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>The only reason business people love patents is that in a world where patents exist, you have an incentive to collect them. But I think the second order negati
by OnlineGladiator 7y ago
>The only reason business people love patents is that in a world where patents exist, you have an incentive to collect them. But I think the second order negative effects of this dramatically slow innovation and harm society economically. If Prusa can exist without patents in a market where competitors still use them, we can obviously make functional an entire economy with less intellectual property restrictions.
You make some interesting points, however generalizing one example from 3d printers and concluding "patents are clearly bad" is really oversimplifying the issue by a lot.
There are plenty of examples of patents stifling innovation (oftentimes purposefully, where a company buys a patent just so nobody else can use it). There are much more complicated examples though, such as the pharmaceutical industry. At least in the US, which funds most of the world's drug research, the entire business incentive for developing new drugs would evaporate without patents. Now there are lots of problems with the pharmaceutical industry, however developing new innovative drugs (with the intent of profiting from them, often viciously) is not one of them.
Everybody agrees the patent system is broken. The problem is nobody can propose a better alternative.
- mrfusion 7y agoTotally agree. And speaking to that, what major patents are expiring in the next few years? It could be an interesting HN thread in itself.
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoPatents for metal 3D printers and cheap methods for refining titanium expire in the next couple of years. That should be interesting.
- balfirevic 7y ago> Everybody agrees the patent system is broken. The problem is nobody can propose a better alternative. Here are two proposals, pick the one you like better: 1) Abolish patents completely. 2) Abolish patents, except for pharmaceutical industry. If anything, proposal number 2 should be strictly better than the status quo.
- dodobirdlord 7y agoNeither of these seem better, which seems to support the point.
- wallacoloo 7y ago> 2) Abolish patents, except for pharmaceutical industry. So what are the boundaries we'd place? Only companies whose primary income source is parmaceuticals are allowed to own patents? Are all the non-pharma companies still required to avoid patent infringement? Or is it that patents can only exist if they're relevant to pharmaceuticals? If so, where do you draw the border? If a pharmaceutical company comes up with a new process for synthesizing some compound Z which they use for their drug, is that patentable? What if it turns out that compound Z is also useful for weather-treating surfaces, and gains widespread use in construction? Now, what if we switch to an alternate timeline where compound Z was invented by a construction company first, and then pharma started to use it? What's the patent situation look like? #2 seems rather arbitrary to me, even moreso than existing patent law. I'm not convinced it's any better than the status quo, though also it's not clear to me exactly what you mean with it.
- balfirevic 7y agoThe point is that the patent system is so deeply messed up an unjust that almost any move towards lessening the applicability of patents is a positive one. In these conversations, someone inevitably comes up with the "but what about the drug research" response. To avoid any worries that the drug research will cease if drugs are no longer patentable, the practical solution is to leave patents in place for drugs. Drugs are regulated in million of ways already. Patent system already has special provisions applicable only to drugs. Just craft the new intellectual property category that will cover 95% of ways patents are now used for pharmaceutical research and call it a day. It doesn't have to be justified from first principles or fully cover all the edge cases because: 1) patent system is already justified on purely consequentialist grounds (at least in the US) 2) existing patent system already fails basic sanity checks, let alone perfectly handling all the edge cases.
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
- nine_k 7y agoAgain I will remind about exponentially-priced patents. Say, the year it is granted the patent costs $1000. The next year, $2000. Ten years since granting, a bit more than million, etc. If this patent fuels your hockey-stick growth, you have no trouble keeping it. Keeping a patent defensively becomes much less affordable. Sharing patent rights for a part of the profit becomes a reasonable way to keep the patent for a few more years. Even megacorps will eventually face the cost of keeping a patent, and decide to abolish it before it expires, just for economic reasons. Administration does not become any harder, or more expensive. [Edited: spelling]
- OnlineGladiator 7y agoI've never heard of this before. How much support does this idea have from economists? A quick google search just brought up a hodge podge of articles on why patents are too expensive.