29 ms·

The patent system needs to go. Soon.

by errantmind 5y ago

StriverGuy 5y ago
I would say it needs to be realigned to only allow productive companies to hold/protect patents.
- ectospheno 5y ago
  That would mean only large companies would own patents. It would be the death of the independent inventor. No capital to make what you invented? Oh well…
  - ntkachov 5y ago
    Not at all, Patent is there for protection. So if you invent something that requires capital, but are a non-practicing entity, you can't enforce your patent. So lets say a bunch of companies start to practice your patent, all of them now have incentive to buy your patent because if any of them own it, none of their competitors can use it anymore.
  - pionar 5y ago
    If you can't make what you invented, the whole world can't have your invention? That seems suboptimal for society.
    - kspacewalk2 5y ago
      If you can't make what you invented, you can find someone who can and license the invention to them. That seems optimal for society.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      >>> I would say it needs to be realigned to only allow productive companies to hold/protect patents. >> That would mean only large companies would own patents. It would be the death of the independent inventor. No capital to make what you invented? Oh well… > If you can't make what you invented, the whole world can't have your invention? That seems suboptimal for society. Right now, a small independent inventor can use their patent rights to secure capital to produce their invention. If only "productive companies" can hold patents, instead of investing in small inventors, they'd just freeze them out until they lose their rights (or use that threat as leverage to buy the patents for less than they're worth). The "whole world" won't get their invention, just the people rich enough to profit from it, and the inventor gets squat.
      - cecilpl2 5y ago
        > instead of investing in small inventors, they'd just freeze them out until they lose their rights (or use that threat as leverage to buy the patents for less than they're worth). I'm trying to understand your point but it seems like you are saying that all people with sufficient capital would band together to prevent small inventors from getting funding for years?
        tablespoon 5y ago
        > I'm trying to understand your point but it seems like you are saying that all people with sufficient capital would band together to prevent small inventors from getting funding for years? Legal rights are often the only protections the little guy has. Take them away, and the big guys are better able to take advantage. The people with sufficient capital don't need to band together in a conspiracy, they just need to understand their advantage, and act accordingly. And I don't know where you're getting "for years" from. If a small inventor/"[un]productive company" can hold a patent "for years," you're basically describing the current patent system, and the ancestor comment becomes a meaningless suggestion. If the ancestor comment isn't a meaningless suggestion, someone "with sufficient capital" should be able to sue an inventor's patent into nonexistence for being held by an "[un]productive company," which would be strong leverage to demand a lower price. One of the biggest merits of the patent system is it gives independent small inventors a chance at seeing some success. A "reform" that undermines that is not a reform worth pursuing. Also a lot of "reforms" proposed by internet commenters aren't very thought through. Often they're just narrow things aimed to stop some specific thing that's in the front of their mind, with little consideration of collateral damage.
    - rhino369 5y ago
      They can make it; they just need to pay a reasonable royalty. One of the easiest fixes for patent litigation issues would be for congress to set some bounds on what a reasonable royalty is.
      - nradov 5y ago
        How could Congress ever do that in a reasonable way? There are orders of magnitude differences in the value of various patents.
  - mminer237 5y ago
    You could always license it out.
    - onion2k 5y ago
      There would be no reason to buy the license because you'd lose in court if you weren't using it. Companies could just use it with no fear of you winning a case against them. You can't even just accept that the originating patent holder should be able to sue while anyone who buys the patent can't. Patent trolls would just hire the person who registered the patent or sue on their behalf. There is no elegant solution to the patent troll problem. If someone can sue, then trolls can sue.
  - tim333 5y ago
    You could make an exception for the inventor.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - achow 5y ago
    The days of garage invention and patenting those are gone. Patent process itself is so expensive and laborious that many do not do it, and upon that to keep patent 'alive' there is an annual expenditure. I'm not sure whether today there are are many patents which are with small inventors and they are holding onto them till they gather enough funds to productionize them.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      How about modifiying to if you can prove "prior art" on an invention but did not have sufficient capitol to file for the protection or start up a business with the patent so that someone else is granted the patent later, the prior art owner is not subject to the patent? Not a perfect idea, but an idea to kick around on improving rather than just the blanket statments of "kill all patents" that are so trendy. Also, we don't have to say that all garage inventors are dead.
      - samhw 5y ago
        That's not a terrible idea. People likely underestimate how much of the legal system runs on - essentially - sensible human discretion in applying rules like that one.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Have you ever watched Shark Tank?
      - achow 5y ago
        You realize that is highly dramatized and curated? Annually around 1.5-2 millions patents are granted. How many episodes of Shark Tank has run till now and what subset of the participants had patents on their inventions? And, how many of those inventors would not get any funding if there was no concept of patents.
  - beefield 5y ago
    > That would mean only large companies would own patents. Wrong. If you applied a tax to IP that increases relatively fast over time (say doubles each year), you could "easily" select the parameters so, that it makes cheap to hold your patent for a while after the invention ( assuming you have some revenue at least on sight), while making it too expensive to hoard patents for nothing, and make keeping the patents closed unnecessarily long for even the largest corporations.
- pionar 5y ago
  With trademark, it's use it or lose it, as it should be with patents. EDIT: I accidentally included copyright in this. It is not.
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    How is copyright use it or lose it?
    - pionar 5y ago
      Sorry, I should've left that out. Edited.
      - iggldiggl 5y ago
        Although interestingly in the EU there is now a small use-it-or-lose-it element with sound recordings, where the copyright on sound recordings expires fifty years after the original recording, or seventy years after the first publication (or at least public playback) by the rightful owner. Cue a number of labels actually officially releasing a number of previously unpublished recordings in order to prevent the corresponding bootlegs of those recordings from falling into the public domain.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- sirwhinesalot 5y ago
  Perhaps we could do something like: if a company is not actively using a patent themselves, they lose exclusive rights after a short period of time (3 years lets say). Even when sold, the time counts from when the patent was created, not bought. Should limit the extent of the damage caused by patent trolls.
  - rPlayer6554 5y ago
    This is a good idea in theory, but what stops a factory offering to produce one of anything for a few thousand dollars, just to meet the requirements of "making a product." If there are requirements for how many you produce, how does that affect small businesses or businesses that want to keep products exclusive?
    - sirwhinesalot 5y ago
      Good point, too easy to work around. Shortening to half time as Robotbeat said might be the way to go.
    - naniwaduni 5y ago
      This would at least force them to establish an example of a product using their invention, which seems like it'd be a great boon.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    I think in general we should just halve the time of patent protection, including the lead-up time where it hasn’t been finalized yet but still protected.
- yread 5y ago
  Is ARM productive? They're not making CPUs themselves...
  - bmitc 5y ago
    Do patent trolls spend billions of dollars designing CPUs or whatever else they hold patents on?
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    They make CPU designs which they license out. That's copyrighted IP, and thus a product. If ARM stopped making CPU designs and decided to just live off of their ISA patents while doing little to no actual development, yeah, then they certainly shouldn't have the right to be milking that cow in perpetuity, in an ideal world.
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      They shouldn't have the right to sell their existing designs until the patent expires? This is the current system
assbuttbuttass 5y ago
Yes, it's interesting that although patents were intended to allow huge corporations to suppress competition, now these huge corporations have to spend endless legal fees fighting patent trolls. Will it be enough to kill patents? Maybe
- toyg 5y ago
  > patents were intended to allow huge corporations to suppress competition Afaik, there weren't any "huge corporations" around when the patent system was first devised, only what today would look like mid-size national companies. There is a good chance the initial legislators thought they were actually protecting the little guys. Alas, good intentions tend to pave roads to very hot places...
mminer237 5y ago
That would essentially end innovation. If you invented the new latest and greatest gadget/medicine/process, a mega-corporation with more resources than you will undercut you with the exact same product within the week. You can say patents relating to phones should be narrowed, but ending the patent system would be a hundred times more disastrous.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  In reality, the big corporations have huge “defensive patent” war chests which your innovation probably infringes on in some way if you were to try to bring it to market. The deck is stacked against the individual inventor more so now than in the past.
- namlem 5y ago
  I don't agree that we should eliminate parents, but it most certainly would not end innovation. China has very weak IP rights but there is still plenty of innovation.
haxorito 5y ago
Nah just need overhaul and better control, start with taking legal actions against patent trolls on federal level. People will always look for ways to make money with very little effort
- NoboruWataya 5y ago
  > start with taking legal actions against patent trolls on federal level How would that work? So you are allowed to acquire legal rights, but if you try to enforce those rights, the federal government will take action against you? Seems like a bizarre and unnecessary trap to set. If you really want to stop this kind of thing surely the more logical thing to do would just be to say that patent rights are personal, ie, they cannot be sold to third parties. Of course, that would lead to a significant devaluation of intellectual property, which (so the theory goes) would result in less innovation.
gdsdfe 5y ago
patents do serve a purpose ... but I would reduce their 'impact' say a patent is only valid for 10 years and same patent can't be refiled twice.
- nradov 5y ago
  Inventors are already prohibited from refiling the same patent twice.
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  The problem is that companies just lobby to extend how long they're valid for e.g. Disney. The entire system is fucked. I wish a bomb would just wipe out Congress sometimes.
jordanpg 5y ago
This criticism is as misguided as "end all regulation." The specific problem that the US patent system enables is that patent rights can be assigned to anyone, just like any other property right. That is what allows NPEs to exploit this manifest economic inefficiency. Ending all patents very much throws the baby out with the bathwater. The federal government can and should intervene to reform the laws that allow this.
- namlem 5y ago
  What we need is a Harberger tax on patents.
- errantmind 5y ago
  Please provide some evidence, other than your intuition, that the patent system is necessary and useful, over no patent system.
  - ChrisLomont 5y ago
    Which countries provide more innovation, those with strong patent laws protecting inventors, or those with lax or no patent laws, allowing anyone to just copy inventions without rewarding inventors?
    - errantmind 5y ago
      You tell me, bring some evidence.
      - ChrisLomont 5y ago
        Some recent papers [1], look at figures at end of paper. Figure one shows the percent of inventions in various industries that would not have been developed without patent protection, and it's 60% for pharm, >35% for chem, and significant for machinery, electrical. This chart is from 1986, so tech didn't exist as it does now. Many other charts, some much more recent, show that without patent protection a lot of current invention would not get done. [2] is an interesting one, a recent paper studying the effect WWII had on innovation by making patents secret so enemies could not learn from them. The effect is that without patents making companies publish innovations, follow-on innovation was slowed significantly. So this provides evidence that patents add innovation by letting competitors learn more quickly. [3] - patents in the UK : "We find evidence pointing to a positive association between patenting and innovative performance measured as turnover due to innovation, but not between patenting and subsequent employment growth." [4] "We find that patent approvals help startups create jobs, grow their sales, innovate, and reward their investors. Exogenous delays in the patent examination process significantly reduce firm growth, job creation, and innovation, even when a firm’s patent application is eventually approved. Our results suggest that patents act as a catalyst that sets startups on a growth path by facilitating their access to capital. " [5] "Using unique data on all first-time applications filed at the U.S. Patent Office since 2001, we find that startups that win the patent “lottery” by drawing lenient examiners have, on average, 55% higher employment growth and 80% higher sales growth five years later. Patent winners also pursue more, and higher quality, follow-on innovation. Winning a first patent boosts a startup’s subsequent growth and innovation by facilitating access to funding from VCs, banks, and public investors." There's hundreds more papers - go to google scholar and search and learn about it. Now, as to your statement, "Please provide some evidence, other than your intuition, that the patent system is necessary and useful, over no patent system. reply". Do you have any good survey papers or wide scale evidence to support that a patent system isn't necessary and useful? Anecdotes, blog posts, stories about this or that company are not solid evidence, since those all ignore the totality of evidence. [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w25383 https://www.nber.org/papers/w25383 [2] https://www.nber.org/digest/jul19/wwii-policy-kept-patents-secret-slowed-innovation https://www.nber.org/digest/jul19/wwii-policy-kept-patents-s... [3] https://www.nber.org/papers/w19089 https://www.nber.org/papers/w19089 [4] https://www.nber.org/papers/w21959 https://www.nber.org/papers/w21959 [5] https://www.nber.org/papers/w23268 https://www.nber.org/papers/w23268
ford_o 5y ago
Why not just limit patents to 3 years before they expire. In today's world this should be all you need to pay for the research and go from startup to established company.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Some products take much longer to develop. A drug or medical device can easily take 10 years from concept/ip filing to hit market. Other products have slow uptake. If you make a novel product with growing users, Google shouldn't be able to clone it at 3 years and push it to a billion of their users.

The patent system needs to go. Soon.

StriverGuy 5y ago

I would say it needs to be realigned to only allow productive companies to hold/protect patents.

ectospheno 5y ago
That would mean only large companies would own patents. It would be the death of the independent inventor. No capital to make what you invented? Oh well…
- ntkachov 5y ago
  Not at all, Patent is there for protection. So if you invent something that requires capital, but are a non-practicing entity, you can't enforce your patent. So lets say a bunch of companies start to practice your patent, all of them now have incentive to buy your patent because if any of them own it, none of their competitors can use it anymore.
- pionar 5y ago
  If you can't make what you invented, the whole world can't have your invention? That seems suboptimal for society.
  - kspacewalk2 5y ago
    If you can't make what you invented, you can find someone who can and license the invention to them. That seems optimal for society.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    >>> I would say it needs to be realigned to only allow productive companies to hold/protect patents. >> That would mean only large companies would own patents. It would be the death of the independent inventor. No capital to make what you invented? Oh well… > If you can't make what you invented, the whole world can't have your invention? That seems suboptimal for society. Right now, a small independent inventor can use their patent rights to secure capital to produce their invention. If only "productive companies" can hold patents, instead of investing in small inventors, they'd just freeze them out until they lose their rights (or use that threat as leverage to buy the patents for less than they're worth). The "whole world" won't get their invention, just the people rich enough to profit from it, and the inventor gets squat.
    - cecilpl2 5y ago
      > instead of investing in small inventors, they'd just freeze them out until they lose their rights (or use that threat as leverage to buy the patents for less than they're worth). I'm trying to understand your point but it seems like you are saying that all people with sufficient capital would band together to prevent small inventors from getting funding for years?
      - tablespoon 5y ago
        > I'm trying to understand your point but it seems like you are saying that all people with sufficient capital would band together to prevent small inventors from getting funding for years? Legal rights are often the only protections the little guy has. Take them away, and the big guys are better able to take advantage. The people with sufficient capital don't need to band together in a conspiracy, they just need to understand their advantage, and act accordingly. And I don't know where you're getting "for years" from. If a small inventor/"[un]productive company" can hold a patent "for years," you're basically describing the current patent system, and the ancestor comment becomes a meaningless suggestion. If the ancestor comment isn't a meaningless suggestion, someone "with sufficient capital" should be able to sue an inventor's patent into nonexistence for being held by an "[un]productive company," which would be strong leverage to demand a lower price. One of the biggest merits of the patent system is it gives independent small inventors a chance at seeing some success. A "reform" that undermines that is not a reform worth pursuing. Also a lot of "reforms" proposed by internet commenters aren't very thought through. Often they're just narrow things aimed to stop some specific thing that's in the front of their mind, with little consideration of collateral damage.
  - rhino369 5y ago
    They can make it; they just need to pay a reasonable royalty. One of the easiest fixes for patent litigation issues would be for congress to set some bounds on what a reasonable royalty is.
    - nradov 5y ago
      How could Congress ever do that in a reasonable way? There are orders of magnitude differences in the value of various patents.
- mminer237 5y ago
  You could always license it out.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    There would be no reason to buy the license because you'd lose in court if you weren't using it. Companies could just use it with no fear of you winning a case against them. You can't even just accept that the originating patent holder should be able to sue while anyone who buys the patent can't. Patent trolls would just hire the person who registered the patent or sue on their behalf. There is no elegant solution to the patent troll problem. If someone can sue, then trolls can sue.
- tim333 5y ago
  You could make an exception for the inventor.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- achow 5y ago
  The days of garage invention and patenting those are gone. Patent process itself is so expensive and laborious that many do not do it, and upon that to keep patent 'alive' there is an annual expenditure. I'm not sure whether today there are are many patents which are with small inventors and they are holding onto them till they gather enough funds to productionize them.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    How about modifiying to if you can prove "prior art" on an invention but did not have sufficient capitol to file for the protection or start up a business with the patent so that someone else is granted the patent later, the prior art owner is not subject to the patent? Not a perfect idea, but an idea to kick around on improving rather than just the blanket statments of "kill all patents" that are so trendy. Also, we don't have to say that all garage inventors are dead.
    - samhw 5y ago
      That's not a terrible idea. People likely underestimate how much of the legal system runs on - essentially - sensible human discretion in applying rules like that one.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Have you ever watched Shark Tank?
    - achow 5y ago
      You realize that is highly dramatized and curated? Annually around 1.5-2 millions patents are granted. How many episodes of Shark Tank has run till now and what subset of the participants had patents on their inventions? And, how many of those inventors would not get any funding if there was no concept of patents.
- beefield 5y ago
  > That would mean only large companies would own patents. Wrong. If you applied a tax to IP that increases relatively fast over time (say doubles each year), you could "easily" select the parameters so, that it makes cheap to hold your patent for a while after the invention ( assuming you have some revenue at least on sight), while making it too expensive to hoard patents for nothing, and make keeping the patents closed unnecessarily long for even the largest corporations.
pionar 5y ago
With trademark, it's use it or lose it, as it should be with patents. EDIT: I accidentally included copyright in this. It is not.
- jtbayly 5y ago
  How is copyright use it or lose it?
  - pionar 5y ago
    Sorry, I should've left that out. Edited.
    - iggldiggl 5y ago
      Although interestingly in the EU there is now a small use-it-or-lose-it element with sound recordings, where the copyright on sound recordings expires fifty years after the original recording, or seventy years after the first publication (or at least public playback) by the rightful owner. Cue a number of labels actually officially releasing a number of previously unpublished recordings in order to prevent the corresponding bootlegs of those recordings from falling into the public domain.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
sirwhinesalot 5y ago
Perhaps we could do something like: if a company is not actively using a patent themselves, they lose exclusive rights after a short period of time (3 years lets say). Even when sold, the time counts from when the patent was created, not bought. Should limit the extent of the damage caused by patent trolls.
- rPlayer6554 5y ago
  This is a good idea in theory, but what stops a factory offering to produce one of anything for a few thousand dollars, just to meet the requirements of "making a product." If there are requirements for how many you produce, how does that affect small businesses or businesses that want to keep products exclusive?
  - sirwhinesalot 5y ago
    Good point, too easy to work around. Shortening to half time as Robotbeat said might be the way to go.
  - naniwaduni 5y ago
    This would at least force them to establish an example of a product using their invention, which seems like it'd be a great boon.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  I think in general we should just halve the time of patent protection, including the lead-up time where it hasn’t been finalized yet but still protected.
yread 5y ago
Is ARM productive? They're not making CPUs themselves...
- bmitc 5y ago
  Do patent trolls spend billions of dollars designing CPUs or whatever else they hold patents on?
- marcan_42 5y ago
  They make CPU designs which they license out. That's copyrighted IP, and thus a product. If ARM stopped making CPU designs and decided to just live off of their ISA patents while doing little to no actual development, yeah, then they certainly shouldn't have the right to be milking that cow in perpetuity, in an ideal world.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    They shouldn't have the right to sell their existing designs until the patent expires? This is the current system

assbuttbuttass 5y ago

Yes, it's interesting that although patents were intended to allow huge corporations to suppress competition, now these huge corporations have to spend endless legal fees fighting patent trolls. Will it be enough to kill patents? Maybe

toyg 5y ago
> patents were intended to allow huge corporations to suppress competition Afaik, there weren't any "huge corporations" around when the patent system was first devised, only what today would look like mid-size national companies. There is a good chance the initial legislators thought they were actually protecting the little guys. Alas, good intentions tend to pave roads to very hot places...

mminer237 5y ago

That would essentially end innovation. If you invented the new latest and greatest gadget/medicine/process, a mega-corporation with more resources than you will undercut you with the exact same product within the week. You can say patents relating to phones should be narrowed, but ending the patent system would be a hundred times more disastrous.

Robotbeat 5y ago
In reality, the big corporations have huge “defensive patent” war chests which your innovation probably infringes on in some way if you were to try to bring it to market. The deck is stacked against the individual inventor more so now than in the past.
namlem 5y ago
I don't agree that we should eliminate parents, but it most certainly would not end innovation. China has very weak IP rights but there is still plenty of innovation.

haxorito 5y ago

Nah just need overhaul and better control, start with taking legal actions against patent trolls on federal level. People will always look for ways to make money with very little effort

NoboruWataya 5y ago
> start with taking legal actions against patent trolls on federal level How would that work? So you are allowed to acquire legal rights, but if you try to enforce those rights, the federal government will take action against you? Seems like a bizarre and unnecessary trap to set. If you really want to stop this kind of thing surely the more logical thing to do would just be to say that patent rights are personal, ie, they cannot be sold to third parties. Of course, that would lead to a significant devaluation of intellectual property, which (so the theory goes) would result in less innovation.

gdsdfe 5y ago

patents do serve a purpose ... but I would reduce their 'impact' say a patent is only valid for 10 years and same patent can't be refiled twice.

nradov 5y ago
Inventors are already prohibited from refiling the same patent twice.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
The problem is that companies just lobby to extend how long they're valid for e.g. Disney. The entire system is fucked. I wish a bomb would just wipe out Congress sometimes.

jordanpg 5y ago

This criticism is as misguided as "end all regulation." The specific problem that the US patent system enables is that patent rights can be assigned to anyone, just like any other property right. That is what allows NPEs to exploit this manifest economic inefficiency. Ending all patents very much throws the baby out with the bathwater. The federal government can and should intervene to reform the laws that allow this.

namlem 5y ago
What we need is a Harberger tax on patents.
errantmind 5y ago
Please provide some evidence, other than your intuition, that the patent system is necessary and useful, over no patent system.
- ChrisLomont 5y ago
  Which countries provide more innovation, those with strong patent laws protecting inventors, or those with lax or no patent laws, allowing anyone to just copy inventions without rewarding inventors?
  - errantmind 5y ago
    You tell me, bring some evidence.
    - ChrisLomont 5y ago
      Some recent papers [1], look at figures at end of paper. Figure one shows the percent of inventions in various industries that would not have been developed without patent protection, and it's 60% for pharm, >35% for chem, and significant for machinery, electrical. This chart is from 1986, so tech didn't exist as it does now. Many other charts, some much more recent, show that without patent protection a lot of current invention would not get done. [2] is an interesting one, a recent paper studying the effect WWII had on innovation by making patents secret so enemies could not learn from them. The effect is that without patents making companies publish innovations, follow-on innovation was slowed significantly. So this provides evidence that patents add innovation by letting competitors learn more quickly. [3] - patents in the UK : "We find evidence pointing to a positive association between patenting and innovative performance measured as turnover due to innovation, but not between patenting and subsequent employment growth." [4] "We find that patent approvals help startups create jobs, grow their sales, innovate, and reward their investors. Exogenous delays in the patent examination process significantly reduce firm growth, job creation, and innovation, even when a firm’s patent application is eventually approved. Our results suggest that patents act as a catalyst that sets startups on a growth path by facilitating their access to capital. " [5] "Using unique data on all first-time applications filed at the U.S. Patent Office since 2001, we find that startups that win the patent “lottery” by drawing lenient examiners have, on average, 55% higher employment growth and 80% higher sales growth five years later. Patent winners also pursue more, and higher quality, follow-on innovation. Winning a first patent boosts a startup’s subsequent growth and innovation by facilitating access to funding from VCs, banks, and public investors." There's hundreds more papers - go to google scholar and search and learn about it. Now, as to your statement, "Please provide some evidence, other than your intuition, that the patent system is necessary and useful, over no patent system. reply". Do you have any good survey papers or wide scale evidence to support that a patent system isn't necessary and useful? Anecdotes, blog posts, stories about this or that company are not solid evidence, since those all ignore the totality of evidence. [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w25383 https://www.nber.org/papers/w25383 [2] https://www.nber.org/digest/jul19/wwii-policy-kept-patents-secret-slowed-innovation https://www.nber.org/digest/jul19/wwii-policy-kept-patents-s... [3] https://www.nber.org/papers/w19089 https://www.nber.org/papers/w19089 [4] https://www.nber.org/papers/w21959 https://www.nber.org/papers/w21959 [5] https://www.nber.org/papers/w23268 https://www.nber.org/papers/w23268

ford_o 5y ago

Why not just limit patents to 3 years before they expire. In today's world this should be all you need to pay for the research and go from startup to established company.

s1artibartfast 5y ago
Some products take much longer to develop. A drug or medical device can easily take 10 years from concept/ip filing to hit market. Other products have slow uptake. If you make a novel product with growing users, Google shouldn't be able to clone it at 3 years and push it to a billion of their users.