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> To rephrase, what exactly do we lose out if patents didn't exist? There is a lot of empirical evidence showing patents incentivize investment of resources in
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
> To rephrase, what exactly do we lose out if patents didn't exist?
There is a lot of empirical evidence showing patents incentivize investment of resources into innovative efforts, such as R&D expenses in large corporations and VC investment in startups. Of course, it's hard to quantify how much innovation this really drives because it's very hard to measure "innovation" itself. The drawbacks of patents include, amongst other things, the potential to reduce follow-on innovation. Again, this is very hard to measure at any meaningful scale.
> To support this point, we can look at the prevalence and utility of Open Source software projects; which work without patent protection.
Open source projects are driven by people willing to donate their efforts for free. (Well, it's not really free, is it? They are, to a great extent, sponsored directly or indirectly by organizations that typically extract value from something other than the software itself, such as, maybe data.) Do you expect that business model to work for everybody?
Not to mention that the vast majority of open source projects actually don't do anything innovative other than just re-implementing known technologies in a different context. There can be a lot of minor, follow-on innovation in open-source projects, but in my experience, the big advances come from other sources, such as academia, startups or corporate R&D labs.
- laotzu 11y ago>There is a lot of empirical evidence showing patents incentivize investment of resources into innovative efforts Do you have any sources of this empirical data? In many cases especially with software the opposite is the case now. Legacy patent holders are able to obtain such broadly vague patents and then sit on them and do nothing but try to sue anyone who tries to actually innovate.
- throwawaykf05 11y agoSee this comment for a link to start with for patents in general: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962996 To my knowledge, empirical evidence that incumbent patent holders in the software industry are suppressing innovators is mixed. This paper from 2006 claims no ill-effects have been felt: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=926204 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=926204 Another 2005 studies also suggests that patent thickets do not prevent the creation of young firms, and the use of patents may actually help startups: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=510103 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=510103 On the other hand, this 2006 study finds that product areas with patent thickets see fewer new entrants: http://www.nber.org/papers/w12563 http://www.nber.org/papers/w12563 -- Interestingly, this paper also finds that startups with patents of their own are much more likely to enter a patent-infested product area.