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> Considering the lack of a control group without major confounding factors, it'd be quite difficult to have a study on the efficacy of a patent system at incre

> Considering the lack of a control group without major confounding factors, it'd be quite difficult to have a study on the efficacy of a patent system at increasing the number of inventions made available. Yes, it is hard to show the beneficial effects of a patent system, just as it is to show any ill effects thereof, which is why any blanket assertion that patents should be abolished or strengthened should be met with skepticism. Still, many studies do attempt to support their conclusions as rigorously as possible. It is, of course, never enough because of the lack of sufficient data or contextual information. Some studies get quite creative in how they find control data. For instance, some take specific events in history, such as the introduction of patent laws (or change in the strength of patent protection for a specific field) in a certain country, and compare various metrics (e.g. derived from industrial data) before and after these events. Or alternatively they find regimes that are similar in other aspects with the prime difference being in patent laws and they compare metrics across these geopolitical boundaries. For instance, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1513814 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1513814 looks at industrial exhibitions and finds that the diversity of fields in which technical activity occurred increased significantly after patent laws were introduced. Different studies take different approaches, so I can't really describe them all. The best I can do is to point to this meta-study and read the studies referenced within: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~bhhall/papers/HallHarhoff12_NBER_w17773.pdf https://eml.berkeley.edu/~bhhall/papers/HallHarhoff12_NBER_w... > I've seen far too many FOSS projects suppressed, features left out, or avenues unexplored, precisely because an area is a patent minefield. Would you claim that those technologies that were suppressed, left our or unexplored were otherwise unavailable on the market? Or were these efforts simply re-inventing something already done before? > You can write code entirely from scratch, create something useful, publish it, be sued by someone you've never even heard of, and lose, all because of an artificial monopoly over ideas. And you can invent a whole new and useful product line, develop it from scratch, bring it to market and be ripped off and put out of business by bigger guys, all because of insufficient protection of ideas. >... patents are one of the main things making it necessary to acquire more patents, as a defense mechanism. Other than protecting their investment in R&D, various companies use patents in various ways. Tech startups, for instance, often seek patents to increase chances of VC funding and acquisition.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
> Yes, it is hard to show the beneficial effects of a patent system, just as it is to show any ill effects thereof It's quite easy to show the ill effects thereof. It's harder to evaluate the beneficial effects, as you'd have to find and model metrics about the net value of inventions that, with all else equal, nobody would have developed or released in the absence of patents. That then makes it hard to evaluate the patent system on balance, to see whether the benefits outweigh the costs. I'm certainly not going to argue that that the patent system produces no benefits whatsoever; there almost certainly exist some inventions that nobody would have developed or productized without patents, or would not have done so on the same timeline. My argument is that those benefits no longer outweigh the costs. I read the meta-study you linked to, and found it quite unmoving. They explicitly note via several studies that patents have little effectiveness in inducing disclosure (particularly as such disclosure has little value when engineers rarely read patents and would take a high risk in doing so). Their discussions and linked studies of efficacy at promoting invention itself seem far too focused on direct economic value as a measure of invention value, and the remainder of their study focuses almost exclusively on economic value. Any methodology that counts a patent troll like Intellectual Ventures in the "positive" column is broken; yes, they cause money to move, but only as a valueless drag force on useful work. > Would you claim that those technologies that were suppressed, left our or unexplored were otherwise unavailable on the market? Or were these efforts simply re-inventing something already done before? Both, and other cases as well. I've seen patents used to threaten newly created technologies (e.g. entirely new video codecs still threatened by the MPEG-LA protection racket), from-scratch reimplementations of existing technologies in FOSS, and new applications of existing technologies (e.g. novel applications of arithmetic coding or cryptographic algorithms). >> You can write code entirely from scratch, create something useful, publish it, be sued by someone you've never even heard of, and lose, all because of an artificial monopoly over ideas. > And you can invent a whole new and useful product line, develop it from scratch, bring it to market and be ripped off and put out of business by bigger guys, all because of insufficient protection of ideas. I simply can't see those cases as remotely similar. In one case, a technology or product is suppressed because of an artificial monopoly on ideas, even if people want that technology or product. In the other case, someone else builds a better product and puts the first out of business, and was not stopped from building a better product by the first company's artificial monopoly. I don't care who first threw paperwork and money at a government office; I care about the better product. To rephrase that another way: in one case, you have two consenting parties that want to do business, but are stopped by a third that neither one wants anything to do with. In the second case, you have two parties that consider doing business, but one chooses to do business with a third party instead because they get more value by doing so. That's leaving aside the very likely scenario that a patent intended for such a purpose cannot be used "successfully" against a bigger company. The standard scenario: "Oh, you have a couple of patents that you claim we infringe? That's adorable; we have a few thousand covering what you've done, and we won't tell you which ones. Perhaps we'll pretend you never brought this up, or perhaps we'll give you a discount on the money you're going to pay us if you let us use your patents to stomp the next one of you upstarts." I realize that the cases that show up in the media have a severe selection bias, and that many patent cases get settled confidentially. However, I can readily bring to mind numerous instances of patents used to threaten new entrants to a market, or used for trolling by companies providing negative value. By contrast, not a single case comes to mind of a patent used as you've described, to "defend" a product by the inventor's company against a larger company. I don't believe technological progress will grind to a halt, or even slow down, with patents (or even just software patents) abolished. I won't necessarily argue with as much confidence that it will massively accelerate, either, though it certainly will in areas I care about. But I can honestly say that I've never once seen a patent lawsuit in which I could muster the slightest sympathy for the plaintiff or the slightest belief that they deserve anything. And I've read a substantial number of patent lawsuits, both contemporary and historical.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

> Yes, it is hard to show the beneficial effects of a patent system, just as it is to show any ill effects thereof It's quite easy to show the ill effects thereof. It's harder to evaluate the beneficial effects, as you'd have to find and model metrics about the net value of inventions that, with all else equal, nobody would have developed or released in the absence of patents. That then makes it hard to evaluate the patent system on balance, to see whether the benefits outweigh the costs. I'm certainly not going to argue that that the patent system produces no benefits whatsoever; there almost certainly exist some inventions that nobody would have developed or productized without patents, or would not have done so on the same timeline. My argument is that those benefits no longer outweigh the costs. I read the meta-study you linked to, and found it quite unmoving. They explicitly note via several studies that patents have little effectiveness in inducing disclosure (particularly as such disclosure has little value when engineers rarely read patents and would take a high risk in doing so). Their discussions and linked studies of efficacy at promoting invention itself seem far too focused on direct economic value as a measure of invention value, and the remainder of their study focuses almost exclusively on economic value. Any methodology that counts a patent troll like Intellectual Ventures in the "positive" column is broken; yes, they cause money to move, but only as a valueless drag force on useful work. > Would you claim that those technologies that were suppressed, left our or unexplored were otherwise unavailable on the market? Or were these efforts simply re-inventing something already done before? Both, and other cases as well. I've seen patents used to threaten newly created technologies (e.g. entirely new video codecs still threatened by the MPEG-LA protection racket), from-scratch reimplementations of existing technologies in FOSS, and new applications of existing technologies (e.g. novel applications of arithmetic coding or cryptographic algorithms). >> You can write code entirely from scratch, create something useful, publish it, be sued by someone you've never even heard of, and lose, all because of an artificial monopoly over ideas. > And you can invent a whole new and useful product line, develop it from scratch, bring it to market and be ripped off and put out of business by bigger guys, all because of insufficient protection of ideas. I simply can't see those cases as remotely similar. In one case, a technology or product is suppressed because of an artificial monopoly on ideas, even if people want that technology or product. In the other case, someone else builds a better product and puts the first out of business, and was not stopped from building a better product by the first company's artificial monopoly. I don't care who first threw paperwork and money at a government office; I care about the better product. To rephrase that another way: in one case, you have two consenting parties that want to do business, but are stopped by a third that neither one wants anything to do with. In the second case, you have two parties that consider doing business, but one chooses to do business with a third party instead because they get more value by doing so. That's leaving aside the very likely scenario that a patent intended for such a purpose cannot be used "successfully" against a bigger company. The standard scenario: "Oh, you have a couple of patents that you claim we infringe? That's adorable; we have a few thousand covering what you've done, and we won't tell you which ones. Perhaps we'll pretend you never brought this up, or perhaps we'll give you a discount on the money you're going to pay us if you let us use your patents to stomp the next one of you upstarts." I realize that the cases that show up in the media have a severe selection bias, and that many patent cases get settled confidentially. However, I can readily bring to mind numerous instances of patents used to threaten new entrants to a market, or used for trolling by companies providing negative value. By contrast, not a single case comes to mind of a patent used as you've described, to "defend" a product by the inventor's company against a larger company. I don't believe technological progress will grind to a halt, or even slow down, with patents (or even just software patents) abolished. I won't necessarily argue with as much confidence that it will massively accelerate, either, though it certainly will in areas I care about. But I can honestly say that I've never once seen a patent lawsuit in which I could muster the slightest sympathy for the plaintiff or the slightest belief that they deserve anything. And I've read a substantial number of patent lawsuits, both contemporary and historical.