7 ms·

I am of the opinion that instead of letting legaleses define good/bad patent, we should let the economics work it out. Mandate patent filers to declare a public

I am of the opinion that instead of letting legaleses define good/bad patent, we should let the economics work it out. Mandate patent filers to declare a public flat license fee . Along with annual recurring patent-maintenance tax to government as some X% of that declared fee. Market will decide which patents are worth maintaining for 20 years, and government get proportional revenue as well.

cjfd 3y ago
I declare that I patented human breathing. Every human who is breathing is to pay me the, really very cheap, fee of 1 cent per day. O there is a tax? So now I only get half a cent per day per living being.
- gruez 3y ago
  You probably joking, but that wouldn't work because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art. All the "bad" patents were probably novel at the time they filed. That's not the issue. The issue is that they're for arguably obvious stuff like "[x] but on internet/phone" that the sibling commenter is talking about.
  - cjfd 3y ago
    Read the comment that I am responding to. 'letting legalese define good/bad patent, we should let the economics work it out.' If 'legalese' cannot define good/bad patent anymore, there is nothing stopping such a silly patent that I propose.
marcjuul 3y ago
While that's an interesting thought experiment and there are definitely good reasons to make it more difficult to sit on an unused patent, it's already difficult enough for lone inventors and small organizations to get and keep a patent. This would require everyone to either have a lot of money up front to pay the maintenance tax or keep the license fees low thus ensuring that they will never have a lot of money.
fyrn_ 3y ago
That puts all the power over patents in the hands of those with deep pockets. They would be able to directly pay to prevent competition. It's insane to eliminate limits on what could be patented while doing that. They could fund the keep-away of basic things like "ordering x on your phone" with the proceeds from being the only actor allowed to do that. Fundamentally exploitable system incentives.
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
Your solution seems to be addressed at solving a "there are too many patents because they're cheap to acquire" problem, but that's not a problem. Patents are expensive to acquire already. Bad patents don't lack value. Rather, they offer insane value for little effort if you guess the right thing to patent. Look at the EFF's example. Say it's 1987, you've been playing with AOL for a bit, and you realize that someone might want to use a computer to do stuff like ordering pizza deliveries. You file a patent where your "invention" is "okay it's like pizza ordering on the phone but you do it with a computer instead." Then you pass it through a lawyer who draws up some diagrams to make it look like it's an invention, and boom, patent US4797818A is granted and you now control the entire online food delivery ecosystem until 2007. Oh, but then someone else says "wait, what if the customer does that but USES A PHONE." Well, now they own that for 20 years, so now you both can arbitrarily limit this space. Great. Oh, but now swomeone says "oh, but what if you do this and also the food is displayed IN CATEGORIES!" Well now he's got a patent, too. It's madness. The problem isn't that it's too cheap to acquire and maintain these. The problem is that these are so obvious that they are no longer inventions.
- throwaway48476 3y ago
  One issue is that you don't have to have a prototype to get a patent. Except perpetual motion machines, too many people tried.
  - gruez 3y ago
    For the example given though, it doesn't seem too hard to prototype a "order pizza using phone" app. It might add a 10k expense or whatever to the patent, but that's small relative to how much money you can extract from all pizza chains in the US.
    - throwaway48476 3y ago
      My assumption is if you had ro have a prototype it would be more likely to discover prior art.
Timwi 3y ago
Or we could just abolish the concept of patents entirely. All they do is stifle progress so that somebody can make money at an unfair advantage to everyone else.
- gruez 3y ago
  >All they do is stifle progress so that somebody can make money at an unfair advantage to everyone else. You don't see any problem with pouring huge sums of money into developing something, only for a competitor to copy your idea and undercut you? As an inventor, why would I bother putting in all that effort knowing that would happen?
  - Timwi 3y ago
    This is such egocentric/selfish thinking. I wish to live in a society which “pours” adequate sums of money into developing things for the benefit of all, not leaving it up to individuals like you who are in it only to benefit themselves.
  - johngladtj 3y ago
    Same reason you would do anything else. Because regardless of whether you have a monopoly, you can still make money by solving people's problems
    - wizzwizz4 3y ago
      If you're going to invest in making something possible, you need to recover at least the value of the resources you expended in doing so. Otherwise, you'll have no resources left for the next investment. Copyright and patents are capitalism's attempt to make investments possible in a world where copying is cheap, and while they're deeply flawed, that doesn't change the fact that investments do need to be returned. (Don't get me started on the stock market: that has nothing to do with actual investment.)
      - gruez 3y ago
        >(Don't get me started on the stock market: that has nothing to do with actual investment.) Secondary markets support "actual investment" by allowing early investors to cash out. An investment is far more attractive to you if you know you can offload it to someone else and get the net present value immediately, rather than waiting years/decades for it to pay out. For instance, if a nuclear plant takes will last 80 years but will take 50 years to break even, why would a 40 year old bother to invest? By the time it breaks even you'd be long dead.
Ygg2 3y ago
Make sure keeping a patent is prohibitively expensive. Start with some trivial price y, like say a dollar. Then make every year cost equal to `(y*x)!` where x is the year/month/time period and `!` is the factorial function. Any patent worth the upkeep for first 10 years is probably worth keeping it.
- gruez 3y ago
  How does this work for patents like drugs or whatever, which are very expensive to develop/bring to market?
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Medical r&d should be done by the government anyway. There's no reason to allow pharma companies to extract untold billions of dollars in profit from the economy every year when the involved "research" is either trivial (such as with the insulin racket) or financed by the government anyway.
    - gruez 3y ago
      >when the involved "research" is either trivial (such as with the insulin racket) source that "the insulin racket" was "trivial" to research? Yes, insulin was discovered more than a century ago, but that's not the thing that's patented today. All the expensive insulin are enhanced versions that are better in some way (eg. lasts longer, reacts sooner). If you want the old, crappy, and non-patented kind, you can get it at walmart for less than $25. >financed by the government anyway. Basic research that the government finances doesn't cover the billions of dollars needed to bring the drug to market.
  - themoonisachees 3y ago
    Then it works as intended, the pharma company at first enjoys a cheap patent, but gatekeeping the drug for years, until way after the r&d costs are recouped from sales, becomes prohibitively expensive. If the drug doesn't sell a lot and is never profitable, then the patent gets dropped earlier to avoid sinking more costs. If the drug cures cancer and makes millions, the company can easily recoup its cost up until the upkeep is too much, at which point surely it would be better for society that the drug be open for everyone? Pharma companies are massively profitable, the argument of "think of the poor pharma companies doing r&d and their costs uwu" isn't really valid.
vlovich123 3y ago
But some companies evolve on top of their patents and use them to obtain a competitive moat over a period of time to outcompete larger players. If the patents were available for a flat license fee, you’d penalize patent innovation by smaller entities as bigger entities could pay the flat license fee and copy the patent. So smaller players will either just keep it a trade secret and hope that no one finds out (which theoretically hurts society due to lack of published secrets) or have to hope they can monetize their patent super fast & find someone with really deep pockets to fund that work. And as mentioned, patents are super expensive. From talking to some people it varies significantly depending on your details but probably starting is ~10-20k per patent.

cjfd 3y ago

I declare that I patented human breathing. Every human who is breathing is to pay me the, really very cheap, fee of 1 cent per day. O there is a tax? So now I only get half a cent per day per living being.

gruez 3y ago
You probably joking, but that wouldn't work because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art. All the "bad" patents were probably novel at the time they filed. That's not the issue. The issue is that they're for arguably obvious stuff like "[x] but on internet/phone" that the sibling commenter is talking about.
- cjfd 3y ago
  Read the comment that I am responding to. 'letting legalese define good/bad patent, we should let the economics work it out.' If 'legalese' cannot define good/bad patent anymore, there is nothing stopping such a silly patent that I propose.

marcjuul 3y ago

While that's an interesting thought experiment and there are definitely good reasons to make it more difficult to sit on an unused patent, it's already difficult enough for lone inventors and small organizations to get and keep a patent. This would require everyone to either have a lot of money up front to pay the maintenance tax or keep the license fees low thus ensuring that they will never have a lot of money.

fyrn_ 3y ago

That puts all the power over patents in the hands of those with deep pockets. They would be able to directly pay to prevent competition. It's insane to eliminate limits on what could be patented while doing that. They could fund the keep-away of basic things like "ordering x on your phone" with the proceeds from being the only actor allowed to do that. Fundamentally exploitable system incentives.

CobrastanJorji 3y ago

Your solution seems to be addressed at solving a "there are too many patents because they're cheap to acquire" problem, but that's not a problem. Patents are expensive to acquire already. Bad patents don't lack value. Rather, they offer insane value for little effort if you guess the right thing to patent. Look at the EFF's example. Say it's 1987, you've been playing with AOL for a bit, and you realize that someone might want to use a computer to do stuff like ordering pizza deliveries. You file a patent where your "invention" is "okay it's like pizza ordering on the phone but you do it with a computer instead." Then you pass it through a lawyer who draws up some diagrams to make it look like it's an invention, and boom, patent US4797818A is granted and you now control the entire online food delivery ecosystem until 2007. Oh, but then someone else says "wait, what if the customer does that but USES A PHONE." Well, now they own that for 20 years, so now you both can arbitrarily limit this space. Great. Oh, but now swomeone says "oh, but what if you do this and also the food is displayed IN CATEGORIES!" Well now he's got a patent, too. It's madness. The problem isn't that it's too cheap to acquire and maintain these. The problem is that these are so obvious that they are no longer inventions.

throwaway48476 3y ago
One issue is that you don't have to have a prototype to get a patent. Except perpetual motion machines, too many people tried.
- gruez 3y ago
  For the example given though, it doesn't seem too hard to prototype a "order pizza using phone" app. It might add a 10k expense or whatever to the patent, but that's small relative to how much money you can extract from all pizza chains in the US.
  - throwaway48476 3y ago
    My assumption is if you had ro have a prototype it would be more likely to discover prior art.

Timwi 3y ago

Or we could just abolish the concept of patents entirely. All they do is stifle progress so that somebody can make money at an unfair advantage to everyone else.

gruez 3y ago
>All they do is stifle progress so that somebody can make money at an unfair advantage to everyone else. You don't see any problem with pouring huge sums of money into developing something, only for a competitor to copy your idea and undercut you? As an inventor, why would I bother putting in all that effort knowing that would happen?
- Timwi 3y ago
  This is such egocentric/selfish thinking. I wish to live in a society which “pours” adequate sums of money into developing things for the benefit of all, not leaving it up to individuals like you who are in it only to benefit themselves.
- johngladtj 3y ago
  Same reason you would do anything else. Because regardless of whether you have a monopoly, you can still make money by solving people's problems
  - wizzwizz4 3y ago
    If you're going to invest in making something possible, you need to recover at least the value of the resources you expended in doing so. Otherwise, you'll have no resources left for the next investment. Copyright and patents are capitalism's attempt to make investments possible in a world where copying is cheap, and while they're deeply flawed, that doesn't change the fact that investments do need to be returned. (Don't get me started on the stock market: that has nothing to do with actual investment.)
    - gruez 3y ago
      >(Don't get me started on the stock market: that has nothing to do with actual investment.) Secondary markets support "actual investment" by allowing early investors to cash out. An investment is far more attractive to you if you know you can offload it to someone else and get the net present value immediately, rather than waiting years/decades for it to pay out. For instance, if a nuclear plant takes will last 80 years but will take 50 years to break even, why would a 40 year old bother to invest? By the time it breaks even you'd be long dead.

Ygg2 3y ago

Make sure keeping a patent is prohibitively expensive. Start with some trivial price y, like say a dollar. Then make every year cost equal to `(y*x)!` where x is the year/month/time period and `!` is the factorial function. Any patent worth the upkeep for first 10 years is probably worth keeping it.

gruez 3y ago
How does this work for patents like drugs or whatever, which are very expensive to develop/bring to market?
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Medical r&d should be done by the government anyway. There's no reason to allow pharma companies to extract untold billions of dollars in profit from the economy every year when the involved "research" is either trivial (such as with the insulin racket) or financed by the government anyway.
  - gruez 3y ago
    >when the involved "research" is either trivial (such as with the insulin racket) source that "the insulin racket" was "trivial" to research? Yes, insulin was discovered more than a century ago, but that's not the thing that's patented today. All the expensive insulin are enhanced versions that are better in some way (eg. lasts longer, reacts sooner). If you want the old, crappy, and non-patented kind, you can get it at walmart for less than $25. >financed by the government anyway. Basic research that the government finances doesn't cover the billions of dollars needed to bring the drug to market.
- themoonisachees 3y ago
  Then it works as intended, the pharma company at first enjoys a cheap patent, but gatekeeping the drug for years, until way after the r&d costs are recouped from sales, becomes prohibitively expensive. If the drug doesn't sell a lot and is never profitable, then the patent gets dropped earlier to avoid sinking more costs. If the drug cures cancer and makes millions, the company can easily recoup its cost up until the upkeep is too much, at which point surely it would be better for society that the drug be open for everyone? Pharma companies are massively profitable, the argument of "think of the poor pharma companies doing r&d and their costs uwu" isn't really valid.

vlovich123 3y ago

But some companies evolve on top of their patents and use them to obtain a competitive moat over a period of time to outcompete larger players. If the patents were available for a flat license fee, you’d penalize patent innovation by smaller entities as bigger entities could pay the flat license fee and copy the patent. So smaller players will either just keep it a trade secret and hope that no one finds out (which theoretically hurts society due to lack of published secrets) or have to hope they can monetize their patent super fast & find someone with really deep pockets to fund that work. And as mentioned, patents are super expensive. From talking to some people it varies significantly depending on your details but probably starting is ~10-20k per patent.