6 ms·

What evidence would it take to convince naysayers that patents are generally a force for good?

by Tycho 14y ago

quadratic_r 14y ago
I dunno, engineers driving Ferraris around or something? Oh no, they will be called 'patent trolls' then.
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  The only engineers with Ferraris that I know are either targets of patent trolls, or have successfully escaped any involvement with the patent system one way or the other.
unimpressive 14y ago
Even if they are it doesn't matter. People aren't going to brush off the general badness of software patents by saying to themselves "But it's okay, patents are a good thing in the long run." That's called denial, and it isn't just a river in Egypt.
orangecat 14y ago
Necessary but not sufficient: technology that wouldn't have been developed if not for the ability to patent it. There are plenty of examples for drugs, and approximately zero for software as far as I'm aware.
- luriel 14y ago
  I'm not convinced about the drugs argument, there is plenty of evidence that the chemical and medical industries have worked very well without patents in the past. See also this about patents in the pharmaceutical industry: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004.pdf http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004.pdf In any case, what is beyond all doubt and all question is that patents in the software industry are a totally insane and extremely harmful thing, and is only getting worse.
- Tycho 14y ago
  How do you go about proving that (either way) ?
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Stating the null hypothesis tends to greatly simplify questions like this. In this case, the null hypothesis is: "Software patents do not allow the development of technology that would otherwise not be developed." (In other words, "they are not good") It is important to note that null hypothesis's are never proven, only disproven. That means you won't prove that software patents do not help (failure to show otherwise could mean nothing more than you did not look hard enough), however you can trivially falsify the null hypothesis if you find a single case where software patents helped. Of course in the event that you falsify the null hypothesis you haven't proved "software patents are good", but rather "software patents can be good". (If you want to go with "they are good", then that becomes your null hypothesis and to disprove it we nearly need to find a single case where they are not. If you want to roll with the 'generally' thing, then you should first start by defining exactly what generally means in this context then go from there.) As for judging data points to determine what exactly they show? That's rather up in the air. Pick a case, state the facts, and argue why you think those facts indicate what you assert they do. This is really more of a soft science.
    - Tycho 14y ago
      I'm not sure how valuable the bias from developer anecdotes is. Naturally patents are going to be annoying for the business that covets the technology they cover. If you have patents at all, you will have friction. Bit like how you can't have parking tickets without having people complain about parking tickets. The majority of users and developers the majority of the time have no trouble with patents. At which point you can argue that it's a hidden cost, something that affects all of us without being immediately obvious. And that's precisely my point... if it's a hidden cost, it could equally be a hidden benefit. I just don't see much worthwhile dialogue going on in the patent debate, just shouting in both directions. For instance in this article, it's not clear to me what people are objecting to. Are people annoyed because someone is trying to enforce a patent? Or is it just because a group of large companies have acquired the patents? Does that imply that we're happy for small companies to have patents, because they'll probably never enforce them anyway, but unhappy for large companies to have them, because they'll actually put them to use? Or is it the nature of the patents (I don't see much analysis of what the patents really cover... they could conceivably be things which took a lot of R&D)? Or, indeed, is it the concept of patents in general? The article did mention stifling innovation, but that's a bit vague - it stifles business activity but that energy could arguably be used on alternative that would be more innovative.
SkyMarshal 14y ago
Software patents, or patents in general?
- Tycho 14y ago
  Software patents, but not necessarily the current implementation of software patents. For instance is the patent office is really bad at examining software applications, that's not a problem with the patents concept, but a problem with the people in charge.
  - SkyMarshal 14y ago
    There seem to be different classes of industries where the benefits and harm of patents are different. There are industries like pharma where the IP is difficult and expensive to create, but manufacturing (and reverse-engineering) it is relatively easy. Patents appear to be helpful in recouping R&D costs there (at least when and where they're enforced). There are also industries where both the IP and the implementation are costly and time consuming, notably the microchip industry. Intel is the perfect example - they derive significant value and competitive moat from both their CPU designs and their manufacturing capability. Do they need patents? I don't know the degree to which patents currently contribute to Intel's dominance, but it appears it would be difficult to catch up even with no patent protection on Intel IP whatsoever. And then there are industries where the IP is cheap and the implementation can be either cheap or costly, like software. This appears to be where patents on IP do more harm than good. The article expresses the problem very well: ... There's also a ridiculous quote from Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi: “A lot of people are still surprised to see the quality and the diversity of the IP that was in Nortel,” he says. “And the fundamental question comes back: ‘How the hell did you guys go bankrupt? Why weren’t you Google? Why weren’t you Facebook? Why weren’t you all these things, because you guys actually had the ideas for these business models before they did?’" The real answer, of course, is because patents are meaningless. Ideas are worth nothing by themselves. Ideas only matter if you execute, and anyone who's ever actually executed on an idea will tell you that the original idea almost is never reflected in the final product. The process of going from idea to actual product is a process by which you learn that what matters is not what you thought mattered. And yet, for reasons that make no sense to anyone who has ever actually built a product, creating monopolies around the ideas only serves to create a massive tollbooth towards actual innovation. And that's what we have here -- and it's funded by Apple and Microsoft.
vibrunazo 14y ago
1) Isolate the pros, isolate the cons. 2) Establish how to measure each. 3) Make detailed study to quantify pros and cons. 4) Sum pros and cons. Step 2 is probably the hardest to find a common ground where both sides would agree on. Step 3 would be lengthier and most expensive. But if steps 1, 3 and 4 are done with scientific scrutiny, peer reviewed and reproducible. Then it's just a matter of each interest party adjust step 2 to whatever they agree on. For software patents, I'm pretty sure you'd have to be so naive to believe the pros outweigh the cons that most of the anti-patent won't even bother going deeper. And most of the pro-patent wouldn't dare trying. Sure I would rather have a good study with a large data sample. But the anecdotes we see every day as developers, are so obviously biased to show patents are a net negative. That I doubt many of us would think a bigger data sample would revert that. At the end of the day, this isn't a problem of lack of scientific method, but a problem of individual interests having a louder voice than the interest of most.
CamperBob2 14y ago
I'd say anyone defending the patent system in general, or the application of patents in a specific field such as software or business methods, needs to answer a two-part question. True or false: Everything that exists and that qualifies for patent protection has, in fact been patented. True or false: This is a good thing.

What evidence would it take to convince naysayers that patents are generally a force for good?

by Tycho 14y ago

What evidence would it take to convince naysayers that patents are generally a force for good?

quadratic_r 14y ago

I dunno, engineers driving Ferraris around or something? Oh no, they will be called 'patent trolls' then.

CamperBob2 14y ago
The only engineers with Ferraris that I know are either targets of patent trolls, or have successfully escaped any involvement with the patent system one way or the other.

unimpressive 14y ago

Even if they are it doesn't matter. People aren't going to brush off the general badness of software patents by saying to themselves "But it's okay, patents are a good thing in the long run." That's called denial, and it isn't just a river in Egypt.

orangecat 14y ago

Necessary but not sufficient: technology that wouldn't have been developed if not for the ability to patent it. There are plenty of examples for drugs, and approximately zero for software as far as I'm aware.

luriel 14y ago
I'm not convinced about the drugs argument, there is plenty of evidence that the chemical and medical industries have worked very well without patents in the past. See also this about patents in the pharmaceutical industry: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004.pdf http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004.pdf In any case, what is beyond all doubt and all question is that patents in the software industry are a totally insane and extremely harmful thing, and is only getting worse.
Tycho 14y ago
How do you go about proving that (either way) ?
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Stating the null hypothesis tends to greatly simplify questions like this. In this case, the null hypothesis is: "Software patents do not allow the development of technology that would otherwise not be developed." (In other words, "they are not good") It is important to note that null hypothesis's are never proven, only disproven. That means you won't prove that software patents do not help (failure to show otherwise could mean nothing more than you did not look hard enough), however you can trivially falsify the null hypothesis if you find a single case where software patents helped. Of course in the event that you falsify the null hypothesis you haven't proved "software patents are good", but rather "software patents can be good". (If you want to go with "they are good", then that becomes your null hypothesis and to disprove it we nearly need to find a single case where they are not. If you want to roll with the 'generally' thing, then you should first start by defining exactly what generally means in this context then go from there.) As for judging data points to determine what exactly they show? That's rather up in the air. Pick a case, state the facts, and argue why you think those facts indicate what you assert they do. This is really more of a soft science.
  - Tycho 14y ago
    I'm not sure how valuable the bias from developer anecdotes is. Naturally patents are going to be annoying for the business that covets the technology they cover. If you have patents at all, you will have friction. Bit like how you can't have parking tickets without having people complain about parking tickets. The majority of users and developers the majority of the time have no trouble with patents. At which point you can argue that it's a hidden cost, something that affects all of us without being immediately obvious. And that's precisely my point... if it's a hidden cost, it could equally be a hidden benefit. I just don't see much worthwhile dialogue going on in the patent debate, just shouting in both directions. For instance in this article, it's not clear to me what people are objecting to. Are people annoyed because someone is trying to enforce a patent? Or is it just because a group of large companies have acquired the patents? Does that imply that we're happy for small companies to have patents, because they'll probably never enforce them anyway, but unhappy for large companies to have them, because they'll actually put them to use? Or is it the nature of the patents (I don't see much analysis of what the patents really cover... they could conceivably be things which took a lot of R&D)? Or, indeed, is it the concept of patents in general? The article did mention stifling innovation, but that's a bit vague - it stifles business activity but that energy could arguably be used on alternative that would be more innovative.

SkyMarshal 14y ago

Software patents, or patents in general?

Tycho 14y ago
Software patents, but not necessarily the current implementation of software patents. For instance is the patent office is really bad at examining software applications, that's not a problem with the patents concept, but a problem with the people in charge.
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  There seem to be different classes of industries where the benefits and harm of patents are different. There are industries like pharma where the IP is difficult and expensive to create, but manufacturing (and reverse-engineering) it is relatively easy. Patents appear to be helpful in recouping R&D costs there (at least when and where they're enforced). There are also industries where both the IP and the implementation are costly and time consuming, notably the microchip industry. Intel is the perfect example - they derive significant value and competitive moat from both their CPU designs and their manufacturing capability. Do they need patents? I don't know the degree to which patents currently contribute to Intel's dominance, but it appears it would be difficult to catch up even with no patent protection on Intel IP whatsoever. And then there are industries where the IP is cheap and the implementation can be either cheap or costly, like software. This appears to be where patents on IP do more harm than good. The article expresses the problem very well: ... There's also a ridiculous quote from Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi: “A lot of people are still surprised to see the quality and the diversity of the IP that was in Nortel,” he says. “And the fundamental question comes back: ‘How the hell did you guys go bankrupt? Why weren’t you Google? Why weren’t you Facebook? Why weren’t you all these things, because you guys actually had the ideas for these business models before they did?’" The real answer, of course, is because patents are meaningless. Ideas are worth nothing by themselves. Ideas only matter if you execute, and anyone who's ever actually executed on an idea will tell you that the original idea almost is never reflected in the final product. The process of going from idea to actual product is a process by which you learn that what matters is not what you thought mattered. And yet, for reasons that make no sense to anyone who has ever actually built a product, creating monopolies around the ideas only serves to create a massive tollbooth towards actual innovation. And that's what we have here -- and it's funded by Apple and Microsoft.

vibrunazo 14y ago

1) Isolate the pros, isolate the cons. 2) Establish how to measure each. 3) Make detailed study to quantify pros and cons. 4) Sum pros and cons. Step 2 is probably the hardest to find a common ground where both sides would agree on. Step 3 would be lengthier and most expensive. But if steps 1, 3 and 4 are done with scientific scrutiny, peer reviewed and reproducible. Then it's just a matter of each interest party adjust step 2 to whatever they agree on. For software patents, I'm pretty sure you'd have to be so naive to believe the pros outweigh the cons that most of the anti-patent won't even bother going deeper. And most of the pro-patent wouldn't dare trying. Sure I would rather have a good study with a large data sample. But the anecdotes we see every day as developers, are so obviously biased to show patents are a net negative. That I doubt many of us would think a bigger data sample would revert that. At the end of the day, this isn't a problem of lack of scientific method, but a problem of individual interests having a louder voice than the interest of most.

CamperBob2 14y ago

I'd say anyone defending the patent system in general, or the application of patents in a specific field such as software or business methods, needs to answer a two-part question. True or false: Everything that exists and that qualifies for patent protection has, in fact been patented. True or false: This is a good thing.