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Society would be better off if patents were abolished.
by em3rgent0rdr 5y ago
Society would be better off if patents were abolished.
- fny 5y agoCan you provide justification? In my view, they work when they promote competition and adequately compensate innovation. I know these are broad requirements, but I think that they're better than abolishing patents altogether.
- alpaca128 5y agoThis whole "competition" idea turns into the exact opposite when giant corporations buy others and gain all their patents. Motorola was bought because it came with over 10k patents, that is guaranteed to hurt competition. I think patents make sense to some degree, but they should expire much quicker and should not be transferrable.
- burnished 5y agoCan you demonstrate that it actually works that way?
- fighterpilot 5y agoPerhaps society would be better off with shorter-duration patents.
- henvic 5y agoIndeed: 0.
- kashug 5y agoPatents are a pertect example of something that did make sense back when they were made. It was a trade off for having people share new knowledge which would benefit society as a whole. But as a price they got "monopoly" on using it for a while after sharing the patent. But like many other things, it has been exploited, especially by big corporations. And the patents no longer work as intended. And the big problem is that theres so much money on the line that is it not easy to change. I would assume large corporations already spend absurd amounts of money on lobbying for the patent-rules to work in their favor. Patents as a concept I am all for. It is a good way to make sure that new entrepreneurs can make it to market before "big-corp" steals their idea and just push them out. But they would have to change how they work to stop patent-sharks and the big exploitations by said big-corp.
- amelius 5y agoSomeone should organize a day of (inter)national strike against patents.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hhsbz 5y agoYou say that patents no longer make sense, that they don't work, that they are exploited by "big corporations", but you don't really make an argument as to why you feel that way
- adrian_b 5y agoThe main problem with patents today is that the patent offices validate too many patent applications that do not contain anything new or non-obvious for any professional in their field. Moreover, there are also many patent claims that are accepted and that refer to things that are either impossible or non-economical at the time when the patent is issued, but they are put in the patent to cover future devices that someone will be able to make after the current technological problems are solved. In the distant past, most patent offices required a demonstration with a working device in which all the patent claims were embodied, so such bogus patent claims against future competitors could not be accepted. Now, every year more patents are issued than anytime in the past, but most of them are just garbage that was not patented before just because everyone else would have been ashamed to attempt to file such patent applications. The number of truly valid patents issued per year now is actually less than in the 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th century. The same as for new movie scripts, it becomes more and more difficult to find something really original to which nobody thought before.
- echelon 5y agoNo patents for trolls and giants. Startups and labs should be able to patent so that they have a chance to make it in the market.
- josefx 5y agoAny law operating at the company level will just be gamed with large amounts of shell companies. You just need to take a look at some of the more common tax evasion schemes to see how well that turns out.
- decremental 5y agoA simplistic view that deserves an equally simplistic dismissal.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoPatents as a whole? No. Software/algorithm patents? Yes.
- jason0597 5y agoWhy only software patterns?
- gmueckl 5y agoHardware patents are by nature more narrow because they have to describe specific solutions to a problem. Software patents are often written as the idea of solving a specific problem using software, completely omitting the how. This makes them overly broad. At least one of the Sonos patents in question is of that nature: it merely describes a system of distributed loudspeakers where one loudspeaker can set the volume of other speakers in the group remotely. The claims completely omit any actual solution that accomplishes that.
- MonadIsPronad 5y agoThis strikes me as an excellent point, how software patents tend to lack any actual solution, unlike traditional patents - I hadn't considered that before.
- Ekaros 5y agoI think the process of accepting patents is broken, at least with software. If a reasonable practitioner could read some head-line and come up with a few solutions, there is not anything worth protecting. Ideas themselves should not be patentable in software. On other hand I do think there is still need to protect innovation in more physical things. Like new manufacturing processes or material innovations like using novel chemistry.
- thfuran 5y agoI don't really see any fundamental difference between implementing your idea with big pieces of iron and implementing your idea with small pulses of electricity. If either is patentable, both should be.
- fxtentacle 5y agoI strongly disagree. Without patents, something like the Subminimal Foamer kickstarter would have been impossible. That was one guy inventing a new way to make milk foam and then commercializing it. Without patents, Amazon.com would probably have been flooded with fakes before he finished raising money for the first prototype.
- VelkaMorava 5y agoGreat. Apple patented a rectangle (https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/7/3614506/apple-patents-rectangle-with-rounded-corners https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/7/3614506/apple-patents-rec...), some dude patented a way to update a sports game (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/january-stupid-patent-month-method-updating-video-game-grass https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/january-stupid-patent-...). I am not even getting into the whole patent trolling and companies suing each other because they are infringing upon each other's patents and then settling. But no, for all the evil patents are we must have them, because some guy found a new way to make milk foam. Jesus ducking christ hacker news, this is almost as funny as Paul Graham writing an essay about why VC is great.
- fxtentacle 5y agoFirst off, I just really like milk foam with my coffee. But mainly, my intent was to point out that patents might be a necessary evil to fight off copycats. Without that protection, I cannot imagine how any hardware startup could be successful, because the established players will always have the factories, tools, and experience so that they can scale up faster as soon as a new desired product is found.