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> People worldwide would love to make pharmaceuticals more affordable for example well, the purpose of the patent is to both reward/incentivize and allow the o

> People worldwide would love to make pharmaceuticals more affordable for example well, the purpose of the patent is to both reward/incentivize and allow the original inventor a monopoly for a period of time to earn back time risk and the development costs, and that monopoly is going to come with higher prices. it's the point of a patent, you can't very well say that patents undermine the ability to undermine them: it's nonsensical! I'm not defending patents nor saying we need them, I'm simply saying you can't say "patents don't work because they do what they were designed to"

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
What I am saying about patents is that the supposed benefits are vastly outweighed by the drawbacks. I believe the reason they continue to be popular is that patents benefit large industry players to the detriment of everyone else, but since they have strong influence over policy in the USA and the USA has strong policy influence the world over, we are all suffering for the perceived benefits of patents.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  Patents benefit the inventor (or at least they did until 2013) through compensation for their efforts and society as a whole through disclosure of information. The alternative is that every bit of applicable knowledge is kept as a trade secret.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    You frame this as a binary: patents or trade secrets. But other options include authorized copying (open source) and copying without express permission (Shanzai style)[1]. As I mentioned in my original comment, both of those modes of development played a crucial role in lowering the price of 3D printers as well as increasing volume. By 2008, Stratasys had shipped 16,000 3D printers in the company history. Now Prusa Research ships that many printers in one month. And Prusa is fully open source and always has been. So clearly trade secrets are not the only alternative to patents. You must understand, when one inventor gets rights over something, now 1000 other inventors working in a similar field cannot easily build on that idea. So one person benefits while 1000 others are restricted. But the market already rewards innovators, so why stop those 1000 would-be innovators because one person filed all the right paperwork? And because people always mention this: investment would still work. Instead of a $10m investment for a big five year project, the investments would be smaller and more frequent. Improve the product and impress buyers with the next version. Is it a flop? Someone else will clone your failed version with the necessary improvements, and next year they will get the investment. Product development happens faster because no one can rest on their laurels, and cost of living goes down because no one can charge a very high price for something that can be cloned for cheap. That faster innovation and lower cost of living is obviously a huge benefit to moving away from patents. This is also a fact rarely acknowledged by those who believe in the standard story about the purpose and benefits of patents. There's billions of people on Earth who need the knowledge we have locked up in patent portfolios. We must not be careless with how we consider this policy. There is a lot at stake. [1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284
randombits0 5y ago
You are confusing the “why” and the “how”. "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." If the end result of a patent does not promote the progress of science and the useful arts, it undermines the core purpose of patents.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
I am not disputing that patents provide the recognized inventor a period of monopoly rights which allow that person higher profits for the patent period. What I argue is that this system as implemented does not actually increase the rate of innovation as we are typically told. I argue that in fact this system dramatically slows the rate of innovation. This occurs because every patent benefits one individual while a thousand others are now prevented from discovery along the same lines as the awarded patent. A system without patents would see more market competition among motivated inventors as one good idea cannot carve a moat around any particular concept. You can see a real world example of capitalists competing without patents in China, and the result is rapid innovation. Here is a written first hand account from a respected hacker and engineer. [1] So with both open source and with Shanzai you see that large numbers of people are often motivated to work on the same problem. The function of patents is to prevent those people from pursuing forks of good ideas. This is why 3D printers had gone down in price by 50% after ten years under patent, but in the ten years after the patent expired they went from $25000 to $300 (1.2%). A multitude of curious people will make more engineering progress than one well funded group with a powerful legal monopoly. This is my claim about an under appreciated aspect of patents and this has been discussed in scholarly literature. [2] A common question I hear relates to funding. People say no one will make investments if someone else can copy their work. But I argue this does not mean investment will cease, but that the nature of investment would change. Broadly it would change from fewer larger investments to more frequent smaller investments. One quarter you get a boost of funding to beat the competition to market, next quarter they copy you but then you copy them back and the cat and mouse game continues. This is actually true capitalist market competition. [3] So my argument is that patents do not actually accelerate innovation as we are told, but they actually slow down the rate of innovation. And it makes sense: the sole purpose of a patent is to limit innovation for everyone but the patent holder. We were raised on the story that the secondary effects are positive, but that story is not so simple. Finally, I will say that secrecy can be punished and openness can be enforced. If we all understand how important open source is to rapid innovation, we can make public commitments to boycott those companies and fund efforts to reverse engineer their work. It’s already the case that open source projects avoid proprietary modules as much as possible. We could do this as a society for all goods. [1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 [2] http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm [3] https://youtu.be/hoSWC_6mDCk https://youtu.be/hoSWC_6mDCk

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

What I am saying about patents is that the supposed benefits are vastly outweighed by the drawbacks. I believe the reason they continue to be popular is that patents benefit large industry players to the detriment of everyone else, but since they have strong influence over policy in the USA and the USA has strong policy influence the world over, we are all suffering for the perceived benefits of patents.

Dracophoenix 5y ago
Patents benefit the inventor (or at least they did until 2013) through compensation for their efforts and society as a whole through disclosure of information. The alternative is that every bit of applicable knowledge is kept as a trade secret.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  You frame this as a binary: patents or trade secrets. But other options include authorized copying (open source) and copying without express permission (Shanzai style)[1]. As I mentioned in my original comment, both of those modes of development played a crucial role in lowering the price of 3D printers as well as increasing volume. By 2008, Stratasys had shipped 16,000 3D printers in the company history. Now Prusa Research ships that many printers in one month. And Prusa is fully open source and always has been. So clearly trade secrets are not the only alternative to patents. You must understand, when one inventor gets rights over something, now 1000 other inventors working in a similar field cannot easily build on that idea. So one person benefits while 1000 others are restricted. But the market already rewards innovators, so why stop those 1000 would-be innovators because one person filed all the right paperwork? And because people always mention this: investment would still work. Instead of a $10m investment for a big five year project, the investments would be smaller and more frequent. Improve the product and impress buyers with the next version. Is it a flop? Someone else will clone your failed version with the necessary improvements, and next year they will get the investment. Product development happens faster because no one can rest on their laurels, and cost of living goes down because no one can charge a very high price for something that can be cloned for cheap. That faster innovation and lower cost of living is obviously a huge benefit to moving away from patents. This is also a fact rarely acknowledged by those who believe in the standard story about the purpose and benefits of patents. There's billions of people on Earth who need the knowledge we have locked up in patent portfolios. We must not be careless with how we consider this policy. There is a lot at stake. [1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284

randombits0 5y ago

You are confusing the “why” and the “how”. "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." If the end result of a patent does not promote the progress of science and the useful arts, it undermines the core purpose of patents.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

I am not disputing that patents provide the recognized inventor a period of monopoly rights which allow that person higher profits for the patent period. What I argue is that this system as implemented does not actually increase the rate of innovation as we are typically told. I argue that in fact this system dramatically slows the rate of innovation. This occurs because every patent benefits one individual while a thousand others are now prevented from discovery along the same lines as the awarded patent. A system without patents would see more market competition among motivated inventors as one good idea cannot carve a moat around any particular concept. You can see a real world example of capitalists competing without patents in China, and the result is rapid innovation. Here is a written first hand account from a respected hacker and engineer. [1] So with both open source and with Shanzai you see that large numbers of people are often motivated to work on the same problem. The function of patents is to prevent those people from pursuing forks of good ideas. This is why 3D printers had gone down in price by 50% after ten years under patent, but in the ten years after the patent expired they went from $25000 to $300 (1.2%). A multitude of curious people will make more engineering progress than one well funded group with a powerful legal monopoly. This is my claim about an under appreciated aspect of patents and this has been discussed in scholarly literature. [2] A common question I hear relates to funding. People say no one will make investments if someone else can copy their work. But I argue this does not mean investment will cease, but that the nature of investment would change. Broadly it would change from fewer larger investments to more frequent smaller investments. One quarter you get a boost of funding to beat the competition to market, next quarter they copy you but then you copy them back and the cat and mouse game continues. This is actually true capitalist market competition. [3] So my argument is that patents do not actually accelerate innovation as we are told, but they actually slow down the rate of innovation. And it makes sense: the sole purpose of a patent is to limit innovation for everyone but the patent holder. We were raised on the story that the secondary effects are positive, but that story is not so simple. Finally, I will say that secrecy can be punished and openness can be enforced. If we all understand how important open source is to rapid innovation, we can make public commitments to boycott those companies and fund efforts to reverse engineer their work. It’s already the case that open source projects avoid proprietary modules as much as possible. We could do this as a society for all goods. [1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 [2] http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm [3] https://youtu.be/hoSWC_6mDCk https://youtu.be/hoSWC_6mDCk