7 ms·

Patents are a monopoly on an idea. And ideas shouldn't be owned by anyone. One shouldn't be forced to share their ideas, but the concept of coming up with somet

by vasco 6y ago

Patents are a monopoly on an idea. And ideas shouldn't be owned by anyone. One shouldn't be forced to share their ideas, but the concept of coming up with something, and then going to your community and saying: "Hey everyone, I thought of this and wrote it down, none of you wrote it down before so now it's my idea for the next 30 years" Is just ridiculous.

OJFord 6y ago
But "so now it's my idea" just means "now only I can produce this thing commercially, unless I give you permission". The alternative is "only I can produce this thing commercially, and you have no idea how I made it anyway".
- mkl 6y ago
  Companies like this don't produce anything commercially, didn't actually invent anything, and their patents are so vague and general that no one is any more informed about how to make anything.
mashpoe 6y ago
People like to say that without patents there will be no incentive to advance technology, but if you're the one to come up with an idea then you already have a huge head start. If you don't make use of that head start, then you don't deserve it, and this applies to patents as well. Monopolies are bad, and competition is good. Everyone is already incentivized to come up with and implement ideas faster than their competitors. Giving one person a monopoly just restricts others from creating competing products and only gives the user a worse and more expensive product.
- varjag 6y ago
  In practice you'll have a head start of maybe a year before a grifter in China replicates your three years of R&D and floods the market. And a copied product will always be cheaper as they don't have to amortise development costs. That's how technology worked before the patent systems, and the outcome was manufacturer secrecy - which generally sucked more than the patent system.
  - vkou 6y ago
    It sucked in different ways, but its not clear that it sucked more. The point of the patent system is that you share your invention in the world, in exchange for monopolizing it for a few years. The problem is that most software patents share absolutely nothing of value with the world.
    - varjag 6y ago
      I'm with you on software patents, but they are only a fraction of patents landscape and really pertinent only to North America. But naturally it's overemphasized here on HN.
      - happyjack 6y ago
        Way overemphasized here on HN. The USPTO is in a terrible spot right now. Your IP is not worth what it was before the AIA (America Invents Act). It essentially decimated the patent system. I won't go into specifics. I think another misconception is the entire purpose of the USPTO. The USPTO wants EVERYTHING in the entire universe to be in the public domain. To achieve this, you give them your idea and in exchange they give you a monopoly for 20 years minus prosecution time. Even worse, anything you publish anywhere on earth after one year automatically gets in the public domain. Anyways, enough ranting, but the system is very expensive and is actually not incentivizing the "inventor" anymore.
        rjzzleep 6y ago
        I'd be very interested in a writeup. My gut feeling was always that it is in fact not incentivizing the "inventor" either. I do see people at big institution filing patent after patent, but it seems very inaccessible for a normal human being like me.
        novaRom 6y ago
        Exactly. Patents protect only monopoly of large companies. Getting a patent in EU or in USA is very expensive ranging from tens of thousands and up to hundreds of thousands. Big part of this money goes to totally unproductive parasitic hands.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  Just because the patent system has some problems doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any value. These troll patents might contain a high number of ideas you might just casually come up with, but the actually valuable ones tend to be comprised of innovative ideas that usually require significant R&D investment to come up with. Without patents there’s very little incentive to invest in coming up with those ideas. A lot of the time the people who come up with the patent have no intention or capability to bring products to market, so unless you want 100% of research to be completely controlled by commercial interests, you probably want to have patents. You’re also ignoring what the patent is actually awarded for. The temporary monopoly is awarded in return for publicly disclosing your invention. Without patents you’d expect almost all commercial innovation to center around ideas that can be kept a trade secret, and to have a lot more budget devoted to protecting trade secrets. It would essentially be the exact opposite of what I expect you’d want to happen.
  - depressedpanda 6y ago
    The key word here is 'invention'. In practice we have lawyers specialized in crafting as vague and broad patents as possible, so that bogus infringements can be litigated in court.
    - AmericanChopper 6y ago
      There’s lots of problems with our current system. However the list of problems doesn’t include the existence of the system itself.
  - crispyambulance 6y ago
    > The temporary monopoly is awarded in return for publicly disclosing your invention. Reading patents is perhaps one of the WORST and most inefficient ways to discover "new ideas". Even ignoring the turgid legal language, the actual central ideas of the patents are either so vague they're useless or they apply to utterly obsolete scenarios or they just poorly describe something that has already been in existence/usage before, during, and after the patent's existence. We could do just fine WITHOUT the patent system. Maybe if instead of fretting about diligent Chinese copycats, the USA and its corporations actually built stuff instead of outsourcing everything, we would not need to worry so much about patent infringement.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- toxik 6y ago
  The fact of the matter is that countries with weak IP laws and/or enforcement see less innovation. It makes sense too, the calculus is easy: rip someone’s tested idea off for free, or invest huge piles of money just to get your foot in the door?
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Do you really believe that software patents represent anything close to an original idea? From my perspective, Software patents are on such stupid things utterly divorced from anything that could be considered innovative, that none of it incentivizes inovation. The calculus also doesn't seem all that clear to me. A alternative calculus: Build something new on top of someone else's idea (stand on the shoulders of giants) or spend all your time and money reinventing a perfectly good wheel so that you can do it in a slightly different manner purely for legal reasons.
    - charcircuit 6y ago
      You are leaving out the option of just licensing the patent. If you are lucky they will license it to you for free.
      - dstick 6y ago
        Can the license holder set any price they want? Essentially blocking access with an absurdly high paywall? Or is there some kind of standard?
        Pfhreak 6y ago
        Yes, or they can refuse to license it to you at all.
      - bawolff 6y ago
        That's still a restraint on innovation. Money going to licensing can't be spent on salaries. If we assume free licensing then you might as well cut out the middle man and abolish patents.
varjag 6y ago
People on here are generally exposed to ridiculous side of patenting, with high publicity marginal cases that make headlines. A lot of patents are way beyond an idea written on a napkin and are the outcomes of significant R&D expenses.
ai_ja_nai 6y ago
Uhm, I used to think that patents are a monopoly on a certain implementation of an idea, not the idea itself. If you own a patent of a video codec, that doesn't make you automatically owner of all codecs of the world. Am I wrong?
koonsolo 6y ago
> "Hey everyone, I thought of this and wrote it down, none of you wrote it down before so now it's my idea for the next 30 years" In this case you are right, it stiffles progress instead of helping it. But what about the case where "Hey, it took us 20 manyears of research to discover this, and when we release it, it's up for grabs for anyone" In that case, you want to have a patent system so the research can have a ROI. But the latter case never happens in software, and so I'm very happy Europe doesn't have any software patents.
- ant6n 6y ago
  Didn’t mpeg work with patents and licenses? ... I guess it’s not really necessary to have patents in order to sell licenses, and I guess in most cases for software, patents are used as a moat for a business rather than getting a direct ROI on research.
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
Not to mention the poorly qualified or downright unethical Intellectual Property(IP) industry which makes the uninformed spend thousands of dollars in the patent process without proper prior art search, only for the patent authority to later dismiss the application i.e. if the the patent authority is competent or else award the patent which ends up with a troll. If you are not from an industry where IP is unfortunately the foundation for doing business e.g. Pharma, Bio Tech; You are better off not pursuing IP at all, at least if you cannot afford the best IP attorney in your jurisdiction and assuming you have a competent patent authority.
lemagedurage 6y ago
Ideas can explicitly not be patented. "A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc., as has been said, and not upon the idea or suggestion of the new machine. A complete description of the actual machine or other subject matter for which a patent is sought is required." https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  I'm on a few dumb software patents and they always start with "a server configured to..." given how close software patents are to ideas.
- yossarian1408 6y ago
  He means idea in the broader sense of nonphysical concept. For example, the patent for a drug is not private property in the same way that a plot of land is. One is a physical entity which can only be owned/utilised by one person or group at a time, and another has no physical properties and can be utilised by literally every single person alive had they the inclination. Patents/IP/etc only have 'scarcity' because the government agrees to grant a monopoly to a person or corporation. It doesn't have any basis in natural law.
  - Ygg2 6y ago
    Just because it's not physically present doesn't mean it's not real. Patent represents compensation for time spent researching and developing it. Without it, you would resort to greater degrees of secrecy.
    - yossarian1408 6y ago
      Sure, it's real, but it is not affected by scarcity. Monopolies are never a good idea, they suit oligarchs at the expense of mankind. First-movers already have an advantage in the market, this seems to be a natural incentive for R&D. And then also consider that many innovators and inventors do what they do for reasons outside of gaining monetary compensation. Any consequences of greater secrecy would be largely overshadowed by the advantage of having an actually competitive market in film, tech, healthcare, and etc. Imagine if any manufacturer could produce insulin, or if any film student could shoot their own Star Wars movie.
snarf21 6y ago
I agree that we allow patents for things today that aren't novel but patents do allow a single person to build a company around an idea. By having some protection for a time, they have time to recoup research costs and build something sustainable. Without them, billionaires could just monitor the market and essentially just steal the business because they have the capital to leverage economies of scale. How do you prevent this without patents? What is your better idea?
Ygg2 6y ago
Patents are a way to encourage sharing ideas. You can always monopolize an unknown idea. Don't share it.
Angostura 6y ago
> One shouldn't be forced to share their ideas. Patents were designed as a way of allowing people to share their ideas, while retaining the ability to profit from their ideas for a limited period.

by vasco 6y ago

OJFord 6y ago

But "so now it's my idea" just means "now only I can produce this thing commercially, unless I give you permission". The alternative is "only I can produce this thing commercially, and you have no idea how I made it anyway".

mkl 6y ago
Companies like this don't produce anything commercially, didn't actually invent anything, and their patents are so vague and general that no one is any more informed about how to make anything.

mashpoe 6y ago

People like to say that without patents there will be no incentive to advance technology, but if you're the one to come up with an idea then you already have a huge head start. If you don't make use of that head start, then you don't deserve it, and this applies to patents as well. Monopolies are bad, and competition is good. Everyone is already incentivized to come up with and implement ideas faster than their competitors. Giving one person a monopoly just restricts others from creating competing products and only gives the user a worse and more expensive product.

varjag 6y ago
In practice you'll have a head start of maybe a year before a grifter in China replicates your three years of R&D and floods the market. And a copied product will always be cheaper as they don't have to amortise development costs. That's how technology worked before the patent systems, and the outcome was manufacturer secrecy - which generally sucked more than the patent system.
- vkou 6y ago
  It sucked in different ways, but its not clear that it sucked more. The point of the patent system is that you share your invention in the world, in exchange for monopolizing it for a few years. The problem is that most software patents share absolutely nothing of value with the world.
  - varjag 6y ago
    I'm with you on software patents, but they are only a fraction of patents landscape and really pertinent only to North America. But naturally it's overemphasized here on HN.
    - happyjack 6y ago
      Way overemphasized here on HN. The USPTO is in a terrible spot right now. Your IP is not worth what it was before the AIA (America Invents Act). It essentially decimated the patent system. I won't go into specifics. I think another misconception is the entire purpose of the USPTO. The USPTO wants EVERYTHING in the entire universe to be in the public domain. To achieve this, you give them your idea and in exchange they give you a monopoly for 20 years minus prosecution time. Even worse, anything you publish anywhere on earth after one year automatically gets in the public domain. Anyways, enough ranting, but the system is very expensive and is actually not incentivizing the "inventor" anymore.
      - rjzzleep 6y ago
        I'd be very interested in a writeup. My gut feeling was always that it is in fact not incentivizing the "inventor" either. I do see people at big institution filing patent after patent, but it seems very inaccessible for a normal human being like me.
        novaRom 6y ago
        Exactly. Patents protect only monopoly of large companies. Getting a patent in EU or in USA is very expensive ranging from tens of thousands and up to hundreds of thousands. Big part of this money goes to totally unproductive parasitic hands.
AmericanChopper 6y ago
Just because the patent system has some problems doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any value. These troll patents might contain a high number of ideas you might just casually come up with, but the actually valuable ones tend to be comprised of innovative ideas that usually require significant R&D investment to come up with. Without patents there’s very little incentive to invest in coming up with those ideas. A lot of the time the people who come up with the patent have no intention or capability to bring products to market, so unless you want 100% of research to be completely controlled by commercial interests, you probably want to have patents. You’re also ignoring what the patent is actually awarded for. The temporary monopoly is awarded in return for publicly disclosing your invention. Without patents you’d expect almost all commercial innovation to center around ideas that can be kept a trade secret, and to have a lot more budget devoted to protecting trade secrets. It would essentially be the exact opposite of what I expect you’d want to happen.
- depressedpanda 6y ago
  The key word here is 'invention'. In practice we have lawyers specialized in crafting as vague and broad patents as possible, so that bogus infringements can be litigated in court.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    There’s lots of problems with our current system. However the list of problems doesn’t include the existence of the system itself.
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  > The temporary monopoly is awarded in return for publicly disclosing your invention. Reading patents is perhaps one of the WORST and most inefficient ways to discover "new ideas". Even ignoring the turgid legal language, the actual central ideas of the patents are either so vague they're useless or they apply to utterly obsolete scenarios or they just poorly describe something that has already been in existence/usage before, during, and after the patent's existence. We could do just fine WITHOUT the patent system. Maybe if instead of fretting about diligent Chinese copycats, the USA and its corporations actually built stuff instead of outsourcing everything, we would not need to worry so much about patent infringement.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
toxik 6y ago
The fact of the matter is that countries with weak IP laws and/or enforcement see less innovation. It makes sense too, the calculus is easy: rip someone’s tested idea off for free, or invest huge piles of money just to get your foot in the door?
- bawolff 6y ago
  Do you really believe that software patents represent anything close to an original idea? From my perspective, Software patents are on such stupid things utterly divorced from anything that could be considered innovative, that none of it incentivizes inovation. The calculus also doesn't seem all that clear to me. A alternative calculus: Build something new on top of someone else's idea (stand on the shoulders of giants) or spend all your time and money reinventing a perfectly good wheel so that you can do it in a slightly different manner purely for legal reasons.
  - charcircuit 6y ago
    You are leaving out the option of just licensing the patent. If you are lucky they will license it to you for free.
    - dstick 6y ago
      Can the license holder set any price they want? Essentially blocking access with an absurdly high paywall? Or is there some kind of standard?
      - Pfhreak 6y ago
        Yes, or they can refuse to license it to you at all.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      That's still a restraint on innovation. Money going to licensing can't be spent on salaries. If we assume free licensing then you might as well cut out the middle man and abolish patents.

varjag 6y ago

People on here are generally exposed to ridiculous side of patenting, with high publicity marginal cases that make headlines. A lot of patents are way beyond an idea written on a napkin and are the outcomes of significant R&D expenses.

ai_ja_nai 6y ago

Uhm, I used to think that patents are a monopoly on a certain implementation of an idea, not the idea itself. If you own a patent of a video codec, that doesn't make you automatically owner of all codecs of the world. Am I wrong?

koonsolo 6y ago

> "Hey everyone, I thought of this and wrote it down, none of you wrote it down before so now it's my idea for the next 30 years" In this case you are right, it stiffles progress instead of helping it. But what about the case where "Hey, it took us 20 manyears of research to discover this, and when we release it, it's up for grabs for anyone" In that case, you want to have a patent system so the research can have a ROI. But the latter case never happens in software, and so I'm very happy Europe doesn't have any software patents.

ant6n 6y ago
Didn’t mpeg work with patents and licenses? ... I guess it’s not really necessary to have patents in order to sell licenses, and I guess in most cases for software, patents are used as a moat for a business rather than getting a direct ROI on research.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

Not to mention the poorly qualified or downright unethical Intellectual Property(IP) industry which makes the uninformed spend thousands of dollars in the patent process without proper prior art search, only for the patent authority to later dismiss the application i.e. if the the patent authority is competent or else award the patent which ends up with a troll. If you are not from an industry where IP is unfortunately the foundation for doing business e.g. Pharma, Bio Tech; You are better off not pursuing IP at all, at least if you cannot afford the best IP attorney in your jurisdiction and assuming you have a competent patent authority.

lemagedurage 6y ago

Ideas can explicitly not be patented. "A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc., as has been said, and not upon the idea or suggestion of the new machine. A complete description of the actual machine or other subject matter for which a patent is sought is required." https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics

Waterluvian 6y ago
I'm on a few dumb software patents and they always start with "a server configured to..." given how close software patents are to ideas.
yossarian1408 6y ago
He means idea in the broader sense of nonphysical concept. For example, the patent for a drug is not private property in the same way that a plot of land is. One is a physical entity which can only be owned/utilised by one person or group at a time, and another has no physical properties and can be utilised by literally every single person alive had they the inclination. Patents/IP/etc only have 'scarcity' because the government agrees to grant a monopoly to a person or corporation. It doesn't have any basis in natural law.
- Ygg2 6y ago
  Just because it's not physically present doesn't mean it's not real. Patent represents compensation for time spent researching and developing it. Without it, you would resort to greater degrees of secrecy.
  - yossarian1408 6y ago
    Sure, it's real, but it is not affected by scarcity. Monopolies are never a good idea, they suit oligarchs at the expense of mankind. First-movers already have an advantage in the market, this seems to be a natural incentive for R&D. And then also consider that many innovators and inventors do what they do for reasons outside of gaining monetary compensation. Any consequences of greater secrecy would be largely overshadowed by the advantage of having an actually competitive market in film, tech, healthcare, and etc. Imagine if any manufacturer could produce insulin, or if any film student could shoot their own Star Wars movie.

snarf21 6y ago

I agree that we allow patents for things today that aren't novel but patents do allow a single person to build a company around an idea. By having some protection for a time, they have time to recoup research costs and build something sustainable. Without them, billionaires could just monitor the market and essentially just steal the business because they have the capital to leverage economies of scale. How do you prevent this without patents? What is your better idea?

Ygg2 6y ago

Patents are a way to encourage sharing ideas. You can always monopolize an unknown idea. Don't share it.

Angostura 6y ago

> One shouldn't be forced to share their ideas. Patents were designed as a way of allowing people to share their ideas, while retaining the ability to profit from their ideas for a limited period.