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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 s

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.
      - scott00 10y ago
        The massive data required for machine learning presents an opportunity to create a moat around those businesses. Releasing the algo but not the data doesn't help competitors much. There's also often a first-mover advantage in data collection: operating a service can give you a unique opportunity to collect relevant data, making it very hard for competitors to catch up. The canonical example is Google search: a competitor can scrape the web (at great cost), but they can't get Google's result click data until they're competitive with Google. And without the data it's damn hard to be competitive.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  Anything to back your prediction up? The startups I've worked for got patents, but everyone knew (including our investors) that the patents were useless if anyone actually copied our work.
  - kelnos 10y ago
    Agreed; the conventional wisdom around filing patents at the startups I've worked for has been to increase the value of the company (a patent can be valued as an asset). No one ever expected us to file suit against another company that might infringe on our patents (which would take years to get issued, anyway). Doing so would be such a time suck that it would distract us too much from building an actual product.
    - hertzdog 10y ago
      I agree with you, I have been involved in startup and patents, and the feeling was similar. I can add that patents can also be viewed as a "freedom to operate" certificate: lower chances that someone else claims you can't do what you are doing.
    - mark-r 10y ago
      I once worked for a small company that decided to sue their competitor for patent infringement. Not only did it take a huge amount of time and money, but in the end they lost the suit anyway. Eventually they ended up merging with said competitor so the only winners were the lawyers.
- Angostura 10y ago
  > You'd then get a longer term slump, as all companies stop investing in basic research and long-term R&D There would be a different type of slump too, as companies kept important technologies secret, rather than patenting them
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.

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.
    - scott00 10y ago
      The massive data required for machine learning presents an opportunity to create a moat around those businesses. Releasing the algo but not the data doesn't help competitors much. There's also often a first-mover advantage in data collection: operating a service can give you a unique opportunity to collect relevant data, making it very hard for competitors to catch up. The canonical example is Google search: a competitor can scrape the web (at great cost), but they can't get Google's result click data until they're competitive with Google. And without the data it's damn hard to be competitive.
greglindahl 10y ago
Anything to back your prediction up? The startups I've worked for got patents, but everyone knew (including our investors) that the patents were useless if anyone actually copied our work.
- kelnos 10y ago
  Agreed; the conventional wisdom around filing patents at the startups I've worked for has been to increase the value of the company (a patent can be valued as an asset). No one ever expected us to file suit against another company that might infringe on our patents (which would take years to get issued, anyway). Doing so would be such a time suck that it would distract us too much from building an actual product.
  - hertzdog 10y ago
    I agree with you, I have been involved in startup and patents, and the feeling was similar. I can add that patents can also be viewed as a "freedom to operate" certificate: lower chances that someone else claims you can't do what you are doing.
  - mark-r 10y ago
    I once worked for a small company that decided to sue their competitor for patent infringement. Not only did it take a huge amount of time and money, but in the end they lost the suit anyway. Eventually they ended up merging with said competitor so the only winners were the lawyers.
Angostura 10y ago
> You'd then get a longer term slump, as all companies stop investing in basic research and long-term R&D There would be a different type of slump too, as companies kept important technologies secret, rather than patenting them

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.