8 ms·

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 t

by 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.
- nness 2y ago
  Yes, that's an interesting problem — the more capital you have to invest, conceptually, the more you can invest in talent and the faster you can research compared to smaller competitors. Great for the rate of technological advancement, not so great for fairness.
  - marcinzm 2y ago
    Now image if there weren't patents. The larger entities would simply wait for their smaller competitors, copy their products and then use their capital to more efficiently/cheaply manufacture/market them. edit: While also maintaining massive private documentation stores that further give them a moat. Patents are public so you at least know what someone did 20 years ago even if you're a one person shop. Without them you'd be in trouble unless you had access to a large companies massive and very private internal invention documentation store.
    - kiba 2y ago
      Larger entities have lawyers and can afford more of them. It doesn't protect the little guys so much as allow larger entities monopoly power. Patents are by themselves not a business model. They merely buy a seat at the negotiation table. Leverage is another matter entirely.
- marcinzm 2y ago
  Which you mitigate by keeping an eye on competitors and avoiding overly saturated market spaces. This in turn incentives a broader research focus and also incentives publishing paper in saturated areas to make sure there's documented prior art. There's also an incentive for multiple smaller inventions spread over time. This all seems like a positive and not a negative for society as a whole.
  - fauigerzigerk 2y ago
    I think it can be a positive as long as the threshold for what counts as an invention is high enough. If the threshold is too low then patents become an instrument for harassment and rent seeking, slowing down industrial progress. We have to find the right balance. If a large number of patents sound like a sad joke to most professionals in a field, then something has gone very wrong.
    - kiba 2y ago
      We have to find the right balance. If a large number of patents sound like a sad joke to most professionals in a field, then something has gone very wrong. That presume that we have the ability to finetune patent laws as needed and also presume that world changing inventions are necessarily novel enough to professionals in a given field. It has often happened commonly enough that inventions will occur to several innovators at once as the next step. It is questionable that it would be fair to penalize an inventor just because another was first to file a patent, potentially driving these inventors out of the industry. It is also pushing against the reality that people are always building on the works of others. Patents are by themselves monopolies. That is how they work. Thus, people had resorted to arrangements to avoid constant patent lawsuits, which had happened in the past.
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.

by nness 2y ago

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.
nness 2y ago
Yes, that's an interesting problem — the more capital you have to invest, conceptually, the more you can invest in talent and the faster you can research compared to smaller competitors. Great for the rate of technological advancement, not so great for fairness.
- marcinzm 2y ago
  Now image if there weren't patents. The larger entities would simply wait for their smaller competitors, copy their products and then use their capital to more efficiently/cheaply manufacture/market them. edit: While also maintaining massive private documentation stores that further give them a moat. Patents are public so you at least know what someone did 20 years ago even if you're a one person shop. Without them you'd be in trouble unless you had access to a large companies massive and very private internal invention documentation store.
  - kiba 2y ago
    Larger entities have lawyers and can afford more of them. It doesn't protect the little guys so much as allow larger entities monopoly power. Patents are by themselves not a business model. They merely buy a seat at the negotiation table. Leverage is another matter entirely.
marcinzm 2y ago
Which you mitigate by keeping an eye on competitors and avoiding overly saturated market spaces. This in turn incentives a broader research focus and also incentives publishing paper in saturated areas to make sure there's documented prior art. There's also an incentive for multiple smaller inventions spread over time. This all seems like a positive and not a negative for society as a whole.
- fauigerzigerk 2y ago
  I think it can be a positive as long as the threshold for what counts as an invention is high enough. If the threshold is too low then patents become an instrument for harassment and rent seeking, slowing down industrial progress. We have to find the right balance. If a large number of patents sound like a sad joke to most professionals in a field, then something has gone very wrong.
  - kiba 2y ago
    We have to find the right balance. If a large number of patents sound like a sad joke to most professionals in a field, then something has gone very wrong. That presume that we have the ability to finetune patent laws as needed and also presume that world changing inventions are necessarily novel enough to professionals in a given field. It has often happened commonly enough that inventions will occur to several innovators at once as the next step. It is questionable that it would be fair to penalize an inventor just because another was first to file a patent, potentially driving these inventors out of the industry. It is also pushing against the reality that people are always building on the works of others. Patents are by themselves monopolies. That is how they work. Thus, people had resorted to arrangements to avoid constant patent lawsuits, which had happened in the past.

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.