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The concept of intellectual property is antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia. It's a wasteful aberration that s

• nness 2y ago
  The first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality. Let's stop being so absolutist about these topics. The problem here isn't that patents exist, intellectual property protection is critical to investment and research. The issue here is two fold: 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cover. Tech patents, however, are so broad and require so little actual material science that the "protect the investment" part doesn't add up. 2. Patent offices couldn't keep up with the rapid rate of technical advancement and may have granted overly-broad patents for what we would now consider rather general topics. The only effective way to invalidate these patents is expensive and lengthy court proceedings — which is fair, if you think about it, you wouldn't want your rights taken away without a defence. But when weaponised, it can count-intuitively stifle the innovation it was trying to protect. What we need is a better criteria and definition of IP which better suits modern industry.
  • fauigerzigerk 2y ago
    >1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. I agree with the gist of your comment, but a fundamental issue with patents is that your investment in research can be destroyed if someone else independently did overlapping research and filed first.
    • Leherenn 2y ago
      It feels like you could overcome this by awarding a patent to both, if they can prove the research was independent?
      • fauigerzigerk 2y ago
        Yes, but how do you prove that it was after one of the teams publishes their work? It seems nearly impossible.
        • spion 2y ago
          You can use the "dropping a hash" method (patio11 has used this). As you progress your work, you publish a hash of it using a service trusted by everyone to correctly identify the researchers and timestamp their hashes. If someone publishes the paper, you can then publish the files that resulted with the dropped hash and therefore prove you had certain progress of the work at a certain time.
          • arthurcolle 2y ago
            4d merkle trees etched on a proton or something
          • datascienced 2y ago
            a use for blockchain at last?
          • fauigerzigerk 2y ago
            Yes you can provably document your progress, but it doesn't solve the problem that someone else may have published overlapping ideas earlier and you can't prove that you didn't read what they published.
            • Leherenn 2y ago
              I was mostly thinking in the case of overlapping research as mentioned in the parent comment, not independent research years after the publication (where indeed it sounds impossible to prove you didn't read it). Basically, if you could show that you had already made significant progress before the publication date, then you might be granted the patent as well.
  • worksonmine 2y ago
    > The first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality. The last 600 years is a rounding error in the history of humans. Imagine if the different methods of lighting a fire were patented. Those humans also burned witches and imprisoned people for criticizing the church. We would have a better world if our goal was progress for all over profit for a few.
    • smabie 2y ago
      And yet, it turns out last 600 years saw many orders of magnitude more innovation than the years prior.
      • chongli 2y ago
        We’d expect this regardless of intellectual property laws. I think the overall innovation follows a logistic function. Early in history most people were primarily engaged in subsistence (hunting or agriculture). It took a really long time to develop the basic tools and infrastructure to get to the point where people could start to specialize in jobs not immediately related to food production, storage, or defence. None of that stuff is strictly dependent on IP laws, they just happened to be the obvious solution to the problem “how do researchers and artists protect their investments from folks that steal/copy their ideas and beat them to market?”
        • wongarsu 2y ago
          Even ignoring education, the compounding effect of innovation and how most people didn't have the preconditions for innovating at all, you would expect us to have vastly more innovation right now just by virtue of having more people. We now have 20 times as many people on earth as in 1400, 40 times as many as in the year 1, and 200 times as many as in the year -4000.
      • worksonmine 2y ago
        Correlation ≠ causation. The printing press came around the same time and probably contributed to this development, not patents. If he was greedy maybe he would've patented the technology and normal people wouldn't learn to read.
  • geysersam 2y ago
    This comment implies that most of the massive technological innovation since 1400s came around because of patents. That's far from the truth. Patent systems that old were local and very different from the modern variant. Besides, most regions didn't have patent systems at all. The Netherlands didn't really get patent law until early 20th century. That didn't stop them from innovating and inventing. Germany similarly.
    • oniony 2y ago
      I did not read any such implication.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • master_crab 2y ago
        The dash marks injecting the second part of the sentence does make a strong implication.
    • MRtecno98 2y ago
      No, they are questioning the parent comment's argument that patents are against the basis for modern technological development itself, which is obviously false if patents where present well before this development
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  • deepsun 2y ago
    Yes, but the same can be said about non-compete agreements. Imagine a company invested a lot in research and infrastructure, only to get their key employees poached and bring most of it to a new company in their heads. Yet, California forbids the non-competes, because it promotes competition and at least somewhat eases capital lock-ins (i.e. two dudes in a garage can start competing with "big ones"). I don't really see much difference with patents here. Remember early Facebook infra looked very similar to Google, they had to get creative to make new names for internal projects clones of Google ones.
    • nness 2y ago
      If you are arguing that non-competes shouldn't exist therefore patents shouldn't exist — I think you're framing the issue too broadly. If a professional joins an organisation, creates something novel and valuable, and then is poached to another organisation to do the same thing — that's exactly what patents are there to protect. Say they spend 5 years developing a nice kind of lubricant — the company can patent that lubricant. Then if the professional goes and joins another company, even if they have that knowledge, they'd have to conduct new research to find a new approach which doesn't run afoul of the existing patent. That's the point — patent's don't protect your market dominance, they just protect against imitation/copying. Now say the work of that professional is systems architecture for some Google project, and they leave and join Facebook to build the same systems architecture for Facebook's project — of course that shouldn't be patented (although sometimes it is, and that's a different issue.) A "restraint of trade" agreement in your employment contract (a "non-compete") is intended protect companies from others copying their product when other IP rights don't exist — and I agree that it shouldn't exist. It quite literally prevents new invention and done through an imbalance of power. But, organisational already have plenty of mechanisms to mitigate that risk — pay the person more, better working conditions, or just pay them a long gardening period.
  • cycomanic 2y ago
    The first patents were not about innovation at all but essentially government guaranteed monopolies similar to guilds. > 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cover. Tech patents, however, are so broad and require so little actual material science that the "protect the investment" part doesn't add up. Citation needed. I know of many patents that are side discoveries of R&D that was done anyway. It's a myth that others could easily undercut a company doing the research, the inertia of expertise of employees, processes etc. is typically much better at holding of the competition. None of the successful technology companies made their business by patenting. The example of pharma is often brought up, but it's actually a very good counter-example, when pharma companies first developed, it was the Swiss and German companies which dominated and there was very little (Germany) or no (Switzerland) patent protection for pharmaceuticals. Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering.
    • nness 2y ago
      > Discoveries of R&D that was done anyway Not sure I agree — That's still investment. All that time spend doing research, even if for a completely different goal, doesn't come for free. Discovering two things in a process intended to discover one doesn't half the value of both things. > None of the successful technology companies made their business by patenting > written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering I agree — software patents are ridiculous, too broad, and stifle the intent of IP rights. But parents protect other industries. My point is that a blanket "get rid of intellection property protections" statement is not realistic. It's nuanced.
      • cycomanic 2y ago
        FYI, I am in a hardware field and the companies I'm aware of (having had direct discussions with on CTO or senior engineer level) largely did patents to have something tangible to justify R&D to investors and financial analysts. They would never put know how that they considered crucial into a patent and considered patent litigation pretty worthless, especially against direct competitors, as they knew that everyone was violating everyone else's patents, because everyone working in the field comes up with the same solutions (so much for patents being non obvious to a subject expert).
  • kajumix 2y ago
    The idea of "intellectual property" is anti-productive as well as immoral. Open source software is a very good evidence of the utilitarian benefits of doing away with software patents. And IP is immoral because it's impossible to grant and secure "intellectual property" rights without violating physical property rights. Please read Stephen Kinsella's "Against Intellectual Property" for a good treatment of both the utilitarian and the moral dimensions: https://cdn.mises.org/15_2_1.pdf https://cdn.mises.org/15_2_1.pdf
    • nness 2y ago
      Open Source software is an awful example because by-and-large no one gets paid to do make it. OSS doesn't exist to spite IP, it exists because of IP rights protect creators from others stealing their work.
  • yareal 2y ago
    Having worked at Amazon, patents there were "if you can imagine that software might be able to do a thing, patent it now". Absolutely no research was necessary, or indeed requested. You simply had to state "I have an idea". In exchange you got a plastic puzzle piece to put on your desk. There's nothing more embarrassing to me than seeing a large number of those puzzle pieces in someone's care. You stood in the way of progress in service of Jeff Bezos? Awful.
  • _fat_santa 2y ago
    IMHO patents are useful for things where you spend a ton of money researching something, but the implementation is rather straightforward. Think of the secret Coke or Pepsi recipes, I would imagine very hard and expensive to develop but easy to produce once you know what to do. Compare that to something like AWS and the equation is basically flipped. Figuring out what to do is not that difficult compared to actually doing it, Amazon could probably open source all of their cloud offerings tomorrow and outside a handful of very capable actors, implementing another AWS would be next to impossible. Lots of things in tech are flipped on their head like that, you can describe the idea and functions of Uber at a high level on a back of a napkin, but good luck actually implementing and doing so successfully. That's why personally I think patents should be abolished in the tech space, they just don't help anyone except the owners of the patent but they don't help in the way people actually intended it to. Here it's not like Cove lost out on being a huge cloud player because Amazon stole the idea behind S3 and DynamoDB, they just "own" the idea and are trying to extract money from Amazon.
    • LordKeren 2y ago
      Coke’s recipe is protected by Trade Secret, not patents. If you can figure out how to reverse engineer Coke 1:1 on your own, you can sell the resulting product. Coke is only protected from people selling their recipe to competitors.
    • kiba 2y ago
      Patents are only useful if they are actually enforced, through lawsuits and lawyers. The amount of time and money spent on patent lawsuits as opposed to innovation is a form of deadweight cost and must be factored in any argument for or against patents. What patents give is a seat at the negotiation table. It is not by itself a business model.
  • smsm42 2y ago
    I've been working in the industry for decades, and most patents I've seen are either portfolio-inflating bullshit, or rent-seeking that blocks innovation for decades (like the infamous compression patents). I'm sure some people worked on their technology a lot, but pretending like software patents are necessary for people getting paid or for technology to advance is nonsense. They are much more frequently used to impede than promote innovation, and their overall impact is mostly negative.
• qwytw 2y ago
  > antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia I'd argue the opposite. It has been one of the primary driving forces behind human progress for the past 300-400 years. The world today would be a much bleaker and more miserable place if IP rights never became a thing. Imagine writing or any type of content creation without copyright. Even after the printing press was invented it was basically impossible to make a living only from writing without being independently wealthy, having some rich patron or a daytime job. Publishing any new content was risky and generally unprofitable, it would either flop or if it didn't other publishers would start printing it without giving you a dime. Without IP rights innovating only makes sense if you're large corporation and have a moat or you're funded by someone else (state/universities/etc.). For any small to medium business it would mean that you would incur all of the costs and couldn't compete with others which would steal your tech as soon as it becomes public. Of course there is a point where it might start stifling innovation and we might be already past it but that's a bit like calling for air travel to be banned because of the whole Boeing debacle etc.
  • pas 2y ago
    Books are fancy, but let's not mix up progress with being able to live off writing them. We see innovation in open source every day from small startups, from various sized communities, and from hobbyists. That said, the startup selling IP model works somewhat in the pharma sector, but that's patents, and you mentioned books, where the whole IP regulation game got abso-fucking-lutely captured by the industry (with their ridiculous 100+ years of copyright).
    • zaphirplane 2y ago
      Human Progress is a lot more than open source software innovation.
      • pas 2y ago
        Yes, obviously. And more than books and pop songs and whatnot. Also more than medicine, though it's definitely up there on the list somewhere. And all of that is thanks to finally some groups of people pulling out their heads from their asses, stopped trying to focus on trying to loot their neighbors, and instead started to trade.
• TrackerFF 2y ago
  It would be an interesting experiment - a world where no patents exist, only production (though corporate espionage / theft is still illegal). Some argue that this will effectively kill R&D, because the second you've created something - others would start reverse engineering, and copy the product. In some areas, like pharma, R&D is notoriously expensive, and the pharma companies have only that many years to recoup all that cost, before their patent runs out. Would it lead to more money spent on making reverse engineering difficult? Both the products, and the manufacturing process.
  • jampekka 2y ago
    R&D can be done without profit motive. Most R is done in universities without profit motive. Some argue that nothing gets done if somebody doesn't get capital gains for it. This is of course empirically flat out false.
    • 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
      Universities are incentivized to research things that will score grant money.
      • bartonfink 2y ago
        The existence of one incentive does not preclude other relevant incentives, for fuck's sake.
      • jampekka 2y ago
        Grant money is not profit.
        • matwood 2y ago
          Yes, it's more like VC. But, the point is university research is not some magically altruistic thing. It is driven by grants either from the government or someone who made a lot of money.
• foolofat00k 2y ago
  This take just does not concord with reality. The rate at which innovation has happened since the first patent was issued in the 1400s is many orders of magnitude higher than the rate at which it happened before. I'm would not argue that patents are the cause of this rapid pace of innovation, but the data does not come anywhere close to supporting your claim.
  • cool_dude85 2y ago
    The rate at which innovation has happened since Constantinople fell is also many orders of magnitude higher than the rate at which it happened before. More evidence is needed to assess how much each event contributed to this innovation rate.
• Cheer2171 2y ago
  The concept of human rights is also antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia.
  • graemep 2y ago
    I disagree. Societies with better human rights (internally - not necessarily how they treated people outside their society) have tended to make more advances historically.
• MRtecno98 2y ago
  If there were no patents most of them would just be kept as secrets, and you would, for the most part, get right back where you started(if not in a worse position)
  • riskable 2y ago
    What you're talking about is a very specific area of patent law: Patents on manufacturing processes. The assumption is that without the patent the knowledge necessary to reproduce the products made with the method would be extremely difficult or impossible. This is nonsense in this day and age. Modern engineers of varying sorts can reverse engineer basically any process and underpaid employees who know the secrets can be easily poached. Therefore, the entire concept of patents existing for the sake of disclosure falls flat on its face.
    • runako 2y ago
      > Modern engineers of varying sorts can reverse engineer basically any process This is in part because they are steeped in a society where essentially all innovations are published, and have been for hundreds of years. This would not be the case if each engineer could only draw on a single career's worth of exposure to actual practices.
• kick_in_the_dor 2y ago
  ...he comments on an article where the big rich tech company hands over money to the small guy he stole the idea from
• TimPC 2y ago
  What is your alternative to IP that solves the secrecy problem? We've created an environment where companies can share most of what they are doing when it comes to AI. How much quicker has AI advanced because researchers at one company can learn progress and techniques from other companies? IP doesn't feel great but it feels a lot better than having every bit of research be a trade secret.
• boplicity 2y ago
  > It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape This is a strong claim, without any evidence to support it. In fact, a look at the historical record, as others have pointed out, very much shows an extremely strong correlation between intellectual property rights and technological development. Sure, this is merely correlation, but that's certainly better than a strong claim without any evidence. I'm curious though, if intellectual property was no longer a thing, which industries would need to be completely restructured. Some rather important ones, I would say. Journalism, in my mind, being at the top of the list. Not that it would be impossible, but the implications would very much be profound. I'm not sure what such a world would look like, but the transition would likely be rather difficult. Maybe it would work out better in the end? Who knows!?
  • mightybyte 2y ago
    The book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine has a decent overview of the arguments supporting this claim. https://annas-archive.org/search?q=against+intellectual+monopoly https://annas-archive.org/search?q=against+intellectual+mono...
    • boplicity 2y ago
      Thanks for the reference. I downloaded the book, and looked up the parts that talked about newspapers, in particular. I found the arguments to generally be counter to what the industry has figured out, in terms of actual survival. From the late 90s to the early 2010s the news industry was very pro-active about making their work freely available to everyone. This made enforcing copyright on news articles not really a thing. Coinciding with this the news industry rapidly shrunk, and is now a shell of what it used to be. Interestingly, the trend of "free" reporting is now strongly reversing. Many publications now put most of their work behind a paywall, no longer freely giving away the material they produce. From the book: "The distribution of news on the Internet makes an interesting contrast to the distribution of music. While the RIAA has used every imaginable legal (and in some cases illegal) strategy to keep music off the Internet, the news reporting industry has embraced the Internet. Most major news agencies have a Web site where news stories may be viewed for, at most, the cost of a free registration. Far from discouraging the copying of news stories, most sites invite you to "e-mail a copy of this story to a friend." In fact, news is available so freely over the Internet that it is possible to create an entire newspaper simply by linking to stories written by other people. An example of such a "newspaper" is the site run by Matt Drudge, which consists almost entirely of links to stories on other sites. Yet the incentive to gather the news has not disappeared. According to intellectual monopolists' preaching, this should be impossible: to report from the Sudan requires the huge cost of going there in person, but copying that same report is as cheap as it can possibly get. So, why are highly paid journalists traveling to the Sudan to get the news?" What the authors of this book don't state is that, the ramifications of this shift to "freely shared" news has meant that far fewer journalists are out there actually reporting. (The layoffs have been massive.) They go on to say, just a few sentences later that "the news industry has been thriving, profitable." Obviously, this is just not true. The news industry is struggling. The layoffs have been massive. This type of pain in the industry was happening in 2008, when the book was published, and continues still. With the authors missing such glaring (and important) facts, it's hard to take their arguments seriously.
• ooterness 2y ago
  As someone who holds several patents, I totally agree. Every time I interact with that system, it makes me want to burn the whole thing to the ground. The legal definition of novelty and obviousness is nonsensical. The duration is far too long. The USPTO does a terrible job of screening for quality. The court enforcement is little more than a high-stakes game of chance.
• troyvit 2y ago
  AWS made 90.8 billion in 2023. I think a $525 million charge for using a smaller company's intellectual property reflects exactly what you're saying. If IP was more important then the lawsuit probably would've gathered more than half a percent of Amazon's revenue for something that was '"essential" to the ability of Amazon's cloud-computing arm to "store and retrieve massive amounts of data."'
  • namlem 2y ago
    AWS didn't steal the technology. They re-invented it in a way that was similar to a patented technology. Imo this is a failure of the patent system. AWS should not have to pay anything in an ideal system.
• gdilla 2y ago
  hardly. patents are also optional - if you wanna give away all your IP to the world, no one is stopping you.
• TulliusCicero 2y ago
  So if I make a game or write a book, someone can just copy+paste it onto another digital store and make money off of it, immediately?
  • panick21_ 2y ago
    Well for many reasons. Also, what you could do is take an existing book, rewrite a few passages and then publish it. Almost like ... open source.
• gentleman11 2y ago
  Then again, Amazon likes to take open source projects and monetize them so cheaply via aws at scale that it drives the creators out of business. And authors need ip protection to keep some random Amazon like printing press company from stealing almost all their revenue from books they write because they just have better distribution and marketing (unless authors are supposed to make almost 100% of their incomes from touring and live shows, as the overwhelming sentiment on hn is towards musicians)
• constantcrying 2y ago
  The problems aren't patents. The alternative to patents are company secrets, which are much less conductive to innovation. The point of a patent is that a company can share something without it being immediately used by their competition, who didn't have to do the RnD, and now obviously can undercut them. The problem is that the patent system is largely gamed and exists to a significant extent to drag your opponents and random companies into multi million dollar lawsuits over the most flimsy excuse of a research result.
• deleted 2y ago
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