10 ms·

What If The Very Theory That Underlies Why We Need Patents Is Wrong?

82 points by yanw 17y ago

binspace 17y ago
I've found plenty of research that concludes that patents hinder innovation. I have been able to find any studies that conclude that patents help innovation. Can somebody provide links if there are any? I only see the number of patents mentioned as "evidence" of innovation.
- njl 17y ago
  What about drug discovery? The road to approval is a long, risky, and amazingly expensive one. Without patent protection, there wouldn't be a lot of incentive to develop new drugs. I think, as software people, we tend to generalize the ridiculousness of software patents, and we decide that all patents are ridiculous. There are industries where innovation is the result of serious risk and serious investment, and it is in everyone's best interest to encourage that. The rub is figuring out which industries and which classes of innovation should be protected, and which should not be protected.
  - binspace 17y ago
    > What about drug discovery? I can see how patents could help there. Are there any studies that favor patents?
  - blahedo 17y ago
    Even with patent protection, there's only direct incentive to develop new drugs for rich people, who can pay for them---which is why you don't see as much research on medicines for malaria as, say, erectile dysfunction.
    - hugh3 17y ago
      Is that true? Is there really less research on medicines for malaria than erectile dysfunction? I've met a whole bunch of malaria researchers, but never an erectile dysfunction researcher.
      - cma 17y ago
        It is clear from the context that he is talking about private-market research, not NSF funded university research, etc.
    - stretchwithme 17y ago
      good point I would also argue that a lot of people invest in finding a solution to problems that affect themselves or loved ones without any thought to the possible financial return. The cure is what they want and its worth spending money to obtain.
  - stretchwithme 17y ago
    I'm working on a medical device, so can't say I am only thinking about software patents. I would suggest the bounty system as a way to deal with the need for CURES to disease. Or treatments if cures are not possible. There is a cost to innovating and a cost of dealing with the government. Yes, dealing with the government is a very expensive process. Ensuring safety is important. Does the current approach accomplish this? Some would question that it does. Still, whoever pays that bill and takes the risk of never being paid back should get a fair return if successful. If one feels that the government has the right to create this enormous regulatory burden, than it can certainly assign the benefits of going through all of that to the one paying the bills for a sufficient time to recover those costs. I qualify that because I don't quite agree the government should be involved or that coercion is necessary, but that is a whole other can of worms. If there is a benefit to be had, there is a price worth paying. I just don't automatically assume government is the way to make that happen. We are quite used to seeing government or coercion as the method, but I think other mechanisms can make the same beneficial occur. For the most part, I think government is a far greater impediment to many good things than most people realize. But I give your comment a point. Its a valid concern.
- edanm 17y ago
  I'm guessing that less research exists because it's not as "sexy". The patent system exists, the assumption is that it works. Why would anyone think to do a study to prove it? On the other hand, proving that it doesn't work is certainly an interesting research topic.
  - gwern 17y ago
    Everyone who is invested in patents has massive incentive to fund such research, especially in cases like the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Is the patent office really going to fund or support research to the effect that the patent office should be abolished?
- kjuhygfgbhjnm 17y ago
  The usual arguement is William Smellie's forceps. He was a doctor in the 1700s that invented the forceps used to deliver babies, but because if he publicized them anybody else would have copied the idea he kept them secret. They were independantly rediscovered about a century later - but how many lives were lost in those 100years!
  - gridspy 17y ago
    Of course if he used them today the new father would tweet about it and the secret would be out.
    - artsrc 17y ago
      He carefully hid them from both the father and the mother.
secretasiandan 17y ago
Regardless of the validity of this or other arguments against the current patent system, how viable would an effort to reform the system be? I think it would take a tremendous force to do so. Something on the order of a developed (not even imminent) and undeniable disadvantage relative to other countries who have a different system. An analogy would be that you'll never be able to remove government entitlements unless the nation faces bankruptcy because the recipients will fight tooth and nail to keep them.
- binspace 17y ago
  You can work around the system until it becomes irrelevant. For example, patents are not prevalent in software. There is hardly an innovation crisis in software. Hardware design is also becoming more like software design. Same with business processes.
  - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
    >There is hardly an innovation crisis in software. Tell that to the HTML5 video codec people.
  - binspace 17y ago
    > Tell that to the HTML5 video codec people. Yes I will. HTML5 (and thus HTML5 video codecs) are still very young in the grand scheme of things. It's pretty innovative stuff and it's evidence that patents slow down innovation via collaboration.
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
I thought this was an elegant defence of open source: > This result hinges on the fact that the innovative design itself is a non-rival good: each participant in a collaborative effort gets the value of the whole design, but incurs only a fraction of the design cost.
- secretasiandan 17y ago
  I wouldn't call that a defense of open source because I didn't realize that people giving things of their own will needed defense. In fact, I would refer to open source as an attack on the rationale for the patent system.
- api 17y ago
  Nope. Without some sort of patent, each participant in a collaborate effort gets nothing and whomever is most successful in marketing the result gets everything.
  - lutorm 17y ago
    You assume they collaborate to sell whatever the result of the collaboration is.
    - api 17y ago
      Don't get me wrong... I used to totally buy the open source idealistic worldview. Then I actually got involved in business. You don't understand what a brawl business can be. People almost never collaborate to sell! You want the customers, you want the leverage! Heh... collaborate to sell... how cute... Marketing is more winner-take-all than anything else. Nice happy idealism sounds really great until you end up in the real world with people competing over money when they have kids, mortgages to pay, etc.
      - kjuhygfgbhjnm 17y ago
        You are a US car company - you find the cheapest supplier and every year cut the amount you are willing to pay - when the supplier goes broke you start again. Most of your costs and effort is put into writing contracts and NDAs and making sure that no information leaks from your engineers to the supplier. If the supplier makes faulty brakes - you sue them, spending 10x as much on lawyers as on engineers. You are a Japanese car company - you work with your suppliers and often invest in them, you lend them your engineers to make their process more efficent, every year their costs go down and you both make more profit. If they make bad parts you spend the money you would have spent on lawyers on fixing the problem and stopping it happening again. Of course this level of cooperation is the reason Japanese car companies can't pay their mortgages while US car companies dominate the world. But I suppose it works for cute little outfits like Mitsubishi or Fuji.
snewe 17y ago
Here is the paper they cite: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1502864 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1502864 One of the authors of the research paper has a lot of work on innovation and open source in general: http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers.htm http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers.htm
- pasbesoin 17y ago
  Do I ever hate the SSRN web site. Damned thing never actually produces the file for me. Thanks for the link to the author's site. He has a non SSRN link to the paper on the following page; the link text is the "(PDF)" that follows the SSRN link he first cites. http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers/evh-08.htm http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers/evh-08.htm
  - warfangle 17y ago
    Thanks for that - I'd found a free version via scholar.google.com
dasil003 17y ago
In reality there's a spectrum. If the patent office would actually enforce the non-obvious clause rather than running as a cash cow then a lot of problems would be solved off the bat. I think of drug companies and software companies as the two extreme examples. Drug development is basically a money-losing proposition without patents, because it takes millions to get to anything useful, and once you do it's distilled down into something that's almost trivially easy to copy. With software on the other hand, innovation happens in tiny steps. Often patents are granted to ideas that took someone a few days to come up with. As software is built, hundreds or thousands of these ideas come together to (hopefully) create a high value application. Once you have a high value application as long as you don't release the source code it's not easy to copy. The patents don't help someone recreate it. They have to pour blood and sweat into the codebase to come up with something that actually replicates the value. In other words the patent helps no one but the trolls. Of course this is obvious to any software developer which is why we reflexively assume patents are bad. However in between software and drugs, in the space real physical inventions, things are quite a bit grayer. In the case of physical things, the "obviousness" test is a little easier to apply because everyone has some familiarity with tools and objects, and R&D can be fairly expensive for a lot of simple end products. It seems to me that the underlying theory of patents is fundamentally sound, but just has absolutely no applicability to software.
- esspem 17y ago
  Why do you think software business model can't be applied to drug development? On of the biggest problem with drug research is that it's highly regulated by government, so it's too costly for a small startup. Remove this regulations and you'll get a software-like situation with thousands of startups and new drugs. e.g. read this: http://daniellefong.com/2010/02/11/how-law-shapes-the-business-landscape-and-a-patent-puzzle/ http://daniellefong.com/2010/02/11/how-law-shapes-the-busine...
  - barmstrong 17y ago
    Exactly what I was thinking....the main reason drug development cost all those millions (and I believe about 10 years on average) is the FDA. We should be careful not to let one mistake justify another.
stretchwithme 17y ago
I think patents are a big impediment to innovation. And I think they are morally wrong. Why do I lose my right to do something because you write that thing down before I do? Coming up with an idea is only a very small part of the battle. Making a viable product is much harder but also not the biggest problem. The biggest challenge often is getting people to buy a thing. And we already have significant incentives in place for that. There are things that we need that take a great deal of investment to discover and that cannot be protected with trade secrets. But if the innovation is of significant value, presumably one can make a profit from it and get to market faster than the competition, so there is reward for innovating. People that need an innovation can also create a bounty or reward for making it happen. And we have seen a lot effort in response to things like the x prize and darpa's grand challenge. So I don't see how the alleged benefits of patents justify the curtailment of individual rights.
- api 17y ago
  The problem is that money trickles down from the point of transaction, and the volume of the trickle is determined by your leverage. So what you're saying is that the people who get people to buy a thing should make almost all the money, followed by the people who make viable products, followed by the people who do the research and development and come up with the ideas coming in dead last. The problem is: in this model, the people who come in dead last are the ones who keep the innovation pipeline full. I don't like the present patent system, but without something like it the only people who make any money are those in marketing.
  - troystribling 17y ago
    You could argue that whether a patent is awarded for an invention should have a dependency on the capital required to produce the innovation. Innovation, distribution and marketing for software has become so inexpensive that patents are seen as an impediment to innovation. While for innovations requiring more capital this may not be the case.
    - api 17y ago
thaumaturgy 17y ago
As usual, history provides a slightly more useful perspective on patents, and on how their utility is changing along with society. Although the idea of patents was first introduced a very long time ago, their modern version didn't show up until the 1800s or so. At that time, there were meager tools available to the average citizen, and innovation then wasn't like it is today. It more typically required a disproportionate outlay of resources, especially given that (at the time) labor was relatively cheaper than technology in the southern parts of the U.S. Later, the U.S. underwent the industrial revolution, and innovation moved from profit-motivated individuals to profit-motivated companies; again, patents were seen -- correctly, at the time -- to be fostering the innovation that was advancing America's technological development. But the landscape is much different today. The average individual has at hand resources that would have been remarkable to Ford or Edison, and probably dumbfounding to Eli Whitney. For roughly a month's salary, I might accumulate all of the materials I need to invent a new kind of robot, and if I'm interested in software, then all I need is a computer, some time, and a problem to solve. So, now patents are no longer as justifiably the protectors of innovation, and now the case can be made that they are actually hindering it. Conditions aren't the same now as they always were.
- kjuhygfgbhjnm 17y ago
  The newly industrial US ignored foreign patents and copyrights - claiming they were an attempt by europe to keep the new country down. Dicken's Martin Chuzzlewit is an attack on the widespread (legal) piracy of his works in the US. It's also how US steel got it's head start - by not having to pay a license for the Bessemer converter. Then at the end of the 19C when the US was industrialized it suddenly got a lot more interested in patents. It's rather like how Disney wants to use 19th century fairy tales in it's cartoons for free while making sure it's stories will still be copyrighted in the 29th century
- kjuhygfgbhjnm 17y ago
  The newly industrial US ignored foreign patents and copyrights - claiming they were an attempt by europe to keep the new country down. Dicken's Martin Chuzzlewit is an attack on the widespread (legal) piracy of his works in the US. It's also how US steel got it's head start - by not having to pay a license for the Bessemer converter. Then at the end of the 19C when the US was industrialized it suddenly got a lot more interested in patents. It's rather like how Disney wants to use 19th century fairy tales in it's cartoons for free while making sure it's stories will still be copyrighted in the 29th century
rsl7 17y ago
I think the bar is just far too low.
jongraehl 17y ago
"the putative theory that..." this is bad usage. it's definitely a theory.
grellas 17y ago
The idea behind patents is to given inventors an incentive to disclose their inventions to the public in exchange for getting a monopoly on them for a limited time. Even the word patent derives for its Latin antecedent meaning "open" (in contrast to its English-derived counterpart, "latent"). And, of course, a monopoly grant over any invention will by definition hinder others from using that same invention during the term of the monopoly. In open, collaborative environments, you have openness by definition and you have no need to give inventors incentives to disclose because they are doing this axiomatically day-by-day as they routinely share their development work. In such an environment, it will appear absurd to the inventors that they should be hindered from doing their work by arbitrary restrictions granted to a monopolist over what they regard as routine tools of their trade. This seems arbitrary, capricious, and damaging. Such a system can even be perceived to be obscene in allowing others who happened to win the rush to the patent office door by a hair's breadth to bring damage claims for up to two decades against others who were not quite so fleet of foot. And all the more so if the "inventor" is not really anything of the sort but rather some troll who lays about conceiving "claims" that get patented for the sole purpose of extorting money from those who truly are in the real world inventing useful products. And hideously so to those who philosophically oppose the idea of such monopoly grants altogether, and see them as being even vicious and oppressive as they are condoned by the social policy of the day as upheld by politicians, lawyers, and lobbyists. That is the case against patents as reflected in the spectrum of opinion pretty widely found here on HN, and it reflects the open, collaborative perspective many of the members here take with respect to the very idea of innovation. In essence, the paper cited in this piece says that the whole world of innovation has moved, or is rapidly moving, to a state where openness is the governing principle behind most inventions. If that is indeed true, then the authors of that paper are right by definition - a patent system that is designed to spur public disclosure by, in effect, "paying" the inventor via a temporally-limited grant of a monopolistic advantage over the invention makes no sense where inventors are more than happy to disclose it all for free based on other things that may motivate them (the gaining of recognition, the belief that useful information ought to be free, or whatever). The real question, though, is whether this assumption of the authors is a correct one. Things clearly have changed in major areas of innovation but to generalize this to the whole world of innovation may or may not be valid. And that is why the patent reform movement is in fact moving quite slowly in the broader society, whatever its fervor in the narrower circles frequented by the members here. Not saying that reform is not needed - it plainly is. Just don't be surprised if others aren't eager to join in the movement, especially when they are subjected to the counter influences brought on by lobbyists, lawyers, etc. The movement may take sway with Congress but I wouldn't expect this to happen any time soon.
jheriko 17y ago
I was going to comment here but I went off on a bit of a tangent: http://jheriko-rtw.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-patents-irritate-me-so.html http://jheriko-rtw.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-patents-irritate... I believe that no scientific theory or logical argument can support patents - further I believe my opinion can be proved fairly rigorously. Although the utility of such proof is not obvious.
ww520 17y ago
The basis for the patent system reflects the tradition of individualism in this country. The idea of a lone inventor (or lone company) creating new stuff is romantic but unrealistic. Invention is often building on top of other ideas and knowledge. It's more of a collaborating effort, as this paper re-affirmed.

82 points by yanw 17y ago

I've found plenty of research that concludes that patents hinder innovation. I have been able to find any studies that conclude that patents help innovation. Can somebody provide links if there are any? I only see the number of patents mentioned as "evidence" of innovation.

njl 17y ago
What about drug discovery? The road to approval is a long, risky, and amazingly expensive one. Without patent protection, there wouldn't be a lot of incentive to develop new drugs. I think, as software people, we tend to generalize the ridiculousness of software patents, and we decide that all patents are ridiculous. There are industries where innovation is the result of serious risk and serious investment, and it is in everyone's best interest to encourage that. The rub is figuring out which industries and which classes of innovation should be protected, and which should not be protected.
- binspace 17y ago
  > What about drug discovery? I can see how patents could help there. Are there any studies that favor patents?
- blahedo 17y ago
  Even with patent protection, there's only direct incentive to develop new drugs for rich people, who can pay for them---which is why you don't see as much research on medicines for malaria as, say, erectile dysfunction.
  - hugh3 17y ago
    Is that true? Is there really less research on medicines for malaria than erectile dysfunction? I've met a whole bunch of malaria researchers, but never an erectile dysfunction researcher.
    - cma 17y ago
      It is clear from the context that he is talking about private-market research, not NSF funded university research, etc.
  - stretchwithme 17y ago
    good point I would also argue that a lot of people invest in finding a solution to problems that affect themselves or loved ones without any thought to the possible financial return. The cure is what they want and its worth spending money to obtain.
- stretchwithme 17y ago
  I'm working on a medical device, so can't say I am only thinking about software patents. I would suggest the bounty system as a way to deal with the need for CURES to disease. Or treatments if cures are not possible. There is a cost to innovating and a cost of dealing with the government. Yes, dealing with the government is a very expensive process. Ensuring safety is important. Does the current approach accomplish this? Some would question that it does. Still, whoever pays that bill and takes the risk of never being paid back should get a fair return if successful. If one feels that the government has the right to create this enormous regulatory burden, than it can certainly assign the benefits of going through all of that to the one paying the bills for a sufficient time to recover those costs. I qualify that because I don't quite agree the government should be involved or that coercion is necessary, but that is a whole other can of worms. If there is a benefit to be had, there is a price worth paying. I just don't automatically assume government is the way to make that happen. We are quite used to seeing government or coercion as the method, but I think other mechanisms can make the same beneficial occur. For the most part, I think government is a far greater impediment to many good things than most people realize. But I give your comment a point. Its a valid concern.
edanm 17y ago
I'm guessing that less research exists because it's not as "sexy". The patent system exists, the assumption is that it works. Why would anyone think to do a study to prove it? On the other hand, proving that it doesn't work is certainly an interesting research topic.
- gwern 17y ago
  Everyone who is invested in patents has massive incentive to fund such research, especially in cases like the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Is the patent office really going to fund or support research to the effect that the patent office should be abolished?
kjuhygfgbhjnm 17y ago
The usual arguement is William Smellie's forceps. He was a doctor in the 1700s that invented the forceps used to deliver babies, but because if he publicized them anybody else would have copied the idea he kept them secret. They were independantly rediscovered about a century later - but how many lives were lost in those 100years!
- gridspy 17y ago
  Of course if he used them today the new father would tweet about it and the secret would be out.
  - artsrc 17y ago
    He carefully hid them from both the father and the mother.

secretasiandan 17y ago

Regardless of the validity of this or other arguments against the current patent system, how viable would an effort to reform the system be? I think it would take a tremendous force to do so. Something on the order of a developed (not even imminent) and undeniable disadvantage relative to other countries who have a different system. An analogy would be that you'll never be able to remove government entitlements unless the nation faces bankruptcy because the recipients will fight tooth and nail to keep them.

binspace 17y ago
You can work around the system until it becomes irrelevant. For example, patents are not prevalent in software. There is hardly an innovation crisis in software. Hardware design is also becoming more like software design. Same with business processes.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  >There is hardly an innovation crisis in software. Tell that to the HTML5 video codec people.
- binspace 17y ago
  > Tell that to the HTML5 video codec people. Yes I will. HTML5 (and thus HTML5 video codecs) are still very young in the grand scheme of things. It's pretty innovative stuff and it's evidence that patents slow down innovation via collaboration.

RyanMcGreal 17y ago

I thought this was an elegant defence of open source: > This result hinges on the fact that the innovative design itself is a non-rival good: each participant in a collaborative effort gets the value of the whole design, but incurs only a fraction of the design cost.

secretasiandan 17y ago
I wouldn't call that a defense of open source because I didn't realize that people giving things of their own will needed defense. In fact, I would refer to open source as an attack on the rationale for the patent system.
api 17y ago
Nope. Without some sort of patent, each participant in a collaborate effort gets nothing and whomever is most successful in marketing the result gets everything.
- lutorm 17y ago
  You assume they collaborate to sell whatever the result of the collaboration is.
  - api 17y ago
    Don't get me wrong... I used to totally buy the open source idealistic worldview. Then I actually got involved in business. You don't understand what a brawl business can be. People almost never collaborate to sell! You want the customers, you want the leverage! Heh... collaborate to sell... how cute... Marketing is more winner-take-all than anything else. Nice happy idealism sounds really great until you end up in the real world with people competing over money when they have kids, mortgages to pay, etc.
    - kjuhygfgbhjnm 17y ago
      You are a US car company - you find the cheapest supplier and every year cut the amount you are willing to pay - when the supplier goes broke you start again. Most of your costs and effort is put into writing contracts and NDAs and making sure that no information leaks from your engineers to the supplier. If the supplier makes faulty brakes - you sue them, spending 10x as much on lawyers as on engineers. You are a Japanese car company - you work with your suppliers and often invest in them, you lend them your engineers to make their process more efficent, every year their costs go down and you both make more profit. If they make bad parts you spend the money you would have spent on lawyers on fixing the problem and stopping it happening again. Of course this level of cooperation is the reason Japanese car companies can't pay their mortgages while US car companies dominate the world. But I suppose it works for cute little outfits like Mitsubishi or Fuji.

snewe 17y ago

Here is the paper they cite: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1502864 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1502864 One of the authors of the research paper has a lot of work on innovation and open source in general: http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers.htm http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers.htm

pasbesoin 17y ago
Do I ever hate the SSRN web site. Damned thing never actually produces the file for me. Thanks for the link to the author's site. He has a non SSRN link to the paper on the following page; the link text is the "(PDF)" that follows the SSRN link he first cites. http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers/evh-08.htm http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers/evh-08.htm
- warfangle 17y ago
  Thanks for that - I'd found a free version via scholar.google.com

dasil003 17y ago

In reality there's a spectrum. If the patent office would actually enforce the non-obvious clause rather than running as a cash cow then a lot of problems would be solved off the bat. I think of drug companies and software companies as the two extreme examples. Drug development is basically a money-losing proposition without patents, because it takes millions to get to anything useful, and once you do it's distilled down into something that's almost trivially easy to copy. With software on the other hand, innovation happens in tiny steps. Often patents are granted to ideas that took someone a few days to come up with. As software is built, hundreds or thousands of these ideas come together to (hopefully) create a high value application. Once you have a high value application as long as you don't release the source code it's not easy to copy. The patents don't help someone recreate it. They have to pour blood and sweat into the codebase to come up with something that actually replicates the value. In other words the patent helps no one but the trolls. Of course this is obvious to any software developer which is why we reflexively assume patents are bad. However in between software and drugs, in the space real physical inventions, things are quite a bit grayer. In the case of physical things, the "obviousness" test is a little easier to apply because everyone has some familiarity with tools and objects, and R&D can be fairly expensive for a lot of simple end products. It seems to me that the underlying theory of patents is fundamentally sound, but just has absolutely no applicability to software.

esspem 17y ago
Why do you think software business model can't be applied to drug development? On of the biggest problem with drug research is that it's highly regulated by government, so it's too costly for a small startup. Remove this regulations and you'll get a software-like situation with thousands of startups and new drugs. e.g. read this: http://daniellefong.com/2010/02/11/how-law-shapes-the-business-landscape-and-a-patent-puzzle/ http://daniellefong.com/2010/02/11/how-law-shapes-the-busine...
- barmstrong 17y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking....the main reason drug development cost all those millions (and I believe about 10 years on average) is the FDA. We should be careful not to let one mistake justify another.

stretchwithme 17y ago

I think patents are a big impediment to innovation. And I think they are morally wrong. Why do I lose my right to do something because you write that thing down before I do? Coming up with an idea is only a very small part of the battle. Making a viable product is much harder but also not the biggest problem. The biggest challenge often is getting people to buy a thing. And we already have significant incentives in place for that. There are things that we need that take a great deal of investment to discover and that cannot be protected with trade secrets. But if the innovation is of significant value, presumably one can make a profit from it and get to market faster than the competition, so there is reward for innovating. People that need an innovation can also create a bounty or reward for making it happen. And we have seen a lot effort in response to things like the x prize and darpa's grand challenge. So I don't see how the alleged benefits of patents justify the curtailment of individual rights.

api 17y ago
The problem is that money trickles down from the point of transaction, and the volume of the trickle is determined by your leverage. So what you're saying is that the people who get people to buy a thing should make almost all the money, followed by the people who make viable products, followed by the people who do the research and development and come up with the ideas coming in dead last. The problem is: in this model, the people who come in dead last are the ones who keep the innovation pipeline full. I don't like the present patent system, but without something like it the only people who make any money are those in marketing.
- troystribling 17y ago
  You could argue that whether a patent is awarded for an invention should have a dependency on the capital required to produce the innovation. Innovation, distribution and marketing for software has become so inexpensive that patents are seen as an impediment to innovation. While for innovations requiring more capital this may not be the case.
  - api 17y ago

thaumaturgy 17y ago

As usual, history provides a slightly more useful perspective on patents, and on how their utility is changing along with society. Although the idea of patents was first introduced a very long time ago, their modern version didn't show up until the 1800s or so. At that time, there were meager tools available to the average citizen, and innovation then wasn't like it is today. It more typically required a disproportionate outlay of resources, especially given that (at the time) labor was relatively cheaper than technology in the southern parts of the U.S. Later, the U.S. underwent the industrial revolution, and innovation moved from profit-motivated individuals to profit-motivated companies; again, patents were seen -- correctly, at the time -- to be fostering the innovation that was advancing America's technological development. But the landscape is much different today. The average individual has at hand resources that would have been remarkable to Ford or Edison, and probably dumbfounding to Eli Whitney. For roughly a month's salary, I might accumulate all of the materials I need to invent a new kind of robot, and if I'm interested in software, then all I need is a computer, some time, and a problem to solve. So, now patents are no longer as justifiably the protectors of innovation, and now the case can be made that they are actually hindering it. Conditions aren't the same now as they always were.

kjuhygfgbhjnm 17y ago
The newly industrial US ignored foreign patents and copyrights - claiming they were an attempt by europe to keep the new country down. Dicken's Martin Chuzzlewit is an attack on the widespread (legal) piracy of his works in the US. It's also how US steel got it's head start - by not having to pay a license for the Bessemer converter. Then at the end of the 19C when the US was industrialized it suddenly got a lot more interested in patents. It's rather like how Disney wants to use 19th century fairy tales in it's cartoons for free while making sure it's stories will still be copyrighted in the 29th century
kjuhygfgbhjnm 17y ago
The newly industrial US ignored foreign patents and copyrights - claiming they were an attempt by europe to keep the new country down. Dicken's Martin Chuzzlewit is an attack on the widespread (legal) piracy of his works in the US. It's also how US steel got it's head start - by not having to pay a license for the Bessemer converter. Then at the end of the 19C when the US was industrialized it suddenly got a lot more interested in patents. It's rather like how Disney wants to use 19th century fairy tales in it's cartoons for free while making sure it's stories will still be copyrighted in the 29th century

rsl7 17y ago

I think the bar is just far too low.

jongraehl 17y ago

"the putative theory that..." this is bad usage. it's definitely a theory.

grellas 17y ago

The idea behind patents is to given inventors an incentive to disclose their inventions to the public in exchange for getting a monopoly on them for a limited time. Even the word patent derives for its Latin antecedent meaning "open" (in contrast to its English-derived counterpart, "latent"). And, of course, a monopoly grant over any invention will by definition hinder others from using that same invention during the term of the monopoly. In open, collaborative environments, you have openness by definition and you have no need to give inventors incentives to disclose because they are doing this axiomatically day-by-day as they routinely share their development work. In such an environment, it will appear absurd to the inventors that they should be hindered from doing their work by arbitrary restrictions granted to a monopolist over what they regard as routine tools of their trade. This seems arbitrary, capricious, and damaging. Such a system can even be perceived to be obscene in allowing others who happened to win the rush to the patent office door by a hair's breadth to bring damage claims for up to two decades against others who were not quite so fleet of foot. And all the more so if the "inventor" is not really anything of the sort but rather some troll who lays about conceiving "claims" that get patented for the sole purpose of extorting money from those who truly are in the real world inventing useful products. And hideously so to those who philosophically oppose the idea of such monopoly grants altogether, and see them as being even vicious and oppressive as they are condoned by the social policy of the day as upheld by politicians, lawyers, and lobbyists. That is the case against patents as reflected in the spectrum of opinion pretty widely found here on HN, and it reflects the open, collaborative perspective many of the members here take with respect to the very idea of innovation. In essence, the paper cited in this piece says that the whole world of innovation has moved, or is rapidly moving, to a state where openness is the governing principle behind most inventions. If that is indeed true, then the authors of that paper are right by definition - a patent system that is designed to spur public disclosure by, in effect, "paying" the inventor via a temporally-limited grant of a monopolistic advantage over the invention makes no sense where inventors are more than happy to disclose it all for free based on other things that may motivate them (the gaining of recognition, the belief that useful information ought to be free, or whatever). The real question, though, is whether this assumption of the authors is a correct one. Things clearly have changed in major areas of innovation but to generalize this to the whole world of innovation may or may not be valid. And that is why the patent reform movement is in fact moving quite slowly in the broader society, whatever its fervor in the narrower circles frequented by the members here. Not saying that reform is not needed - it plainly is. Just don't be surprised if others aren't eager to join in the movement, especially when they are subjected to the counter influences brought on by lobbyists, lawyers, etc. The movement may take sway with Congress but I wouldn't expect this to happen any time soon.

jheriko 17y ago

I was going to comment here but I went off on a bit of a tangent: http://jheriko-rtw.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-patents-irritate-me-so.html http://jheriko-rtw.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-patents-irritate... I believe that no scientific theory or logical argument can support patents - further I believe my opinion can be proved fairly rigorously. Although the utility of such proof is not obvious.

ww520 17y ago

The basis for the patent system reflects the tradition of individualism in this country. The idea of a lone inventor (or lone company) creating new stuff is romantic but unrealistic. Invention is often building on top of other ideas and knowledge. It's more of a collaborating effort, as this paper re-affirmed.