their invention for market differentiation?
Being required to conduct good-faith negotiation sounds like a great idea, a reasonable tradeoff between protection that encourages innovation so that inventors can profit off their inventions, while also allowing for society to progress based on those inventions.
LG could ignore trolls and morons - but if Samsung makes a good-faith, fair offer to license the technology, they should have to have a good reason for saying no beyond "we don't feel like it."
One company, Cobasys (owned by an oil company!) purposefully refused to license NiMH technology in transportation. The patent system was never intended to be used like a weapon to protect a market.
> The patent system was never intended to be used like a weapon to protect a market.
This doesn't seem true to me. Nothing about the design of the patent system makes sense if the intent if not to use it like a weapon to let a giant company protect a whole area of the market from competition.
As a point of interest, there is a class of patterns called Standard Essential Patents (SEP), which the patent holder is required to sell licenses under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) conditions when an implementation of that patented idea is required to comply with certain standards.
Why shouldn't they have to license it to Samsung? Why do we want to stifle innovation by preventing Samsung from using any of LG's tech and vice versa? Imagine the TVs we could've had if the two companies could combine the best parts of each others' technologies.
