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The first patents were not about innovation at all but essentially government guaranteed monopolies similar to guilds. > 1. Patents usually involve a lot of re

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 3y 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 3y 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).
denton-scratch 3y ago
> Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them My father used to work for Pilkington's Glass. Pilkington invented the float-glass process, which made better, flatter glass than the plate-glass process. Yes, it was patented; but the main protection was control of know-how. When you licensed the process, you got several engineers onsite to make it work. This is similar in some ways to the mediaeval Venetian glassmakers; they didn't have patents, but they did have assassins, who would hunt down runaway glassmakers and silence them.
- hasmanean 3y ago
  Assassins are a step too far, but maybe advertising…let the public choose whether to buy the real deal instead of the parasitical imitators.
  - bradjohnson 3y ago
    And what exactly would stop an imitator from advertising that they're the "real deal"? Or maybe just that they're an "improved version"? There's extremely little regulation in advertising even now.
  - mminer237 3y ago
    The public will buy the cheapest, almost-as-good option 99% of the time. If morality were a strong deciding factor, we wouldn't have megacorporations like Nestlé and Unilever making everything, nor would all of our clothes be made by sweatshops. I'm not going to spend billions of dollars on some new gadget when every other company will have the exact same thing for sale next month with razor-thin margins. There's no way to make a living innovating.
    - Draiken 3y ago
      It's almost like capitalism stifles innovation. Paradoxically it's one of the most common arguments people use in favor of the system: it pushes innovation! It actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation. When real innovation happens it's mostly by coincidence on the small intersection of the Venn diagram. Edit: It's interesting that the patent system was created, in theory, to allow people to profit from innovation and actually promote it. Ironically it instead created a whole industry of extracting rent from broad useless patents that stifles innovation even further.
throw0101a 3y ago
> Citation needed. * OECD: http://fs2.american.edu/wgp/www/park_lippoldt08.pdf http://fs2.american.edu/wgp/www/park_lippoldt08.pdf * Via: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallphelps/2015/09/16/do-patents-really-promote-innovation-a-response-to-the-economist/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallphelps/2015/09/16/do-pa... A review of the literature: * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5664960/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5664960/
- kiba 3y ago
  It is a good idea to read the citation, at least in part. I am quoting from conclusion as that's the only part I am interested and read. Today, I would argue that given the limitations of the existing literature we still have essentially no credible empirical evidence on the seemingly simple question of whether stronger patent rights – either longer patent terms or broader patent rights – encourage research investments into developing new technologies. While researchers have recently begun to make progress on the more limited question of how patents on existing technologies affect follow-on innovation (Galasso and Schankerman, 2015; Sampat and Williams, 2015), evidence on the overall effects of patents on research investments are needed as one input into optimal patent policy design.
marcinzm 3y ago
> 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. That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the patent. Doing so efficiently and at scale is a different issues. Having dealt with patents personally, lawyers very much stress this point as a requirement for a patent that is not easy to overturn. You're confusing a patent being broad with it not being detailed. They are both. A patent is a detailed reproducible description that includes a ton of language to also cover other similar things. For example, "in one embodiment of this invention a silver coated aluminum substrate is used for part N." This is very specific in that it says what was used to make the invention (a silver coated aluminum substrate) but also broad enough to cover other substrates (one embodiment).
- TimPC 3y ago
  A very common pattern is to write a patent and a research paper after the initial patent filing. When the patent office doesn't do their job you can still usually learn the invention from the paper. They key thing is companies wouldn't let employees publish without the patent part.
- michaelt 3y ago
  Patents are in principle supposed to be non-obvious, and detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the description. I can assure you that in practice they are neither. There are merely a lot of people in the legal profession whose jobs depend on ignoring that fact.
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    In my past experience, this is only true because many people's eyes glaze over when they try to read patent-ese. If you can penetrate the obtuse form of English used, "in embodiments, ... may be ... to name a few" for example (and the weird ordering of paragraphs, etc.), it's actually not that hard to understand patents. There are a lot of people whose job it is to read patents, too.
rtkwe 3y ago
Patents IMO work better when it's a physically instantiated implementation of a very specific task. The big issue is where we've gone with software patents that are little more than "a server talks to another server and requests information from a database". Those implementations are extremely vague and cover way too much ground. Like the game patent that covered the entire idea of having a playable game during a loading screen or at least pretended to and the idea of fighting it was too expensive to bother trying to force the issue.

nness 3y 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 3y 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).

denton-scratch 3y ago

> Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them My father used to work for Pilkington's Glass. Pilkington invented the float-glass process, which made better, flatter glass than the plate-glass process. Yes, it was patented; but the main protection was control of know-how. When you licensed the process, you got several engineers onsite to make it work. This is similar in some ways to the mediaeval Venetian glassmakers; they didn't have patents, but they did have assassins, who would hunt down runaway glassmakers and silence them.

hasmanean 3y ago
Assassins are a step too far, but maybe advertising…let the public choose whether to buy the real deal instead of the parasitical imitators.
- bradjohnson 3y ago
  And what exactly would stop an imitator from advertising that they're the "real deal"? Or maybe just that they're an "improved version"? There's extremely little regulation in advertising even now.
- mminer237 3y ago
  The public will buy the cheapest, almost-as-good option 99% of the time. If morality were a strong deciding factor, we wouldn't have megacorporations like Nestlé and Unilever making everything, nor would all of our clothes be made by sweatshops. I'm not going to spend billions of dollars on some new gadget when every other company will have the exact same thing for sale next month with razor-thin margins. There's no way to make a living innovating.
  - Draiken 3y ago
    It's almost like capitalism stifles innovation. Paradoxically it's one of the most common arguments people use in favor of the system: it pushes innovation! It actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation. When real innovation happens it's mostly by coincidence on the small intersection of the Venn diagram. Edit: It's interesting that the patent system was created, in theory, to allow people to profit from innovation and actually promote it. Ironically it instead created a whole industry of extracting rent from broad useless patents that stifles innovation even further.

throw0101a 3y ago

> Citation needed. * OECD: http://fs2.american.edu/wgp/www/park_lippoldt08.pdf http://fs2.american.edu/wgp/www/park_lippoldt08.pdf * Via: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallphelps/2015/09/16/do-patents-really-promote-innovation-a-response-to-the-economist/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallphelps/2015/09/16/do-pa... A review of the literature: * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5664960/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5664960/

kiba 3y ago
It is a good idea to read the citation, at least in part. I am quoting from conclusion as that's the only part I am interested and read. Today, I would argue that given the limitations of the existing literature we still have essentially no credible empirical evidence on the seemingly simple question of whether stronger patent rights – either longer patent terms or broader patent rights – encourage research investments into developing new technologies. While researchers have recently begun to make progress on the more limited question of how patents on existing technologies affect follow-on innovation (Galasso and Schankerman, 2015; Sampat and Williams, 2015), evidence on the overall effects of patents on research investments are needed as one input into optimal patent policy design.

marcinzm 3y ago

> 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. That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the patent. Doing so efficiently and at scale is a different issues. Having dealt with patents personally, lawyers very much stress this point as a requirement for a patent that is not easy to overturn. You're confusing a patent being broad with it not being detailed. They are both. A patent is a detailed reproducible description that includes a ton of language to also cover other similar things. For example, "in one embodiment of this invention a silver coated aluminum substrate is used for part N." This is very specific in that it says what was used to make the invention (a silver coated aluminum substrate) but also broad enough to cover other substrates (one embodiment).

TimPC 3y ago
A very common pattern is to write a patent and a research paper after the initial patent filing. When the patent office doesn't do their job you can still usually learn the invention from the paper. They key thing is companies wouldn't let employees publish without the patent part.
michaelt 3y ago
Patents are in principle supposed to be non-obvious, and detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the description. I can assure you that in practice they are neither. There are merely a lot of people in the legal profession whose jobs depend on ignoring that fact.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  In my past experience, this is only true because many people's eyes glaze over when they try to read patent-ese. If you can penetrate the obtuse form of English used, "in embodiments, ... may be ... to name a few" for example (and the weird ordering of paragraphs, etc.), it's actually not that hard to understand patents. There are a lot of people whose job it is to read patents, too.

rtkwe 3y ago

Patents IMO work better when it's a physically instantiated implementation of a very specific task. The big issue is where we've gone with software patents that are little more than "a server talks to another server and requests information from a database". Those implementations are extremely vague and cover way too much ground. Like the game patent that covered the entire idea of having a playable game during a loading screen or at least pretended to and the idea of fighting it was too expensive to bother trying to force the issue.