5 ms·

If you're suggesting a 1 year patent period for all utility patents, you might as well just get rid of patents. In the industry I work in (Biotech - DNA sequenc

• rapsey 7y ago
  > If you're suggesting a 1 year patent period for all utility patents, you might as well just get rid of patents. In the industry I work in (Biotech - DNA sequencing) it takes maybe 5 years to mature an approach and get it to market. So have a two phase validity. Once it's in the market you have a year.
  • dkersten 7y ago
    You’d want some limitations on the first phase too, so that companies don’t hold onto their patents indefinitely while waiting for the perfect market conditions for their one-year monopoly.
    • mcny 7y ago
      A real solution is don't apply for patent protection. The down side is if someone else also figured it out, you don't get anything. Makes sense to me.
      • dkersten 7y ago
        Yes, I agree. I'm not a fan of patents. While I understand the desire to protect ones investment, it doesn't make sense to me that it should be done at the expense of someone else's investment, since multiple people coming up with similar ideas around the same time isn't particularly uncommon and unfortunately there's no easy way to differentiate those from plagiarism.
  • new299 7y ago
    This encourages companies to withhold products from the market. In many, cases they will withhold products for the maximal allowable period before releasing them into the market. This will give them the maximum period of patent coverage, and prevent other players from releasing products. Market leaders in particular will want to extend their coverage using this technique. Aside from this, what is "on the market" most novel scientific equipment undergoes early access. This period often lasts up to a year, usually equipment is sold at a loss or near cost. The product is validated. So... they recover none of their R&D during the patent period (making the patent largely useless). So... perhaps you structure things such that you give this patent covered product away for free during early access. But you use the product to recognize revenue elsewhere (consumables, reagents... whatever)... Thereby extending your coverage period. So... how will all this be policed/structured so companies can't find ways round it? If you can find a way of enforcing it, it still doesn't work out for the companies. In my experience a scientific startup needs at least 5 years in R&D.. an then at least 5 years on the market to cover those R&D expenses. If this is going to get funded by a VC it then needs a high enough return to cover all the VCs investments. This is then looking like a minimum of 10 years of patent coverage, and something like 20 years to make it worthwhile for VCs. Yea, you can get rid of patents all together. Probably the investment/funding sources will need to change and that might not be a bad thing. But I can't see that what you're suggesting is workable.
• davidhyde 7y ago
  Patent validity should not be one size fits all like it currently is. It's hard to imagine but the patent system was actually designed to encourage growth, not slow it. The validity period should be part of the application process and awarded based on things like time-to-market and the length of the research effort involved. Pharma is an example of a long patent period and a software patent like two finger zooming should be shorter (maybe five years).
  • baybal2 7y ago
    > It's hard to imagine but the patent system was actually designed to encourage growth, not slow it. And that was done by people completely oblivious to how real world economics work, and reinforced in that delusion by later generations of not much smarter statesmen. It is not humanly possible to imagine how economic growth and efficiency is encouraged by intentional introduction of economic inefficiency through imposition of artificial scarcity (which is what patents are, literally a license on economic inefficiency)
    • xoa 7y ago
      It actually is quite humanly possible. The fundamental issue is that while replication of information is effectively free, generation of (valuable) information most certainly is not. Which takes us right back into limited resource allocation and value decision territory. And markets are the best tool we've found so far for societies to use to perform generalized efficient resource allocation towards societal goals. It's also often quite possible to keep information secret for a significant time period, but efforts to do so (and efforts in turn to gain that information) are themselves examples of the "economic inefficiency" you complain about. However, generalized efforts to restrict information require the cooperation of society overall and costs to society in a way that real physical property does not. "Intellectual Property" is one possible way to try to answer all these points, a hack to try to couple market allocation to the information generation issue while also recognizing that it's not real property and is funded by and for the public. It offers a chance, not a certainty, to make money off an investment on information generation through convincing other parts of society to pay for it piecemeal during a limited pseudo-physical-property replication stage. In exchange, it shouldn't be secret, shouldn't cover basic facts of the world or certain other areas where additional generation incentives are unnecessary, and should have limited times taking into account the ongoing and ever increasing societal cost. I think it's very foolish to mistake implementation issues with fundamental ones and throw out the baby with the bath water unless you've got something better to fund information generation equally effective. And I have yet to hear any proposed scheme by total-anti-IP folks to take its place, merely complaints about the current implementation. I think it'd be far more productive to first direct efforts towards fixing mismatches in historical IP in each of the 3 areas above vs modern times. On the secrecy issue for example, encrypted source code escrow should be a requirement for having copyright protection for everything that isn't open or available source already, and have-your-cake-and-eat-it Trade Secret laws should be eliminated. Patent protection for mathematics (all software patents) should be completely eliminated, copyright is more then enough already for software and better aligns incentives. And new, better ways to reflect ongoing and increasing societal costs, and the divergence in areas of generation, should be added rather than mere fixed times. Ongoing yearly renewal beyond an initial short period at non-linearly increasing cost (either fixed or an increasing percentage of revenue) would be one possible approach. But all this seems far more useful than anything else I've seen. Total command and control at all levels of the economic stack hasn't proved any more effective for information generation than it has anywhere else in economics. IP has overall worked fairly effective, and it seems to me that the problems it has caused are more down to warts and rust that could be fixed.