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> why do there need to be patents (and effective monopoly protections) on top of that? It's explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause htt

> why do there need to be patents (and effective monopoly protections) on top of that? It's explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." It's to avoid free-riders copying an invention after someone else researches the related dead ends.

dave_sullivan 10y ago
I understand the argument, I just don't think it "promotes the Progress of Science and useful Arts". If you were to remove patent protections, the progress of science and useful art would not suddenly take a nose dive. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that patents stifle progress in art and science. Also there's a big distinction between copyright and patents. You don't hear about copyright trolls as often; it's not as crippled of a system.
- tomcam 10y ago
  It's a compromise. The framers of the Constitution had battles about that. Some of them thought patents were bad, some thought they promoted innovation.
- taneq 10y ago
  You'd get a short term boost, with a flurry of activity around the suddenly freed patents, leading to a lot of incremental work. You'd then get a longer term slump, as all companies stop investing in basic research and long-term R&D, since they can just wait and copy someone else's research instead. When building real physical products, being second to market by a few weeks costs far less than the years of R&D required to build a truly revolutionary product, not to mention you can use that R&D money to either (a) polish the your product more than the inventor's original product, or (b) splurge on marketing.
  - dave_sullivan 10y ago
    > being second to market by a few weeks costs far less than the years of R&D required to build a truly revolutionary product Can you point to a time where this has turned out to be true by your estimation? An example of a product where there was a tremendous amount of R&D required and the only thing saving the company from being destroyed by competitors beating them to the market 2 weeks later was a strong patent portfolio? Even in the original iPhone presentation, there's a point where Steve is like, "Oh, and you bet we patented it, lol." But was that why the iphone succeeded? Was that why it could exist in the first place? Were it not for those patents, would Apple have been crushed by competitors mimicking them? The pro-patent arguments are always expressed as hypotheticals, whereas there are numerous specific examples of patents hurting smaller companies unable to afford the cost of defending themselves. I'd be very interested in situations where the upshot is, "Oh boy, good thing for science and art that those patents existed."
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      A huge company like Apple is a bad example. The best example of patents working well are when they are used by startups formed from university research groups. You have a group of people that has performed basic research with minimum funding and decides to commercialize an idea. Since the group's work is already published in conferences and/or journals[1], it is extremely easy for a huge company to just throw some money at the idea and come out with a commercial implementation. But with patents in hand, the research group and the university can decide to either sell the patents to the highest bidder, or continue developing the product if they see the potential. And since the idea is protected by the law, no amount of money can kill the company. I actually believe that the US patent system is one reason behind the success of advanced tech startups here. [1]: Publication of results is a requirement for virtually all types of research funding. In other words, if you don't patent the outcome of your research, it's essentially in the public domain.
      - dave_sullivan 10y ago
        That sounds pretty reasonable, but what's a specific example of this happening? One that comes to mind is CRISPR, and the patent dispute over that has literally held the field back. CRISPR is the thing that's going to cure cancer, and it's being held back because of patent nonsense. I can't prove it, but if patents didn't exist, I'm pretty sure CRISPR (and the specific nuances at the heart of the actual patent dispute) would nonetheless have been discovered. Meanwhile compare to something like deep learning, which is uniquely unencumbered by patents for several reasons. Yet somehow corporations seem to be interested and the pace of progress is rapid.
- twblalock 10y ago
  > If you were to remove patent protections, the progress of science and useful art would not suddenly take a nose dive. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that patents stifle progress in art and science. Why would corporations be motivated to promote progress in science if someone else could come along and get all of their hard-earned research and development for free? It costs millions or billions of dollars to drive innovation, and there are very few (if any) corporations idealistic enough to spend that kind of money if they don't think they will be able to earn it back.
  - mcbits 10y ago
    Because the other option besides innovation is to compete in the "drive margins to zero" space, which isn't very profitable. Patents don't drive innovation. They supposedly prevent innovation from being locked up in trade secrets to live and die with the inventor. But today's patents are written by lawyers and for lawyers. Patents are usually so terrible at their one job - elucidating inventions - that it takes years of debate between experts just to decide whether a patent even applies to an existing product. They are of no value to the public 20 years later. The whole system has become a make-work welfare program for lawyers and a barrier to free competition.
- tracker1 10y ago
  I would suggest that anything that can be implemented as an abstraction in software alone probably should be limited to no more than 5 years of protection, without any possibility of extension patents... Even then, it would be far better than what we have. Drug/Medical patents need some reform that may need to include compulsory licensing after 3-5 years, and a dual-source requirement (two manufacturers) in order to be covered by government subsidized/paid for insurance programs (including VA, Medicare and gov't employees).
- kelnos 10y ago
  Note that the term "useful Arts" as used in the Constitution doesn't mean art as in performance or fine art, it means the same thing as if you were saying that something is "state of the art" -- methods of construction, craftmanship, or manufacture. (Though you could probably say that copyrights might in some ways stifle people's artistic expression.)
  - incompatible 10y ago
    I suppose needing a license to be able to repeat any non-trivial part of anything that anyone has done over the last lifetime + 70 years could stifle artistic expression in some way. Who knows.
- icodestuff 10y ago
  But you do hear about them. SCO, Las Vegas Review Journal, Warner Bros., Prenda Law, etc.
- spacemanmatt 10y ago
  > You don't hear about copyright trolls as often; it's not as crippled of a system. Strongly disagreed. Copyright is at least as broken as patents, if not more. Mickey Mouse and most of the Disney catalog should have gone out of copyright years ago but they lobbied our corrupt Congress for an insane extension which is now uniformly used throughout the industry. Our public domain has been thoroughly robbed. For more about abuse of the copyright system and courts in general, see the history of abuse meted out by Prenda Law against various innocent parties. That shit show never should have happened, and it took courts years to stop it. Prenda attorneys are now turning state's witness against each other because they're so busted.
imjustsaying 10y ago
>It's to avoid free-riders copying an invention after someone else researches the related dead ends. How much did you pay to use the language and the vocabulary you're using in this post?
hbgl 10y ago
> "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts ... " That's begging the question. How much innovation is gained and how much is lost? Nobody can give an answer.

dave_sullivan 10y ago

I understand the argument, I just don't think it "promotes the Progress of Science and useful Arts". If you were to remove patent protections, the progress of science and useful art would not suddenly take a nose dive. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that patents stifle progress in art and science. Also there's a big distinction between copyright and patents. You don't hear about copyright trolls as often; it's not as crippled of a system.

tomcam 10y ago
It's a compromise. The framers of the Constitution had battles about that. Some of them thought patents were bad, some thought they promoted innovation.
taneq 10y ago
You'd get a short term boost, with a flurry of activity around the suddenly freed patents, leading to a lot of incremental work. You'd then get a longer term slump, as all companies stop investing in basic research and long-term R&D, since they can just wait and copy someone else's research instead. When building real physical products, being second to market by a few weeks costs far less than the years of R&D required to build a truly revolutionary product, not to mention you can use that R&D money to either (a) polish the your product more than the inventor's original product, or (b) splurge on marketing.
- dave_sullivan 10y ago
  > being second to market by a few weeks costs far less than the years of R&D required to build a truly revolutionary product Can you point to a time where this has turned out to be true by your estimation? An example of a product where there was a tremendous amount of R&D required and the only thing saving the company from being destroyed by competitors beating them to the market 2 weeks later was a strong patent portfolio? Even in the original iPhone presentation, there's a point where Steve is like, "Oh, and you bet we patented it, lol." But was that why the iphone succeeded? Was that why it could exist in the first place? Were it not for those patents, would Apple have been crushed by competitors mimicking them? The pro-patent arguments are always expressed as hypotheticals, whereas there are numerous specific examples of patents hurting smaller companies unable to afford the cost of defending themselves. I'd be very interested in situations where the upshot is, "Oh boy, good thing for science and art that those patents existed."
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    A huge company like Apple is a bad example. The best example of patents working well are when they are used by startups formed from university research groups. You have a group of people that has performed basic research with minimum funding and decides to commercialize an idea. Since the group's work is already published in conferences and/or journals[1], it is extremely easy for a huge company to just throw some money at the idea and come out with a commercial implementation. But with patents in hand, the research group and the university can decide to either sell the patents to the highest bidder, or continue developing the product if they see the potential. And since the idea is protected by the law, no amount of money can kill the company. I actually believe that the US patent system is one reason behind the success of advanced tech startups here. [1]: Publication of results is a requirement for virtually all types of research funding. In other words, if you don't patent the outcome of your research, it's essentially in the public domain.
    - dave_sullivan 10y ago
      That sounds pretty reasonable, but what's a specific example of this happening? One that comes to mind is CRISPR, and the patent dispute over that has literally held the field back. CRISPR is the thing that's going to cure cancer, and it's being held back because of patent nonsense. I can't prove it, but if patents didn't exist, I'm pretty sure CRISPR (and the specific nuances at the heart of the actual patent dispute) would nonetheless have been discovered. Meanwhile compare to something like deep learning, which is uniquely unencumbered by patents for several reasons. Yet somehow corporations seem to be interested and the pace of progress is rapid.
twblalock 10y ago
> If you were to remove patent protections, the progress of science and useful art would not suddenly take a nose dive. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that patents stifle progress in art and science. Why would corporations be motivated to promote progress in science if someone else could come along and get all of their hard-earned research and development for free? It costs millions or billions of dollars to drive innovation, and there are very few (if any) corporations idealistic enough to spend that kind of money if they don't think they will be able to earn it back.
- mcbits 10y ago
  Because the other option besides innovation is to compete in the "drive margins to zero" space, which isn't very profitable. Patents don't drive innovation. They supposedly prevent innovation from being locked up in trade secrets to live and die with the inventor. But today's patents are written by lawyers and for lawyers. Patents are usually so terrible at their one job - elucidating inventions - that it takes years of debate between experts just to decide whether a patent even applies to an existing product. They are of no value to the public 20 years later. The whole system has become a make-work welfare program for lawyers and a barrier to free competition.
tracker1 10y ago
I would suggest that anything that can be implemented as an abstraction in software alone probably should be limited to no more than 5 years of protection, without any possibility of extension patents... Even then, it would be far better than what we have. Drug/Medical patents need some reform that may need to include compulsory licensing after 3-5 years, and a dual-source requirement (two manufacturers) in order to be covered by government subsidized/paid for insurance programs (including VA, Medicare and gov't employees).
kelnos 10y ago
Note that the term "useful Arts" as used in the Constitution doesn't mean art as in performance or fine art, it means the same thing as if you were saying that something is "state of the art" -- methods of construction, craftmanship, or manufacture. (Though you could probably say that copyrights might in some ways stifle people's artistic expression.)
- incompatible 10y ago
  I suppose needing a license to be able to repeat any non-trivial part of anything that anyone has done over the last lifetime + 70 years could stifle artistic expression in some way. Who knows.
icodestuff 10y ago
But you do hear about them. SCO, Las Vegas Review Journal, Warner Bros., Prenda Law, etc.
spacemanmatt 10y ago
> You don't hear about copyright trolls as often; it's not as crippled of a system. Strongly disagreed. Copyright is at least as broken as patents, if not more. Mickey Mouse and most of the Disney catalog should have gone out of copyright years ago but they lobbied our corrupt Congress for an insane extension which is now uniformly used throughout the industry. Our public domain has been thoroughly robbed. For more about abuse of the copyright system and courts in general, see the history of abuse meted out by Prenda Law against various innocent parties. That shit show never should have happened, and it took courts years to stop it. Prenda attorneys are now turning state's witness against each other because they're so busted.

imjustsaying 10y ago

>It's to avoid free-riders copying an invention after someone else researches the related dead ends. How much did you pay to use the language and the vocabulary you're using in this post?

hbgl 10y ago

> "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts ... " That's begging the question. How much innovation is gained and how much is lost? Nobody can give an answer.