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> There is no benefit for humanity to be gained through patents, they merely hinder our technological advancement. I disagree. There are three alternatives (th

by rcfox 15y ago

> There is no benefit for humanity to be gained through patents, they merely hinder our technological advancement. I disagree. There are three alternatives (that come to mind) to patents: 1) Make all information freely accessible to anyone. This is the one we'd all like everyone to do. However, there's very little (economic) incentive to innovate when you do all of the heavy thinking and anyone else can just come along and beat you to the implementation. 2) Stop innovating. If you can't protect your ideas, you might as well just stop trying. 3) Hide your information. Only you can benefit from the information if no one else knows about it. (You can't license information and keep it a secret at the same time!) There are laws to help protect you, but you also have to do a lot of work to protect yourself. You can also keep your information secret indefinitely. By filing a patent, you're telling the world how to do something (allegedly) new. In 20 years, (or longer/shorter, depending on the country) everyone is freely able to use the idea.

rgoddard 15y ago
The problem is, patents are not a repository for searching for solutions and solving problems. If you were to do so, you open yourself for further liability down the road. Not only that, you then harm the person who discovers the same solution independently, even though, your patent did not help them in anyway.
- rcfox 15y ago
  > The problem is, patents are not a repository for searching for solutions and solving problems. Tell that to the generic-brand pharmaceutical companies. ;) > Not only that, you then harm the person who discovers the same solution independently, even though, your patent did not help them in anyway. In the old way, where you had to actually present an implementation of the patented idea, I imagine this would have encouraged inventors to innovate more rapidly. The current system is very broken, and allows patents for things like the perpetual motion machine. (I'd try to provide a link, but engineers shouldn't be looking at patents.) "Oh, you're trying to genuinely improve our lives? Too bad I already came up with the idea in the shower one day and wrote it down before you did! But I'm willing to let you go ahead and try for $40 million."
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    If it can be shown that you can show that you have a history of reading patents, then it can be argued that you wilfully infringed. It certainly makes defense much harder. Patent lawyers generally recommend that engineers NOT read patents for that reason.
    - ars 15y ago
      What about reading only expired patents?
      - burgerbrain 15y ago
        I don't know, I'm not a patent lawyer myself. I suspect however, that they would advise you this is a risky activity.
  - derleth 15y ago
    > The current system is very broken, and allows patents for things like the perpetual motion machine. Actually, they explicitly say 'no perpetual motion machines' or the equivalent (I think they say 'You must provide a working example of something you claim is a perpetual motion machine', which comes to the same thing.) It's a special little carve-out they have to fix that specific problem.
    - Natsu 15y ago
      Sadly, that hasn't stopped all of those patents from being issued. See here, for example: http://www.google.com/patents/about/6362718_Motionless_electromagnetic_gener.html?id=-64KAAAAEBAJ http://www.google.com/patents/about/6362718_Motionless_elect...
- Gravityloss 15y ago
  But why? If I patented something (that I'd spent resources on inventing), I'd sell a license for a reasonable sum, not block its use. That's the intent of the system. Or if I found a patent that was a solution to my problem, I'd buy a licence. People buy hardware, software, services all the time. Companies also do that and use them to build more value and sell that further. Software patents have lots of problems but the idea to just throw it all in the trash bin is a bit black and white. You could for example have (international?) patent courts that would prevent monopoly-by-patent things.
  - slowpoke 15y ago
    People buy hardware, software, services all the time. There is a big difference between hardware and services, and patents. Software is a whole other deal, and I object to the whole model of proprietary distribution as well, but that's besides the point. Fact is, an idea is an abstract concept, not a physical good or a services. One cannot own an abstract concept - the very notion of that is completely nonsensical. If somebody has a an idea, and tells (gives) that idea to somebody else, both people will have that idea now. You cannot say the same of a physical good or a service. Besides, arguing for the status quo by citing the status quo is a circular argument. the idea to just throw it all in the trash bin is a bit black and white. We have a system built upon paradoxical, nonsensical and self-contradictory basics which does nothing but help create artificial monopolies and slow down or halt technological progress for the benefit of a few big corporations. There is but this only option, and that's to completely scrap it and never try it again. I'm honestly tired of seeing 'but that's black and white thinking' in defense of a completely indefensible position. Sometimes there are things which are simply bad - patents are one of those things. You could for example have (international?) patent courts that would prevent monopoly-by-patent things. The solution to a massively broken system that, in large parts, relies on huge amounts of bureaucracy is even more bureaucracy? I think not. You cannot fix this system - it's broken by default.
    - rcfox 15y ago
      > Fact is, an idea is an abstract concept, not a physical good or a services. One cannot own an abstract concept - the very notion of that is completely nonsensical. If somebody has a an idea, and tells (gives) that idea to somebody else, both people will have that idea now. You cannot say the same of a physical good or a service. You're missing the point. Filing patents isn't (in theory) about hoarding ideas. It's a way to ensure that when you expend (often large amounts of) money and/or effort in order to develop a new technology, you are able to reap the rewards. Often, a new technology is most valuable to the first person to commercialize it.
slowpoke 15y ago
> However, there's very little (economic) incentive to innovate In the economic sense, that might be true, but on the contrary, patents prevent (or hinder) people who might have good ideas from innovating - and I'd wager that those people are way more numerous than the lot of people who wouldn't try to further advance current technologies (or invent new ones) just because there suddenly is no more economic incentive to do so. > By filing a patent, you're telling the world how to do something (allegedly) new. I don't want to be told how to do it, and then be told that I have to wait 20 years until I can use it. I want to use it now, and I want to build on it now. So does the rest of humanity. 20 years is way too long, but so are 1 year, 6 months, 10 days or half a minute. It's plain and simply ridiculous - as well has highly paradoxical - to stop progress (even if only temporary) in the name of promoting progress. There is only one alternative in this entire mess - abolish patents, completely. They never fulfilled the purpose they were intended for (even historically they caused quite the opposite, see Watt and the Steam Engine), and serve the few powerful and rich to the detriment of humanity as a whole (again, see Watt).
CamperBob 15y ago
When someone loses a patent suit without a finding of willful infringement, none of your three points apply. The 'teachings' of the patent clearly weren't involved in the majority of instances of patent infringement. Almost invariably the infringer had no clue they were infringing. By filing a patent, you're telling the world how to do something (allegedly) new. In 20 years, (or longer/shorter, depending on the country) everyone is freely able to use the idea. If it's a good idea, someone else -- perhaps the very next person who confronts the same problem -- will almost certainly reinvent it independently. The idea of paying monopoly rents on ideas should make no sense to anyone but a lawyer.
- rcfox 15y ago
  > If it's a good idea, someone else -- perhaps the very next person who confronts the same problem -- will almost certainly reinvent it independently. It's not reasonable to assume that discovering the same solution to a particular problem is inevitable for everyone. > The idea of paying monopoly rents on ideas should make no sense to anyone but a lawyer. That wasn't my point. After the patent expires, the knowledge is available to everyone. If it's held as a trade secret, then it's possible that the knowledge is never released to the public.
  - CamperBob 15y ago
    If it's held as a trade secret, then it's possible that the knowledge is never released to the public. However, to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts," as the Constitution states, it's necessary to demonstrate both that patents serve as a widespread source of inspiration and teaching (which they don't do very often, as demonstrated by the relative rarity of willful-infringement awards), and that trade secrets actually do keep advances from becoming more widely available. This is hard to show, at best. Nobody refrains from producing a touchscreen phone with a swipe-to-unlock feature because they can't figure out how... they refrain because Apple is allowed to financially destroy anyone who tries. Most patents work the same way, in that they keep people from being able to use techniques that might have been obscure and irrelevant at one time but are now obvious, no thanks to the patent itself.
eric-hu 15y ago
> 1) Make all information freely accessible to anyone. This is the one we'd all like everyone to do. However, there's very little (economic) incentive to innovate when you do all of the heavy thinking and anyone else can just come along and beat you to the implementation. Indeed. Economic incentives to innovate don't always produce the best products for the users anyways. Examples: Encarta : Wikipedia Windows NT : Unix/Linux IIS : Apache The products on the left aren't "bad", but in my opinion, the ones on the right are generally more accepted and used because they're superior. There was minimal economic incentive to create the products on the right for the developers. My opinion: people try harder to make their innovations of the highest quality when the incentives aren't monetary.
- rcfox 15y ago
  Unix is(was?) a commercial product. Linux was born out of the desire for a free version of Unix. There are economic incentives. I agree that money isn't the best motivation for people. However, in general, things like robotics, medicine, silicon fabrication, etc. are out of most people's leagues financially. In order to be able to innovate in these fields, you need to convince some company that they can make more money than what they will spend by researching in the field. Remember, patents cover more fields than just software.
  - jholman 15y ago
    > Unix is(was?) a commercial product Unix was originally a non-commercial product, albeit produced by paid researchers at Bell Labs (owned by a commercial entity, AT&T). And actually, Wikipedia claims that {Thompson, Ritchie, et al} received no financial support for the first version, which was developed on a spare PDP-7, so I'm not even clear if they were using paid time to work on it. It was non-commercial because AT&T had been forbidden by a 1956 consent decree to be commercially active in the fledgling computer space. It was only in 1983 (with the breakup of AT&T and the consequent expiry of the consent decree) that commercialization of Unix started, over 15 years after its creation. So the successes of Unix pre-1983 should be lumped with the successes of GNU (founded that same year) and Linux, as being non-commercial and not-for-profit.
noglorp 15y ago
> anyone else can just come along and beat you to the implementation Pray tell, how might they do this when you know the method and they do not? Unless you developed the method, then went around telling random people before going about implementing it.

by rcfox 15y ago

rgoddard 15y ago

The problem is, patents are not a repository for searching for solutions and solving problems. If you were to do so, you open yourself for further liability down the road. Not only that, you then harm the person who discovers the same solution independently, even though, your patent did not help them in anyway.

rcfox 15y ago
> The problem is, patents are not a repository for searching for solutions and solving problems. Tell that to the generic-brand pharmaceutical companies. ;) > Not only that, you then harm the person who discovers the same solution independently, even though, your patent did not help them in anyway. In the old way, where you had to actually present an implementation of the patented idea, I imagine this would have encouraged inventors to innovate more rapidly. The current system is very broken, and allows patents for things like the perpetual motion machine. (I'd try to provide a link, but engineers shouldn't be looking at patents.) "Oh, you're trying to genuinely improve our lives? Too bad I already came up with the idea in the shower one day and wrote it down before you did! But I'm willing to let you go ahead and try for $40 million."
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  If it can be shown that you can show that you have a history of reading patents, then it can be argued that you wilfully infringed. It certainly makes defense much harder. Patent lawyers generally recommend that engineers NOT read patents for that reason.
  - ars 15y ago
    What about reading only expired patents?
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      I don't know, I'm not a patent lawyer myself. I suspect however, that they would advise you this is a risky activity.
- derleth 15y ago
  > The current system is very broken, and allows patents for things like the perpetual motion machine. Actually, they explicitly say 'no perpetual motion machines' or the equivalent (I think they say 'You must provide a working example of something you claim is a perpetual motion machine', which comes to the same thing.) It's a special little carve-out they have to fix that specific problem.
  - Natsu 15y ago
    Sadly, that hasn't stopped all of those patents from being issued. See here, for example: http://www.google.com/patents/about/6362718_Motionless_electromagnetic_gener.html?id=-64KAAAAEBAJ http://www.google.com/patents/about/6362718_Motionless_elect...
Gravityloss 15y ago
But why? If I patented something (that I'd spent resources on inventing), I'd sell a license for a reasonable sum, not block its use. That's the intent of the system. Or if I found a patent that was a solution to my problem, I'd buy a licence. People buy hardware, software, services all the time. Companies also do that and use them to build more value and sell that further. Software patents have lots of problems but the idea to just throw it all in the trash bin is a bit black and white. You could for example have (international?) patent courts that would prevent monopoly-by-patent things.
- slowpoke 15y ago
  People buy hardware, software, services all the time. There is a big difference between hardware and services, and patents. Software is a whole other deal, and I object to the whole model of proprietary distribution as well, but that's besides the point. Fact is, an idea is an abstract concept, not a physical good or a services. One cannot own an abstract concept - the very notion of that is completely nonsensical. If somebody has a an idea, and tells (gives) that idea to somebody else, both people will have that idea now. You cannot say the same of a physical good or a service. Besides, arguing for the status quo by citing the status quo is a circular argument. the idea to just throw it all in the trash bin is a bit black and white. We have a system built upon paradoxical, nonsensical and self-contradictory basics which does nothing but help create artificial monopolies and slow down or halt technological progress for the benefit of a few big corporations. There is but this only option, and that's to completely scrap it and never try it again. I'm honestly tired of seeing 'but that's black and white thinking' in defense of a completely indefensible position. Sometimes there are things which are simply bad - patents are one of those things. You could for example have (international?) patent courts that would prevent monopoly-by-patent things. The solution to a massively broken system that, in large parts, relies on huge amounts of bureaucracy is even more bureaucracy? I think not. You cannot fix this system - it's broken by default.
  - rcfox 15y ago
    > Fact is, an idea is an abstract concept, not a physical good or a services. One cannot own an abstract concept - the very notion of that is completely nonsensical. If somebody has a an idea, and tells (gives) that idea to somebody else, both people will have that idea now. You cannot say the same of a physical good or a service. You're missing the point. Filing patents isn't (in theory) about hoarding ideas. It's a way to ensure that when you expend (often large amounts of) money and/or effort in order to develop a new technology, you are able to reap the rewards. Often, a new technology is most valuable to the first person to commercialize it.

slowpoke 15y ago

> However, there's very little (economic) incentive to innovate In the economic sense, that might be true, but on the contrary, patents prevent (or hinder) people who might have good ideas from innovating - and I'd wager that those people are way more numerous than the lot of people who wouldn't try to further advance current technologies (or invent new ones) just because there suddenly is no more economic incentive to do so. > By filing a patent, you're telling the world how to do something (allegedly) new. I don't want to be told how to do it, and then be told that I have to wait 20 years until I can use it. I want to use it now, and I want to build on it now. So does the rest of humanity. 20 years is way too long, but so are 1 year, 6 months, 10 days or half a minute. It's plain and simply ridiculous - as well has highly paradoxical - to stop progress (even if only temporary) in the name of promoting progress. There is only one alternative in this entire mess - abolish patents, completely. They never fulfilled the purpose they were intended for (even historically they caused quite the opposite, see Watt and the Steam Engine), and serve the few powerful and rich to the detriment of humanity as a whole (again, see Watt).

CamperBob 15y ago

When someone loses a patent suit without a finding of willful infringement, none of your three points apply. The 'teachings' of the patent clearly weren't involved in the majority of instances of patent infringement. Almost invariably the infringer had no clue they were infringing. By filing a patent, you're telling the world how to do something (allegedly) new. In 20 years, (or longer/shorter, depending on the country) everyone is freely able to use the idea. If it's a good idea, someone else -- perhaps the very next person who confronts the same problem -- will almost certainly reinvent it independently. The idea of paying monopoly rents on ideas should make no sense to anyone but a lawyer.

rcfox 15y ago
> If it's a good idea, someone else -- perhaps the very next person who confronts the same problem -- will almost certainly reinvent it independently. It's not reasonable to assume that discovering the same solution to a particular problem is inevitable for everyone. > The idea of paying monopoly rents on ideas should make no sense to anyone but a lawyer. That wasn't my point. After the patent expires, the knowledge is available to everyone. If it's held as a trade secret, then it's possible that the knowledge is never released to the public.
- CamperBob 15y ago
  If it's held as a trade secret, then it's possible that the knowledge is never released to the public. However, to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts," as the Constitution states, it's necessary to demonstrate both that patents serve as a widespread source of inspiration and teaching (which they don't do very often, as demonstrated by the relative rarity of willful-infringement awards), and that trade secrets actually do keep advances from becoming more widely available. This is hard to show, at best. Nobody refrains from producing a touchscreen phone with a swipe-to-unlock feature because they can't figure out how... they refrain because Apple is allowed to financially destroy anyone who tries. Most patents work the same way, in that they keep people from being able to use techniques that might have been obscure and irrelevant at one time but are now obvious, no thanks to the patent itself.

eric-hu 15y ago

> 1) Make all information freely accessible to anyone. This is the one we'd all like everyone to do. However, there's very little (economic) incentive to innovate when you do all of the heavy thinking and anyone else can just come along and beat you to the implementation. Indeed. Economic incentives to innovate don't always produce the best products for the users anyways. Examples: Encarta : Wikipedia Windows NT : Unix/Linux IIS : Apache The products on the left aren't "bad", but in my opinion, the ones on the right are generally more accepted and used because they're superior. There was minimal economic incentive to create the products on the right for the developers. My opinion: people try harder to make their innovations of the highest quality when the incentives aren't monetary.

rcfox 15y ago
Unix is(was?) a commercial product. Linux was born out of the desire for a free version of Unix. There are economic incentives. I agree that money isn't the best motivation for people. However, in general, things like robotics, medicine, silicon fabrication, etc. are out of most people's leagues financially. In order to be able to innovate in these fields, you need to convince some company that they can make more money than what they will spend by researching in the field. Remember, patents cover more fields than just software.
- jholman 15y ago
  > Unix is(was?) a commercial product Unix was originally a non-commercial product, albeit produced by paid researchers at Bell Labs (owned by a commercial entity, AT&T). And actually, Wikipedia claims that {Thompson, Ritchie, et al} received no financial support for the first version, which was developed on a spare PDP-7, so I'm not even clear if they were using paid time to work on it. It was non-commercial because AT&T had been forbidden by a 1956 consent decree to be commercially active in the fledgling computer space. It was only in 1983 (with the breakup of AT&T and the consequent expiry of the consent decree) that commercialization of Unix started, over 15 years after its creation. So the successes of Unix pre-1983 should be lumped with the successes of GNU (founded that same year) and Linux, as being non-commercial and not-for-profit.

noglorp 15y ago

> anyone else can just come along and beat you to the implementation Pray tell, how might they do this when you know the method and they do not? Unless you developed the method, then went around telling random people before going about implementing it.