Bialystock (reading adaptation
of Kafka’s
Metamorphosis while looking
for worst play ever written):
"Gregor Samsa
awoke one morning
to discover that he had
been transformed
into a giant
cockroach..." (Pauses.) Nah, it's too good.
—The Producers (1968)
Do you want
a measure of The Great Stagnation in Localization Land? The mosquito-infested
backwater of language technology now
has its very own patent troll! Yes! Transperfect’s purchase of WorldLingo has
nothing to do with the acquiree’s technology (which is probably commoditized
anyway). According to David Grunwald,
the bold merger is a tactic by Transperfect to seize WorldLingo’s patents and
then use them in ongoing litigation against a competitor in the field of localizing websites for large corporates. In other
words, Transperfect is becoming a patent troll.
What is a
patent troll, you ask? To phrase it in the style of Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, it is the bloodcurling sound of the
technology industry eating its young. The issue was brought to mainstream
attention by a recent podcast from the teams of This American Life and Planet
Money (When
Patents Attack). (By the way, have I recommended This American Life? Did I mention it’s free?) To
put it succinctly, a patent troll is a company that buys up reams of patents from
other companies and then uses them to sue innovative start-ups. The objective is simply to
extort money. There are entire companies in Silicon Valley that do
not create anything but simply snap up legacy patents and use them as part of a
tech version of racketeering (“that’s a really nice technology company you have
there; it’d be a shame if anything were to happen to it…”). And guess who is
the largest patent troll in the Valley? None other than Nathan Myhrvold. And
who is Nathan Myhrvold? None other than one of the co-founders of
Microsoft. Great Stagnation, Exhibit A: “Thy name is Myhrvold.”
What is
wrong with that, you ask? Patents, after all, were invented to protect the work
of the inventors who make our lives better. Well, the problem is that in the IT
sphere the idea of a patent is problematic. One example is the idea of using
the Internet to distribute a piece of software via downloading. The software
itself, of course, should have a
copyright. That is not the issue. The idea
of downloading software via the Web in
general, well… not so much. And American judges and the U.S. Patent Office
until twenty years ago were inclined to this common-sense view of technology:
The hurdles to get an IT patent were many and difficult to leap over. That is,
until the tide started shifting in the 1990s. And now you basically can’t move a
single inch in Silicon Valley without stepping on a the tails of companies holding reams of useless patents, whether for offensive or preemptive
purposes. Indeed, one of the causes for Tyler Cowen’s innovation slowdown may
well be the peculiarities of patent-trolling and the U.S. legal system.
What does
that mean for the translation industry? This means that Transperfect is
probably planning to use a patent that describes in vague terms a system that
employs, say, machine translation, translation memory and terminology
management over the Web. None of these ideas by themselves is original. You
didn’t need a genius to come along and “invent” the idea of using computers to
translate text. Or of recycling previous translations. Or of using the Web to
harness the power of the hamster mob. But (wham!) Transperfect is going to
leverage those dead patents to hit a competitor.
Just more
proof of the vibrancy of the
translation technology niche.
Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.
