4 ms·

Totally agree. - there is very little evidence that patents are beneficial - there is a ton of very evident cases like this where patents are just used to ren

by pitaj 7y ago

Totally agree. - there is very little evidence that patents are beneficial - there is a ton of very evident cases like this where patents are just used to rent-seek or destroy - patents are collected by companies to inhibit competition across industries. Imagine if Intel, Nvidia, AMD, ARM, etc were actually threatened by competition from newcomers - patents are the government giving a monopoly on using certain information. Information should be free

sanxiyn 7y ago
Note that your last point applies to copyright as well.
- TuringTest 7y ago
  And copyright shares a lot of the same problems. When everybody carries in their pocket a device that creates perfect copies of all kinds of information, the marginal economic value of a copy is reduced to zero, and you need to create artificial scarcity to support selling copies as a business model. That's why everyone is moving to "software as a service".
edoo 7y ago
If there were no patents everyone would be busy working to implement ideas. Innovation would fly and the inequality index would drop like a rock. A lot of the wealth concentrated at megacorps in the form of IP would flow out to any who worked to actually implement ideas. Information cannot be stolen, it can only be copied. The literal definition of theft is to deprive someone of their property. That just doesn't apply to anything information based. There are several claimed intents but at its root it is an excuse to use violence against others to prevent competition, basically the one thing that shouldn't be allowed in civilization.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  In general you need resources to go to market. John Doe makes a new widget goes to CompanyA with his invention, CompanyA just copy it. John gets nothing, CompanyA gets the profits. How is that good?
  - lstodd 7y ago
    Same way it works right now - John Doe forms a company, gets it on Kickstarter, YC, whatever, gobs VC money, then sells his company to CompanyA. Everyone gets profit. What's not to like and where are patents in this picture?
bostik 7y ago
Patents in general and as originally intended are beneficial: the concept was created to incentivise publishing innovations, to promote progress and state of the art. Patents in software space are an abomination. The solution is actually easy, and AFAIK has been at one time in the books too. Require a physical prototype with the submission. But I would go further. We should also require that the information in the patent, and any publicly available resources it references are together sufficient to replicate the prototype build. If the rebuild cannot produce the same results as the application claims, then the entire application is invalid. (This limits the incentive for patent claims to be overly broad.) Want to patent a process improvement? Fine, submit the description, the claims, the prototype implementing the improvement - and the accurate build instructions to replicate the design. Think your setup would be too costly due to the requirement of the physical prototype? Works as intended: now you have an extra incentive to improve the invention to the point where it is actually useful and cost-effective. And if the cost of submission due to prototype requirement prevents you from submitting for a patent in the first place? Excellent, the cost of entry is already high enough. Now you have to keep innovating to maintain your competitive edge, because there is no patent moat to prevent competition in an obviously expensive, potentially high-margin field. The last one may sound like a weird one, but it serves a very specific purpose. You are allowed to keep trade secrets, but if you choose not to patent them and your competition does (because they figured out a more cost-effective way of doing it), then you just got what you deserved. And the final nail in the coffin of overbroad patents would be to turn the patent office incentives around. Make the rejection of an application be financially the most beneficial result. Allow resubmissions, but make them exponentially more expensive, so companies can't just bombard the patent office with junk.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  What you're talking about is a utility patent, for an embodiment (a product that embodies an invention)instead of allowing patents for inventions. If you think it's sensible to require manufacture first, before a patent is granted then I don't think you've thought about this enough. (fictionalisation) "right I tooled up my new design for a wafer fabrication plant, but someone else came up with the same idea and they got the patent last week, now I'm $20M in the hole and did so much needless duplication; now there's no money for us highly skilled people to make further improvements" Yay! /s

by pitaj 7y ago

sanxiyn 7y ago

Note that your last point applies to copyright as well.

TuringTest 7y ago
And copyright shares a lot of the same problems. When everybody carries in their pocket a device that creates perfect copies of all kinds of information, the marginal economic value of a copy is reduced to zero, and you need to create artificial scarcity to support selling copies as a business model. That's why everyone is moving to "software as a service".

edoo 7y ago

If there were no patents everyone would be busy working to implement ideas. Innovation would fly and the inequality index would drop like a rock. A lot of the wealth concentrated at megacorps in the form of IP would flow out to any who worked to actually implement ideas. Information cannot be stolen, it can only be copied. The literal definition of theft is to deprive someone of their property. That just doesn't apply to anything information based. There are several claimed intents but at its root it is an excuse to use violence against others to prevent competition, basically the one thing that shouldn't be allowed in civilization.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
In general you need resources to go to market. John Doe makes a new widget goes to CompanyA with his invention, CompanyA just copy it. John gets nothing, CompanyA gets the profits. How is that good?
- lstodd 7y ago
  Same way it works right now - John Doe forms a company, gets it on Kickstarter, YC, whatever, gobs VC money, then sells his company to CompanyA. Everyone gets profit. What's not to like and where are patents in this picture?

bostik 7y ago

Patents in general and as originally intended are beneficial: the concept was created to incentivise publishing innovations, to promote progress and state of the art. Patents in software space are an abomination. The solution is actually easy, and AFAIK has been at one time in the books too. Require a physical prototype with the submission. But I would go further. We should also require that the information in the patent, and any publicly available resources it references are together sufficient to replicate the prototype build. If the rebuild cannot produce the same results as the application claims, then the entire application is invalid. (This limits the incentive for patent claims to be overly broad.) Want to patent a process improvement? Fine, submit the description, the claims, the prototype implementing the improvement - and the accurate build instructions to replicate the design. Think your setup would be too costly due to the requirement of the physical prototype? Works as intended: now you have an extra incentive to improve the invention to the point where it is actually useful and cost-effective. And if the cost of submission due to prototype requirement prevents you from submitting for a patent in the first place? Excellent, the cost of entry is already high enough. Now you have to keep innovating to maintain your competitive edge, because there is no patent moat to prevent competition in an obviously expensive, potentially high-margin field. The last one may sound like a weird one, but it serves a very specific purpose. You are allowed to keep trade secrets, but if you choose not to patent them and your competition does (because they figured out a more cost-effective way of doing it), then you just got what you deserved. And the final nail in the coffin of overbroad patents would be to turn the patent office incentives around. Make the rejection of an application be financially the most beneficial result. Allow resubmissions, but make them exponentially more expensive, so companies can't just bombard the patent office with junk.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
What you're talking about is a utility patent, for an embodiment (a product that embodies an invention)instead of allowing patents for inventions. If you think it's sensible to require manufacture first, before a patent is granted then I don't think you've thought about this enough. (fictionalisation) "right I tooled up my new design for a wafer fabrication plant, but someone else came up with the same idea and they got the patent last week, now I'm $20M in the hole and did so much needless duplication; now there's no money for us highly skilled people to make further improvements" Yay! /s