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I find the concept of intellectual property and patents ridiculous. What would be the benefit of granting IP over an invention or innovation to a corporation o

I find the concept of intellectual property and patents ridiculous. What would be the benefit of granting IP over an invention or innovation to a corporation or a group of individuals versus releasing the knowledge under the public domain? Except the corporation or inventor(s) making money off of it, I can't think of anything significant. Instead, if the knowledge is made freely available under the public domain, the limitation becomes how well the innovation is used for the benefit of humanity instead of the limitation being access to the invention itself and IP. Maybe the existence of IP and patents was important to get to the present as a way of rewarding innovation, but it's high time to look for a better model. I know this is a very complex issue for which there are no simple answers or solutions, but a good starting point might be to think about a society where the motivation for innovation is not financial reward. Taking the example of patented drugs, how is it justified to keep access to life saving drugs beyond the reach of most people(including people in developed nations)?

forrestthewoods 11y ago
> how is it justified to keep access to life saving drugs beyond the reach of most people Trivially. By asserting that without intellectual property protection those drugs wouldn't have been invented. I'm not arguing if that's true or not. But it's certainly how people justify it. I'm going to copy and paste one of my favorite comments on copyright. From Judge Richard Posner. It's bit a of a wall of text; sorry. It's worth reading in it's entirety. "A distinguishing characteristic of intellectual property is its "public good" aspect. While the cost of creating a work subject to copyright protection—for example, a book, movie, song, ballet, lithograph, map, business directory, or computer software program—is often high, the cost of reproducing the work, whether by the creator or by those to whom he has made it available, is often low. And once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged from making copies, but the creator’s total revenues may not be sufficient to cover the cost of creating the work. Copyright protection—the right of the copyright’s owner to prevent others from making copies—trades off the costs of limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to create the work in the first place. STRIKING THE CORRECT BALANCE BETWEEN ACCESS AND INCENTIVES IS THE CENTRAL PROBLEM IN COPYRIGHT LAW. [empaphsis added] For copyright law to promote economic efficiency, its principal legal doctrines must, at least approximately, maximize the benefits from creating additional works minus both the losses from limiting access and the costs of administering copyright protection." http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html
- venomsnake 11y ago
  One may argue that balance is way off right now. I would prefer to see a system in which there are lump sums by the government for a treatment development with certain performance characteristics. And the government owns the rights afterwards. We should make pharma companies do work for hire.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  >Trivially. By asserting that without intellectual property protection those drugs wouldn't have been invented That isn't trivial. It's stupid. It's a completely non-disprovable argument. Plenty of innovations are created where creators voluntarily yields their rights and plenty of others are probably not created because the creator of it (under employment) isn't hugely keen on creating yet more property for his or her employer to exploit.
  - throwaway160303 11y ago
    hahahaha this place is going downhill. In fairness, maybe it's always been like this during the too-early/way-too-late timeframes. Sorry, but the world ain't full of copyleft warriors. People put their name on patents, in no small part because they immediately subsequently put that patent on their resumes. Nobody is denying themselves earning power - cash money - in order to protect the public interest from their big bad provider of paychecks. Especially since the public interest, here, means "the companies competing with my provider of paychecks".
    - crdoconnor 11y ago
      >Sorry, but the world ain't full of copyleft warriors Linux is the most popular operating system. A legal ideology that presumes that could never happen is simply wrong.
      - forrestthewoods 11y ago
        Does it cost a billion dollars to bring a new flavor of Linux to market? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cost-to-develop-new-pharmaceutical-drug-now-exceeds-2-5b/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cost-to-develop-ne...
runholm 11y ago
The issue is that with medicine, it cost vast amounts of money to develop and test a medicine. If there was nothing making sure the investment would pay of, there would be much less money spent developing medicine. I am not saying the system is perfect, and some companies push the prices to the ridiculous to exploit people in need, but removing medical patents altogether would require some other equally strong economic incentive to keep development rolling.
- Fuxy 11y ago
  The prices pharma companies ask for is ridiculous and makes the drug unavailable to 90% of the people that need it. if they priced their drug to make it more accessible they could easily make the development cost back by making money off the 90% they left to die or hunt for drugs on the Indian market. There needs to be a balance between getting drugs to the people that need it and making a profit. Currently that balance is non existent and pharma companies charge ridiculous amounts knowing full well that us insurance companies will pay it. You know how the rest of the planet feels when your insurance company refuses to pay for your drugs and you have to pay for it yourself.
  - ucaetano 11y ago
    Would you invest your money in a pharma company that returned below-the-market risk-adjusted returns?
    - Fuxy 11y ago
      No because the market is part of the problem. I would however invest (read as donate) in a non profit pharma with the sole goal of developing drugs and covering their development cost.
      - ucaetano 11y ago
        You can do that already, just donate to universities and public research institutions doing drug research. Now, do you think that investors should be forced to invest in pharma companies offering lower-than-market returns?
deciplex 11y ago
> Except the corporation or inventor(s) making money off of it, I can't think of anything significant. But, that alone is significant enough to justify most intellectual property: patents, copyright, etc. But, it's not nearly enough to justify a patent system that allows you to patent absolutely obvious bullshit then turn around and sue everyone. And, it doesn't justify our copyright system either, with insane terms which span centuries. So I would agree that it's an open question whether the way we do intellectual property now is better than absolutely nothing i.e. everything publicly known is automatically public domain. I suspect we'd be better off with no patents and no copyright, than with what we have now. But intellectual property in theory and properly implemented, is unquestionably a fine idea, and obviously far superior both to the shit show we have now, and also to a Wild West approach. Anyway, it's not like you need patents to gouge patients cf epipen, insulin, where patents ran out decades ago and yet, strangely, stuff that costs a few dollars to actually make, is priced in the hundreds of dollars.
- zanny 11y ago
  > But, that alone is significant enough to justify most intellectual property: patents, copyright, etc. No, certainly not. Guaranteeing corporate profits are never a justifiable reason to restrict freedom of information so severely. You do not need a patent on plastic forks to make money selling them. If there is demand, the floating price will be above the price of manufacture, and the economy is incentivized to meet that demand. If drug recipes were not patented, and there was demand for a drug, once the profit overcomes opportunity cost everyone in industry has incentive to start meeting the demand. Plenty of arguments exist in this thread why you do not need private for-profit research to discover medicine - and why in many ways having such a system is counter-productive in the first place (the industry consistently refuses to consider anything as a product they cannot patent - and will actively harm people by not selling products they know work but that they cannot guarantee long-term monopoly on).
  - deciplex 11y ago
    Yes, certainly. And OP said corporation or inventor. As long as we're doing capitalism, we ought to have a way for people to make a living off of knowledge work and the arts. Not selling physical artifacts of knowledge work, or making some sort of other derivative income off of it, but profiting directly from the generation and POC of good ideas. It is a system that served us well for one hundred years or more before being hijacked by a pack of ruthless jackals - I probably agree that if we can't fix it it's better to tear it down, but we should still try to fix it.
melling 11y ago
This should be a HN FAQ because every time the topic comes up, someone makes your invalid argument. Well, it's not really an argument but more of the sympathy card. It cost billions to develop a drug and pennies to make it. Can you explain the business model where companies don't go out of business and research dries up? India is creating drug resistant bacteria because antibiotics are so overused. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/world/asia/superbugs-kill-indias-babies-and-pose-an-overseas-threat.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/world/asia/superbugs-kill-... Who's going to pay for the research needed to prevent a pandemic? I'm going to write a blog so this question doesn't need to be answered every couple of months. How about India with a million people turning 18 every month (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11232383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11232383), develop a drug industry to create better and cheaper new drugs, while creating great jobs for people who need them? Of course, if you simply give away everyone's work, no company is going to stay in business.
- dineshp2 11y ago
  My point was that innovation and financial reward need to be decoupled to ensure valuable knowledge is not locked behind IP. > Of course, if you simply give away everyone's work, no company is going to stay in business. To think about a future without ridiculous restrictions on access to knowledge(which IP law promotes implicitly), it is important to stop accepting the status quo in which innovation and financial reward are directly linked. You seem to accept the reality that innovation has to be linked to financial reward by gaining exclusive rights over the invention using IP laws,which,respectfully,is preposterous.
  - melling 11y ago
    Can you provide some concrete examples of the business model, and how it works? Perhaps some new agile startups could disrupt big pharma. You can't realistically expect people to accept that you have a better plan without offering real evidence that it works.
    - dineshp2 11y ago
ekianjo 11y ago
> I find the concept of intellectual property and patents ridiculous. I think what's more ridiculous is that the patent system was not made, in the first place, to lock competition out of the market. It was supposed to be a starting point to create licenses for other companies to produce the same item, by providing royalty fees to the original patent owner. But the system has quickly become a way to create rents and lock competitors out of the market. Short of fixing patents by making them shorter and all, we should find a way to market licenses at reasonable costs so that alternatives exist even during patent protection.

forrestthewoods 11y ago

> how is it justified to keep access to life saving drugs beyond the reach of most people Trivially. By asserting that without intellectual property protection those drugs wouldn't have been invented. I'm not arguing if that's true or not. But it's certainly how people justify it. I'm going to copy and paste one of my favorite comments on copyright. From Judge Richard Posner. It's bit a of a wall of text; sorry. It's worth reading in it's entirety. "A distinguishing characteristic of intellectual property is its "public good" aspect. While the cost of creating a work subject to copyright protection—for example, a book, movie, song, ballet, lithograph, map, business directory, or computer software program—is often high, the cost of reproducing the work, whether by the creator or by those to whom he has made it available, is often low. And once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged from making copies, but the creator’s total revenues may not be sufficient to cover the cost of creating the work. Copyright protection—the right of the copyright’s owner to prevent others from making copies—trades off the costs of limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to create the work in the first place. STRIKING THE CORRECT BALANCE BETWEEN ACCESS AND INCENTIVES IS THE CENTRAL PROBLEM IN COPYRIGHT LAW. [empaphsis added] For copyright law to promote economic efficiency, its principal legal doctrines must, at least approximately, maximize the benefits from creating additional works minus both the losses from limiting access and the costs of administering copyright protection." http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html

venomsnake 11y ago
One may argue that balance is way off right now. I would prefer to see a system in which there are lump sums by the government for a treatment development with certain performance characteristics. And the government owns the rights afterwards. We should make pharma companies do work for hire.
crdoconnor 11y ago
>Trivially. By asserting that without intellectual property protection those drugs wouldn't have been invented That isn't trivial. It's stupid. It's a completely non-disprovable argument. Plenty of innovations are created where creators voluntarily yields their rights and plenty of others are probably not created because the creator of it (under employment) isn't hugely keen on creating yet more property for his or her employer to exploit.
- throwaway160303 11y ago
  hahahaha this place is going downhill. In fairness, maybe it's always been like this during the too-early/way-too-late timeframes. Sorry, but the world ain't full of copyleft warriors. People put their name on patents, in no small part because they immediately subsequently put that patent on their resumes. Nobody is denying themselves earning power - cash money - in order to protect the public interest from their big bad provider of paychecks. Especially since the public interest, here, means "the companies competing with my provider of paychecks".
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    >Sorry, but the world ain't full of copyleft warriors Linux is the most popular operating system. A legal ideology that presumes that could never happen is simply wrong.
    - forrestthewoods 11y ago
      Does it cost a billion dollars to bring a new flavor of Linux to market? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cost-to-develop-new-pharmaceutical-drug-now-exceeds-2-5b/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cost-to-develop-ne...

runholm 11y ago

The issue is that with medicine, it cost vast amounts of money to develop and test a medicine. If there was nothing making sure the investment would pay of, there would be much less money spent developing medicine. I am not saying the system is perfect, and some companies push the prices to the ridiculous to exploit people in need, but removing medical patents altogether would require some other equally strong economic incentive to keep development rolling.

Fuxy 11y ago
The prices pharma companies ask for is ridiculous and makes the drug unavailable to 90% of the people that need it. if they priced their drug to make it more accessible they could easily make the development cost back by making money off the 90% they left to die or hunt for drugs on the Indian market. There needs to be a balance between getting drugs to the people that need it and making a profit. Currently that balance is non existent and pharma companies charge ridiculous amounts knowing full well that us insurance companies will pay it. You know how the rest of the planet feels when your insurance company refuses to pay for your drugs and you have to pay for it yourself.
- ucaetano 11y ago
  Would you invest your money in a pharma company that returned below-the-market risk-adjusted returns?
  - Fuxy 11y ago
    No because the market is part of the problem. I would however invest (read as donate) in a non profit pharma with the sole goal of developing drugs and covering their development cost.
    - ucaetano 11y ago
      You can do that already, just donate to universities and public research institutions doing drug research. Now, do you think that investors should be forced to invest in pharma companies offering lower-than-market returns?

deciplex 11y ago

> Except the corporation or inventor(s) making money off of it, I can't think of anything significant. But, that alone is significant enough to justify most intellectual property: patents, copyright, etc. But, it's not nearly enough to justify a patent system that allows you to patent absolutely obvious bullshit then turn around and sue everyone. And, it doesn't justify our copyright system either, with insane terms which span centuries. So I would agree that it's an open question whether the way we do intellectual property now is better than absolutely nothing i.e. everything publicly known is automatically public domain. I suspect we'd be better off with no patents and no copyright, than with what we have now. But intellectual property in theory and properly implemented, is unquestionably a fine idea, and obviously far superior both to the shit show we have now, and also to a Wild West approach. Anyway, it's not like you need patents to gouge patients cf epipen, insulin, where patents ran out decades ago and yet, strangely, stuff that costs a few dollars to actually make, is priced in the hundreds of dollars.

zanny 11y ago
> But, that alone is significant enough to justify most intellectual property: patents, copyright, etc. No, certainly not. Guaranteeing corporate profits are never a justifiable reason to restrict freedom of information so severely. You do not need a patent on plastic forks to make money selling them. If there is demand, the floating price will be above the price of manufacture, and the economy is incentivized to meet that demand. If drug recipes were not patented, and there was demand for a drug, once the profit overcomes opportunity cost everyone in industry has incentive to start meeting the demand. Plenty of arguments exist in this thread why you do not need private for-profit research to discover medicine - and why in many ways having such a system is counter-productive in the first place (the industry consistently refuses to consider anything as a product they cannot patent - and will actively harm people by not selling products they know work but that they cannot guarantee long-term monopoly on).
- deciplex 11y ago
  Yes, certainly. And OP said corporation or inventor. As long as we're doing capitalism, we ought to have a way for people to make a living off of knowledge work and the arts. Not selling physical artifacts of knowledge work, or making some sort of other derivative income off of it, but profiting directly from the generation and POC of good ideas. It is a system that served us well for one hundred years or more before being hijacked by a pack of ruthless jackals - I probably agree that if we can't fix it it's better to tear it down, but we should still try to fix it.

melling 11y ago

This should be a HN FAQ because every time the topic comes up, someone makes your invalid argument. Well, it's not really an argument but more of the sympathy card. It cost billions to develop a drug and pennies to make it. Can you explain the business model where companies don't go out of business and research dries up? India is creating drug resistant bacteria because antibiotics are so overused. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/world/asia/superbugs-kill-indias-babies-and-pose-an-overseas-threat.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/world/asia/superbugs-kill-... Who's going to pay for the research needed to prevent a pandemic? I'm going to write a blog so this question doesn't need to be answered every couple of months. How about India with a million people turning 18 every month (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11232383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11232383), develop a drug industry to create better and cheaper new drugs, while creating great jobs for people who need them? Of course, if you simply give away everyone's work, no company is going to stay in business.

dineshp2 11y ago
My point was that innovation and financial reward need to be decoupled to ensure valuable knowledge is not locked behind IP. > Of course, if you simply give away everyone's work, no company is going to stay in business. To think about a future without ridiculous restrictions on access to knowledge(which IP law promotes implicitly), it is important to stop accepting the status quo in which innovation and financial reward are directly linked. You seem to accept the reality that innovation has to be linked to financial reward by gaining exclusive rights over the invention using IP laws,which,respectfully,is preposterous.
- melling 11y ago
  Can you provide some concrete examples of the business model, and how it works? Perhaps some new agile startups could disrupt big pharma. You can't realistically expect people to accept that you have a better plan without offering real evidence that it works.
  - dineshp2 11y ago

ekianjo 11y ago

> I find the concept of intellectual property and patents ridiculous. I think what's more ridiculous is that the patent system was not made, in the first place, to lock competition out of the market. It was supposed to be a starting point to create licenses for other companies to produce the same item, by providing royalty fees to the original patent owner. But the system has quickly become a way to create rents and lock competitors out of the market. Short of fixing patents by making them shorter and all, we should find a way to market licenses at reasonable costs so that alternatives exist even during patent protection.