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Can you point to some evidence that patents generally have had a useful role in our society, other than pharmaceuticals, which is the usual (and also incorrect)

• potatolicious 16y ago
  Sure. I've worked in manufacturing in the past - in the automotive context. Patents are incredibly important there: the safety regulations and requirements, along with the innate costs of producing a tangible physical product, make it incredibly expensive to bring a new technology to market. Tens, if not hundreds of millions. If anyone could simply reverse engineer your work and produce it willy nilly, there really would be no incentive to innovate. The patent system is broken, no doubt about it - but IMHO the view that all patents are evil/useless is myopic, and really only possible from the perspective of someone who doesn't have any experience with fields with high intrinsic costs (e.g., software, where marginal cost is basically nil).
  • deleted 16y ago
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  • ZeroGravitas 16y ago
    Some research I read recently suggested that it's not software that's the exception, it's chemical and pharmaceuticals (and even there it's not a clear win, nor is it based on high costs, but rather the specificity of patents in those fields creating clearly delineated property rights). In every other industry surveyed the patents may be felt necessary under current conditions but aren't considered useful in the sense you describe for rewarding innovation (e.g. defensive patents to stop others from blocking access to your own innovations). I believe the research was cited in Eric von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation, ah here we are from, Chapter 6, " The real-world value of patent protection has been studied for more than 40 years. Various researchers have found that, with a few exceptions, inno- vators do not think that patents are very useful either for excluding imita- tors or for capturing royalties in most industries. (Fields generally cited as exceptions are pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and chemical processes, where patents do enable markets for technical information (Arora et al. 2001).) Most respondents also say that the availability of patent protection does not induce them to invest more in research and development than they would if patent protection did not exist." link to the full (and very good) book: http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm
    • argv_empty 16y ago
      Various researchers have found that, with a few exceptions, innovators do not think that patents are very useful either for excluding imitators or for capturing royalties in most industries By this, do they mean that imitators are typically able to operate despite patent protection or that there aren't attempts to imitate? The latter does not really support the concluusion that patents are not useful/effective, since a lack of imitators is something we should expect if they were (though it also is not proof that they are). The former suggests some problem with the legal situation surrounding patents, since it is exactly what patent law is meant to prevent.
      • ZeroGravitas 16y ago
        It's the latter i.e. a problem with patent law not doing what it's supposed to do.
• loewenskind 16y ago
  Without patents the only source for R&D is going to be universities. But private R&D made: the desktop, the mouse, C, Unix (do you think Berkley would have made unix without seeing what AT&T had?), C++, etc., etc. They need to change. No doubt about that, but anything that causes even less R&D than is already going on is very short sighted.
  • henrikschroder 16y ago
    Without patents the only source for R&D is going to be universities. That's an incredibly broad and completely unsubstantiated claim.