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There is no moral justification for patents. Period. There can be no actually moral argument that says "you are not allowed to think of the same thing this othe

by wissler 14y ago

There is no moral justification for patents. Period. There can be no actually moral argument that says "you are not allowed to think of the same thing this other fellow did and then trade it with someone." Patents are a form of feudalism. The very word "patent" is rooted in feudalism, where it used to be "land patents" that were granted to the landholders in the middle ages.

Confusion 14y ago
You misunderstand patents. Despite what is reported every so often, you cannot patent abstract concepts: only specific ways to execute upon those concepts. The title of a patent is irrelevant, but it is the title that gets the press. Patents do not disallow you to think of certain things and they do not disallow you to share those thoughts. They only disallow you to implement a specific solution to a specific problem, for a specific period of time. Patents get struck down for being too broad. If having to be struck down is the problem, then look at the justice system, not the patent system.
- wissler 14y ago
  No, you misunderstand ethics. There is and can be no ethical principle that bans you from creating a physical object that happens to be similar to an object someone else created, unless you had explicitly consented to being bound to an agreement where you would refrain from doing so. And you misunderstand patents as well, but that's not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is that you cannot make an ethical case for patents, on the contrary, they are a gross usurpation of a human being's right to create and trade. This is obvious to anyone who ignores the propaganda they were taught in high school.
  - flyinRyan 14y ago
    Do you realize that, regardless of how it's abused now, in a world with zero patents no little guy would ever be paid for his idea? Big companies could just see the idea, realize the value and task 100 people with copying it exactly. Further no company would bother with R&D because as soon as they make a breakthrough everyone else will simply steal the idea and sell for pennies more than cost of production. R&D costs could never be recouped so no one would ever do it again.
    - wissler 14y ago
      Men who have minds large enough to envision the kinds of ideas that would deserve a patent (if patents were moral) are precisely the kind who would invent regardless of whether they could get one. See Nicola Tesla or the many scientists throughout history who have achieved great things without having a carrot and a stick. Or see Linus Torvalds. The kind of men who refuse to engage themselves in creation without being prodded are the kind who patent most of the trivial ideas we see patented today.
      - jeremyarussell 14y ago
        Tesla was one in a million. For your ideas to work you would need to teach the entire 7 billion strong population of humans that we need to peacefully work together as a species. I'm sure you'll be met with great success. Until that day it is necessary to protect rights in a manner that lets people know they can do great things and not have to worry that someone will steal their years of hard work. I don't agree with people filing this lawsuit. I don't think their idea is all that novel. I also think patents shouldn't last longer then it takes to recoup the investment. TL;DR = People don't work that way, but yeah the patent system is currently ridiculous.
      - wissler 14y ago
        jeremyrussell: "People don't work that way" is question-begging (if you don't know what that logical fallacy is please see Wikipedia). The point is that they ought to work that way. People can and should change. Answering "well they don't work that way" as an argument against this is fallacious. I mean, take your argument and apply it to (say) cannibals. A cannibalistic tribe would say "well, we eat people, we've always eaten people, therefore things will never change." There can't be a logical, rational argument for patents. Which is unsurprising, since patents are clearly barbaric. So barbarians defend patents using (surprise) barbaric illogic.
      - flyinRyan 14y ago
        I'm sorry but this is just not true. You say the kind of people who deserve a patent would do the work either way and then you suggest a handful of people. Many, many people have created things for the purpose of making money. Your world would eliminate people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Later in life, when Jobs had billions, he didn't seem to care about money anymore but in the beginning Apple tried everything. They even had a clothing line. As for your examples, Linus didn't invent. He made a version of an existing OS and started with an existing version of a copy of that OS. He did it for fun, but one must also recognize that he's gained a tremendous amount by this seemingly "benevolent" action. Fresh out of college he could take much more interesting jobs than most people with his background could. His "gift" ended up being a loss leader for his career. So if we were reliant on only having people like Tesla to push us forward we'd be nowhere near where we are today. Tesla was brilliant but there are just far too few people who think and work as he did.
  - Confusion 14y ago
    There is and can be no ethical principle [..] I wasn't addressing the ethical part of your claim at all, but since you insist: there can be a moral argument in favor of patents. It goes like this: * Corporations are legal entities that are allowed because they were expected to, and have been shown to, advance our average wellbeing * Corporations more effectively increase our average wellbeing if they are encouraged to heavily invest in innovation. They receive this encouragement by allowing them temporary monopolies on their inventions, thus enabling them to profit from their investment * On average, the population profits: they have more free time, more money, a better health and can engage in 'creating and trading' all they want, except for a few specific instances that have been sacrificed in order to enable them to have these resources and this wellbeing in the first place It's a trade-off our government made for us, in the belief it would be a net benefit. Things seems to have taken a wrong turn somewhere, but the original intent of the patent system was for the public good. That is a valid moral argument. Which doesn't mean you have to agree with it.
    - wissler 14y ago
      This is horribly embarrassing argument. It's a blatant post hoc ergo proper hoc fallacy. What's worse is that it ignores the central point: the cost of your system is that individuals who think of an idea that happens to match one that is patented by one of these corporations gets the tar beaten out of him if he tries to use/trade it. You can't justify this violence, you can only try to sweep it under the rug, as you have attempted to do here.
      - jholman 14y ago
        Speaking of embarrassing, you're embarrassing people who advocate against patents, with your incoherent vehemence. The comments you've been responding to have been civil and contributory to the conversation, and your responses, I think, have been less than civil and perhaps not very well-crafted towards contribution. If the rest of this comment appears to be a personal attack, I apologize; I would ask that it be read as an analysis of the above thread, with an eye to improving future discourse. ------------- The fact is, people DO make arguments of a moral nature in favour of patents. And last I checked, there's no gold standard in validity of moral arguments. Your opening salvo ("no moral justification for patents, period") is interpretable as either a claim about the behaviour of humans, or a claim about universal ethics; that would make it obviously false or obviously laughable, respectively. You ALSO, in your opening salvo, misrepresented patents ("you are not allowed to think of... and then trade..."), and Confusion fairly-politely tried to help you out. You replied with "No, you misunderstand ethics", which aside from being a rude escalation of conflict is also a non sequitur (since the use of "No" implies you're replying to his/her content, which you weren't). THEN, Confusion was again polite and outlined a moral argument which has been taken by many participants in the broader societal discussion about patents, including the ones who make the laws in several countries over a few hundred years. She/he was even clear that the consequences alleged by this argument, with respect to the public good, appear to be at least partially divergent from the consequences observed in reality, AND explicitly pointed out that the argument isn't unassailable ("That is a valid moral argument. Which doesn't mean you have to agree with it."). I think any reasonable observer would agree that there IS a moral argument in favour of patents. It has some premises that not everyone agrees with (e.g. a sort of utilitarian framework). It also contains some contentious claims about the interaction between incentive structures and behaviour (e.g. inventors wouldn't invent, AND/OR drug companies wouldn't do FDA testing, without patent "protection"), which are clearly hard to test the truth of, and many reasonable people disagree about to what extent they are true. (I myself find the "drug company" argument very persuasive (I agree with kevinalexbrown above), and the "inventor" argument highly suspect (I mostly agree with you, below, in your comment about Tesla and Torvalds), but the point is that intelligent thoughtful people (or even HN commenters) can disagree about these things. Hopefully I don't have to go into detail about how opening a post with "This is horribly embarrassing argument." is nothing more than verbal abuse. And your shot about post hoc ergo propter hoc is a little missing the point: while some crazy person COULD say "look we got an internet because of the patent system, therefore we were right about patents", and I take your point about that hypothetical argument being an instance of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, I don't think anybody actually does make that argument. We all know we haven't sampled the universe in two states, and we all know that we're arguing about untested hypotheticals (about what WOULD happen with less patents or more patents, and about what WOULD HAVE happened in the past say 50 years). And one last complaint about your rhetoric: while I acknowledge that ultimately any law (at least in all extent societies) is ultimately backed up by threat of violence, and thus in some sense law is violence, it's ludicrous to conflate the enforcement of near-consensus with violence. Unless you literally meant violence, and literally meant "gets the tar beaten out of him", in which case of course we all know that's not what happens to those who lose in patent fights. What happens is that profits that they have taken, which are judged by the courts to have been earned in violation of the framework of law, are taken away, and/or they are required to make good profits that they have been judged to have unfairly denied to others. Much as other proscribed commercial activity (e.g. fraudulent product misrepresentation, e.g. cartels) would be penalized. So, either way, your phrasing about violence is at best a distraction, at worst a falsehood. ------- The thing is, it's weird having to write this little attack on your little attacks, because I agree that the first-world patent system has raged dysfunctionally out of control, and is stifling innovation rather than promoting it. (That's ALL it's doing wrong, mind you, because if you stick to 30-year-old products and technologies, you'll never notice this stuff. But I want to live in the FUTURE, never mind the present!) But I think the argument is narrower than you make it seem (again, consider drug companies), and I think we could afford to keep it more civil than I read you to have done, at least among basically-reasonable people. Hopefully I have myself managed to avoid destructive incivility.
- quanticle 14y ago
  >Despite what is reported every so often, you cannot patent abstract concepts: only specific ways to execute upon those concepts. That was true only up until software patents were approved. In software, there is no hard and fast line between concept and execution. Without a physical product, the concept is the execution.
LinXitoW 14y ago
I'm not sure anyone would ever claim that patents are morally justified. Their justification is cultural, in a sense. They are there that invention is worth it. Invention and innovation, in turn, bring about advances for the entire culture that has surrendered these specific rights, because it sees more value in progress than in the rights that are given up for it. I don't know whether a culture without patents would still advance and have as many inventors, but on the surface, this sounds like a reasonable trade-off. I would restrict patent law to force a patent holder to license their patents to whomever for a reasonable price. We already have that for standards relevant patents, but i think it should apply to all patents.
- air 14y ago
  "I'm not sure anyone would ever claim that patents are morally justified." Objectivists do that: Rand argued that limited intellectual property monopolies being granted to certain inventors and artists on a first-to-file basis as moral because she viewed all property as fundamentally intellectual. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_%28Ayn_Rand%29#Politics:_individual_rights_and_capitalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_%28Ayn_Rand%29#Poli...
- brazzy 14y ago
  There is a second justification for patents that often gets overlooked: in order to patent an innovation, you have to exactly describe that innovation, and this discription is made public, and after the patent expires everyone is free to use it. Without this, there would be a strong incentive to keep innovations secret as much as possible, which may have them end up being lost.

by wissler 14y ago

Confusion 14y ago

You misunderstand patents. Despite what is reported every so often, you cannot patent abstract concepts: only specific ways to execute upon those concepts. The title of a patent is irrelevant, but it is the title that gets the press. Patents do not disallow you to think of certain things and they do not disallow you to share those thoughts. They only disallow you to implement a specific solution to a specific problem, for a specific period of time. Patents get struck down for being too broad. If having to be struck down is the problem, then look at the justice system, not the patent system.

wissler 14y ago
No, you misunderstand ethics. There is and can be no ethical principle that bans you from creating a physical object that happens to be similar to an object someone else created, unless you had explicitly consented to being bound to an agreement where you would refrain from doing so. And you misunderstand patents as well, but that's not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is that you cannot make an ethical case for patents, on the contrary, they are a gross usurpation of a human being's right to create and trade. This is obvious to anyone who ignores the propaganda they were taught in high school.
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  Do you realize that, regardless of how it's abused now, in a world with zero patents no little guy would ever be paid for his idea? Big companies could just see the idea, realize the value and task 100 people with copying it exactly. Further no company would bother with R&D because as soon as they make a breakthrough everyone else will simply steal the idea and sell for pennies more than cost of production. R&D costs could never be recouped so no one would ever do it again.
  - wissler 14y ago
    Men who have minds large enough to envision the kinds of ideas that would deserve a patent (if patents were moral) are precisely the kind who would invent regardless of whether they could get one. See Nicola Tesla or the many scientists throughout history who have achieved great things without having a carrot and a stick. Or see Linus Torvalds. The kind of men who refuse to engage themselves in creation without being prodded are the kind who patent most of the trivial ideas we see patented today.
    - jeremyarussell 14y ago
      Tesla was one in a million. For your ideas to work you would need to teach the entire 7 billion strong population of humans that we need to peacefully work together as a species. I'm sure you'll be met with great success. Until that day it is necessary to protect rights in a manner that lets people know they can do great things and not have to worry that someone will steal their years of hard work. I don't agree with people filing this lawsuit. I don't think their idea is all that novel. I also think patents shouldn't last longer then it takes to recoup the investment. TL;DR = People don't work that way, but yeah the patent system is currently ridiculous.
    - wissler 14y ago
      jeremyrussell: "People don't work that way" is question-begging (if you don't know what that logical fallacy is please see Wikipedia). The point is that they ought to work that way. People can and should change. Answering "well they don't work that way" as an argument against this is fallacious. I mean, take your argument and apply it to (say) cannibals. A cannibalistic tribe would say "well, we eat people, we've always eaten people, therefore things will never change." There can't be a logical, rational argument for patents. Which is unsurprising, since patents are clearly barbaric. So barbarians defend patents using (surprise) barbaric illogic.
    - flyinRyan 14y ago
      I'm sorry but this is just not true. You say the kind of people who deserve a patent would do the work either way and then you suggest a handful of people. Many, many people have created things for the purpose of making money. Your world would eliminate people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Later in life, when Jobs had billions, he didn't seem to care about money anymore but in the beginning Apple tried everything. They even had a clothing line. As for your examples, Linus didn't invent. He made a version of an existing OS and started with an existing version of a copy of that OS. He did it for fun, but one must also recognize that he's gained a tremendous amount by this seemingly "benevolent" action. Fresh out of college he could take much more interesting jobs than most people with his background could. His "gift" ended up being a loss leader for his career. So if we were reliant on only having people like Tesla to push us forward we'd be nowhere near where we are today. Tesla was brilliant but there are just far too few people who think and work as he did.
- Confusion 14y ago
  There is and can be no ethical principle [..] I wasn't addressing the ethical part of your claim at all, but since you insist: there can be a moral argument in favor of patents. It goes like this: * Corporations are legal entities that are allowed because they were expected to, and have been shown to, advance our average wellbeing * Corporations more effectively increase our average wellbeing if they are encouraged to heavily invest in innovation. They receive this encouragement by allowing them temporary monopolies on their inventions, thus enabling them to profit from their investment * On average, the population profits: they have more free time, more money, a better health and can engage in 'creating and trading' all they want, except for a few specific instances that have been sacrificed in order to enable them to have these resources and this wellbeing in the first place It's a trade-off our government made for us, in the belief it would be a net benefit. Things seems to have taken a wrong turn somewhere, but the original intent of the patent system was for the public good. That is a valid moral argument. Which doesn't mean you have to agree with it.
  - wissler 14y ago
    This is horribly embarrassing argument. It's a blatant post hoc ergo proper hoc fallacy. What's worse is that it ignores the central point: the cost of your system is that individuals who think of an idea that happens to match one that is patented by one of these corporations gets the tar beaten out of him if he tries to use/trade it. You can't justify this violence, you can only try to sweep it under the rug, as you have attempted to do here.
    - jholman 14y ago
      Speaking of embarrassing, you're embarrassing people who advocate against patents, with your incoherent vehemence. The comments you've been responding to have been civil and contributory to the conversation, and your responses, I think, have been less than civil and perhaps not very well-crafted towards contribution. If the rest of this comment appears to be a personal attack, I apologize; I would ask that it be read as an analysis of the above thread, with an eye to improving future discourse. ------------- The fact is, people DO make arguments of a moral nature in favour of patents. And last I checked, there's no gold standard in validity of moral arguments. Your opening salvo ("no moral justification for patents, period") is interpretable as either a claim about the behaviour of humans, or a claim about universal ethics; that would make it obviously false or obviously laughable, respectively. You ALSO, in your opening salvo, misrepresented patents ("you are not allowed to think of... and then trade..."), and Confusion fairly-politely tried to help you out. You replied with "No, you misunderstand ethics", which aside from being a rude escalation of conflict is also a non sequitur (since the use of "No" implies you're replying to his/her content, which you weren't). THEN, Confusion was again polite and outlined a moral argument which has been taken by many participants in the broader societal discussion about patents, including the ones who make the laws in several countries over a few hundred years. She/he was even clear that the consequences alleged by this argument, with respect to the public good, appear to be at least partially divergent from the consequences observed in reality, AND explicitly pointed out that the argument isn't unassailable ("That is a valid moral argument. Which doesn't mean you have to agree with it."). I think any reasonable observer would agree that there IS a moral argument in favour of patents. It has some premises that not everyone agrees with (e.g. a sort of utilitarian framework). It also contains some contentious claims about the interaction between incentive structures and behaviour (e.g. inventors wouldn't invent, AND/OR drug companies wouldn't do FDA testing, without patent "protection"), which are clearly hard to test the truth of, and many reasonable people disagree about to what extent they are true. (I myself find the "drug company" argument very persuasive (I agree with kevinalexbrown above), and the "inventor" argument highly suspect (I mostly agree with you, below, in your comment about Tesla and Torvalds), but the point is that intelligent thoughtful people (or even HN commenters) can disagree about these things. Hopefully I don't have to go into detail about how opening a post with "This is horribly embarrassing argument." is nothing more than verbal abuse. And your shot about post hoc ergo propter hoc is a little missing the point: while some crazy person COULD say "look we got an internet because of the patent system, therefore we were right about patents", and I take your point about that hypothetical argument being an instance of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, I don't think anybody actually does make that argument. We all know we haven't sampled the universe in two states, and we all know that we're arguing about untested hypotheticals (about what WOULD happen with less patents or more patents, and about what WOULD HAVE happened in the past say 50 years). And one last complaint about your rhetoric: while I acknowledge that ultimately any law (at least in all extent societies) is ultimately backed up by threat of violence, and thus in some sense law is violence, it's ludicrous to conflate the enforcement of near-consensus with violence. Unless you literally meant violence, and literally meant "gets the tar beaten out of him", in which case of course we all know that's not what happens to those who lose in patent fights. What happens is that profits that they have taken, which are judged by the courts to have been earned in violation of the framework of law, are taken away, and/or they are required to make good profits that they have been judged to have unfairly denied to others. Much as other proscribed commercial activity (e.g. fraudulent product misrepresentation, e.g. cartels) would be penalized. So, either way, your phrasing about violence is at best a distraction, at worst a falsehood. ------- The thing is, it's weird having to write this little attack on your little attacks, because I agree that the first-world patent system has raged dysfunctionally out of control, and is stifling innovation rather than promoting it. (That's ALL it's doing wrong, mind you, because if you stick to 30-year-old products and technologies, you'll never notice this stuff. But I want to live in the FUTURE, never mind the present!) But I think the argument is narrower than you make it seem (again, consider drug companies), and I think we could afford to keep it more civil than I read you to have done, at least among basically-reasonable people. Hopefully I have myself managed to avoid destructive incivility.
quanticle 14y ago
>Despite what is reported every so often, you cannot patent abstract concepts: only specific ways to execute upon those concepts. That was true only up until software patents were approved. In software, there is no hard and fast line between concept and execution. Without a physical product, the concept is the execution.

LinXitoW 14y ago

I'm not sure anyone would ever claim that patents are morally justified. Their justification is cultural, in a sense. They are there that invention is worth it. Invention and innovation, in turn, bring about advances for the entire culture that has surrendered these specific rights, because it sees more value in progress than in the rights that are given up for it. I don't know whether a culture without patents would still advance and have as many inventors, but on the surface, this sounds like a reasonable trade-off. I would restrict patent law to force a patent holder to license their patents to whomever for a reasonable price. We already have that for standards relevant patents, but i think it should apply to all patents.

air 14y ago
"I'm not sure anyone would ever claim that patents are morally justified." Objectivists do that: Rand argued that limited intellectual property monopolies being granted to certain inventors and artists on a first-to-file basis as moral because she viewed all property as fundamentally intellectual. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_%28Ayn_Rand%29#Politics:_individual_rights_and_capitalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_%28Ayn_Rand%29#Poli...
brazzy 14y ago
There is a second justification for patents that often gets overlooked: in order to patent an innovation, you have to exactly describe that innovation, and this discription is made public, and after the patent expires everyone is free to use it. Without this, there would be a strong incentive to keep innovations secret as much as possible, which may have them end up being lost.