6 ms·

> I've always thought of that as representing a stifling of innovation. The short lifetime of patents and the requirement that you publish detailed information

> I've always thought of that as representing a stifling of innovation. The short lifetime of patents and the requirement that you publish detailed information about the invention significantly mitigates this. If they were measuring innovation by the number of copyrights filed, then I might agree with you.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
Respectfully, how do you define the current patent terms as “short”? Sure copyright is much worse, but innovation regularly happens on the scale of months! The current term of 20 years seems incredibly long to me, and it’s not clear that even at 5 years patents would provide more benefit than harm. Most of the purported benefits of patents seem based on theories that most people don’t understand. We all take some received knowledge about their supposed operation, and usually proponents of patents know nothing about how powerful innovation in open source and other patent-free spaces can be.
chii 3y ago
> significantly mitigates this. not if patents become a weapon against actual innovation - which it has devolved into being today. Far from being made to progress science and the arts, patents have become a method for which large corporations can add moats to competition. Things like codecs for video/audio, which are purely mathematical expressions, have been patented. Genes and molecules, even tho they might occur naturally, can be patented (a very tenuous form of invention - it's discovered, even if not naturally occurring!). And not to mention design patents. I say the entire patent system needs to be abolished, or at least, made such that only applicable to physical mechanisms, and not software, nor biological systems.
crote 3y ago
In theory? Yes. In practice? No. For a lot of industries 20 years is an awfully long time to the point of complete irrelevance - and that "detailed information" is often vague enough to be unusable. Combine that with an overly-broad range of patent-able things and an overworked USPTO granting clearly invalid patents, and in practice (at least in the tech/software world) it's doing more harm than good. Patents are no longer about protecting R&D investments. They have become more about patenting the vaguest concepts possible, in the hope of making a profit when someone else does an actual invention which somehow stumbles into your patents' wording.
- kiba 3y ago
  Patents are no longer about protecting R&D investments. Patents are always the tool of the moneyed and the lawyered, which is not the same thing as protecting R&D investment. There are exception, such as the guy who spent 12 years suing car companies over the windshield wiper, but that actually proves the rule because of time spent. It even apparently cause his marriage to break down. [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns
  - saulpw 3y ago
    To be fair, this appears to be a case of greed: > Kearns sought $395 million in damages. He turned down a $30 million settlement offer in 1990 and took it to the jury, which awarded him $5.2 million; Ford agreed to pay $10.2 million rather than face another round of litigation.
    - kiba 3y ago
      Presumably, the point of a patent is to 'protect' the little guy which I would argued actually doesn't. Not that I don't agree with you, what makes Kearns' pursuit 'greedy'?
      - Red_Leaves_Flyy 3y ago
        He rejected $30,000,000. Jury awarded 1/6 after litigation. Ford payed double to get rid of this nuisance. $30 million in 1990 was fuck you money. It’s still enough to comfortably retire on for a high school aged person.
        syklep 3y ago
        Inflation begs to differ. That much money left liquid for 60 years at 10% inflation will be worth less than 100k of today’s money. Edit: sorry about the non sequitur. Bitterly learning about inflation and fiat recently.
sanity 3y ago
Depends on the industry, 20 years is a lifetime in software.
wongarsu 3y ago
"short lifetime" is relative. Had Apple been granted a patent on the idea of a smartphone the same year they released the iPhone, that patent would only expire in three years. There are some industries where due to slow-moving markets the 20 year patent period is still sensible, but for most sectors we would be better off with a 5 or 10 year patent period to account for the increased speed of innovation.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Apple did not invent the smart phone. The invented several features that make them useful (even their version one lacked apps), but others made smart phones before them. What Apple really did was make them useful by eliminating several of the things that made them annoying not not useful before.
  - Nevermark 3y ago
    They didn't say Apple invented the iPhone. That was a counterfactual example to make a point. Also, the point counts even if Apple just patented enough to block comparable phones. The point: For the smartphone market, 20 years would be a very long effective time for any foundational or gatekeeping patents.
    - hhshhhhjjjd 3y ago
      Didn't Samsung and Apple have a tiff over the shape of the phone? "Rectangle with rounded corners"
  - paulmd 3y ago
    > What Apple really did was make them useful by eliminating several of the things that made them annoying not not useful before. that’s literally every patentable invention ever, though. Remington didn’t invent the hunting rifle… they didn’t even invent the first self-loading or lever action rifle, probably. “removing the annoyances and downsides that make a previous approach infeasible or impractical” is more charitably described as “a useful innovation that advances the field”. Now, the problem is that a lot of patents are issued for things that someone else already has done, so the recipient of the patent isn't actually advancing the state of the art. But on the face of it, "removing the annoyances and downsides that make a previous approach infeasible or impractical" is literally what patents are supposed to be granted for.
cryptonector 3y ago
> The short lifetime of patents 20 years is not short! 20 years might be appropriate for capital-intensive innovations (e.g., in pharma), but definitely not for industries where innovations are not typically capital-intensive. E.g., 20 years for cryptography and software patents is a disaster.
_aavaa_ 3y ago
In theory maybe, but in practice it seems like the opposite. The current growth of the 3D printer market is in part directly tied to the lapsing of several key patents in the area. Further, most patents may contain key details, but they also intentionally contain as much broad information as to create a massive exclusionary zone, not to mention burying any legitimately useful information.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
EasyMark 3y ago
How is the lifetime of patents short? I mean they last for 20 years, that's an entire generation of time to make a profit?
- patmcc 3y ago
  They're short relative to other IP (like copyright), and short relative to inventions that have long R&D and cost recovery timelines. If $NEW_DRUG takes 5 years to develop, 5 years to trial, 5 years to market, and 5 years to profit...20 years isn't all that long. If the invention takes 3 weeks and $0, yeah, 20 years is a long time.
  - bdowling 3y ago
    > If the invention takes 3 weeks and $0… …then the patent can be invalidated on the basis that it is obvious. If the invention is commercially valuable, then invalidating it (or just pretending it doesn’t exist until you get sued, then invalidating it) can make more sense than licensing it. A related issue is that there are many, many patents that most people (e.g., competitors) mostly ignore, because everyone, including the patent owner, knows that they would be invalidated if challenged.
    - patmcc 3y ago
      Yeah, it seems like we should have stricter "obviousness" testing when patents are issued. At least based on some of the software ones I've seen.
fsckboy 3y ago
for software patents they should have to disclose the sourcecode
- mlhpdx 3y ago
  Any patent that fails to “teach” the innovation can be challenged and will likely prevail if it’s an egregious gap. That’s the public benefit part, in writing.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    that's the idea, but challenging a patent in court is extremely expensive and not at all a slam dunk even for garbage patents

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

Respectfully, how do you define the current patent terms as “short”? Sure copyright is much worse, but innovation regularly happens on the scale of months! The current term of 20 years seems incredibly long to me, and it’s not clear that even at 5 years patents would provide more benefit than harm. Most of the purported benefits of patents seem based on theories that most people don’t understand. We all take some received knowledge about their supposed operation, and usually proponents of patents know nothing about how powerful innovation in open source and other patent-free spaces can be.

chii 3y ago

> significantly mitigates this. not if patents become a weapon against actual innovation - which it has devolved into being today. Far from being made to progress science and the arts, patents have become a method for which large corporations can add moats to competition. Things like codecs for video/audio, which are purely mathematical expressions, have been patented. Genes and molecules, even tho they might occur naturally, can be patented (a very tenuous form of invention - it's discovered, even if not naturally occurring!). And not to mention design patents. I say the entire patent system needs to be abolished, or at least, made such that only applicable to physical mechanisms, and not software, nor biological systems.

crote 3y ago

In theory? Yes. In practice? No. For a lot of industries 20 years is an awfully long time to the point of complete irrelevance - and that "detailed information" is often vague enough to be unusable. Combine that with an overly-broad range of patent-able things and an overworked USPTO granting clearly invalid patents, and in practice (at least in the tech/software world) it's doing more harm than good. Patents are no longer about protecting R&D investments. They have become more about patenting the vaguest concepts possible, in the hope of making a profit when someone else does an actual invention which somehow stumbles into your patents' wording.

kiba 3y ago
Patents are no longer about protecting R&D investments. Patents are always the tool of the moneyed and the lawyered, which is not the same thing as protecting R&D investment. There are exception, such as the guy who spent 12 years suing car companies over the windshield wiper, but that actually proves the rule because of time spent. It even apparently cause his marriage to break down. [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns
- saulpw 3y ago
  To be fair, this appears to be a case of greed: > Kearns sought $395 million in damages. He turned down a $30 million settlement offer in 1990 and took it to the jury, which awarded him $5.2 million; Ford agreed to pay $10.2 million rather than face another round of litigation.
  - kiba 3y ago
    Presumably, the point of a patent is to 'protect' the little guy which I would argued actually doesn't. Not that I don't agree with you, what makes Kearns' pursuit 'greedy'?
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 3y ago
      He rejected $30,000,000. Jury awarded 1/6 after litigation. Ford payed double to get rid of this nuisance. $30 million in 1990 was fuck you money. It’s still enough to comfortably retire on for a high school aged person.
      - syklep 3y ago
        Inflation begs to differ. That much money left liquid for 60 years at 10% inflation will be worth less than 100k of today’s money. Edit: sorry about the non sequitur. Bitterly learning about inflation and fiat recently.

sanity 3y ago

Depends on the industry, 20 years is a lifetime in software.

wongarsu 3y ago

"short lifetime" is relative. Had Apple been granted a patent on the idea of a smartphone the same year they released the iPhone, that patent would only expire in three years. There are some industries where due to slow-moving markets the 20 year patent period is still sensible, but for most sectors we would be better off with a 5 or 10 year patent period to account for the increased speed of innovation.

bluGill 3y ago
Apple did not invent the smart phone. The invented several features that make them useful (even their version one lacked apps), but others made smart phones before them. What Apple really did was make them useful by eliminating several of the things that made them annoying not not useful before.
- Nevermark 3y ago
  They didn't say Apple invented the iPhone. That was a counterfactual example to make a point. Also, the point counts even if Apple just patented enough to block comparable phones. The point: For the smartphone market, 20 years would be a very long effective time for any foundational or gatekeeping patents.
  - hhshhhhjjjd 3y ago
    Didn't Samsung and Apple have a tiff over the shape of the phone? "Rectangle with rounded corners"
- paulmd 3y ago
  > What Apple really did was make them useful by eliminating several of the things that made them annoying not not useful before. that’s literally every patentable invention ever, though. Remington didn’t invent the hunting rifle… they didn’t even invent the first self-loading or lever action rifle, probably. “removing the annoyances and downsides that make a previous approach infeasible or impractical” is more charitably described as “a useful innovation that advances the field”. Now, the problem is that a lot of patents are issued for things that someone else already has done, so the recipient of the patent isn't actually advancing the state of the art. But on the face of it, "removing the annoyances and downsides that make a previous approach infeasible or impractical" is literally what patents are supposed to be granted for.

cryptonector 3y ago

> The short lifetime of patents 20 years is not short! 20 years might be appropriate for capital-intensive innovations (e.g., in pharma), but definitely not for industries where innovations are not typically capital-intensive. E.g., 20 years for cryptography and software patents is a disaster.

_aavaa_ 3y ago

In theory maybe, but in practice it seems like the opposite. The current growth of the 3D printer market is in part directly tied to the lapsing of several key patents in the area. Further, most patents may contain key details, but they also intentionally contain as much broad information as to create a massive exclusionary zone, not to mention burying any legitimately useful information.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

EasyMark 3y ago

How is the lifetime of patents short? I mean they last for 20 years, that's an entire generation of time to make a profit?

patmcc 3y ago
They're short relative to other IP (like copyright), and short relative to inventions that have long R&D and cost recovery timelines. If $NEW_DRUG takes 5 years to develop, 5 years to trial, 5 years to market, and 5 years to profit...20 years isn't all that long. If the invention takes 3 weeks and $0, yeah, 20 years is a long time.
- bdowling 3y ago
  > If the invention takes 3 weeks and $0… …then the patent can be invalidated on the basis that it is obvious. If the invention is commercially valuable, then invalidating it (or just pretending it doesn’t exist until you get sued, then invalidating it) can make more sense than licensing it. A related issue is that there are many, many patents that most people (e.g., competitors) mostly ignore, because everyone, including the patent owner, knows that they would be invalidated if challenged.
  - patmcc 3y ago
    Yeah, it seems like we should have stricter "obviousness" testing when patents are issued. At least based on some of the software ones I've seen.

fsckboy 3y ago

for software patents they should have to disclose the sourcecode

mlhpdx 3y ago
Any patent that fails to “teach” the innovation can be challenged and will likely prevail if it’s an egregious gap. That’s the public benefit part, in writing.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  that's the idea, but challenging a patent in court is extremely expensive and not at all a slam dunk even for garbage patents