5 ms·

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

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.
  - wissler 14y ago
    Next time you're seething with rage that someone crossed your arbitrary line about what you mistakenly think is "civil", save your breath and save your energy. As to your silly play by play, it's all just your own self-serving spin. You have some bogus theory of civility that you mindlessly cling to as if it were a religion, it's a wrong theory, and that's really all the substance there is to your "criticism." I see your remarks in the same way as I'd see a religious zealot reading me the riot act over violating one of his beloved precepts. If inside of that babbling rant of yours there is something you actually consider to be a reasonable disagreement, not with my style, but with the logic of my point, then go ahead and point it out without ranting and I'll try to elaborate for you.
  - wissler 14y ago
    One more thing. I regard patents as nearly tantamount to cannibalism: patent trolls eat the efforts of honest, productive people. I don't think gentle words are appropriate and civilized for cannibalism proper, nor for the evil of patents. On the contrary, to treat these leeches as if they were somehow being reasonable is the height of being counter-produtive. The trolls don't mince words: they readily call it "theft" if you happen to be using something they patented. If we mince words then we loose from the very start, for the moral argument is the most powerful. Which is precisely why you try to turn it on me given all your hypocritically impolite scolding about me not being polite enough for your tastes. If you're opposed to moralizing, don't moralize, not even about people who moralize.
sp332 14y ago
This is completely wrong. Patents are supposed to protect small or individual inventors from having their work ripped off by larger manufacturers. Large companies are not the reason we have patents. They don't need patents because they're hard to compete with anyway. Patents are for the good of society by helping individuals, not by helping large corporations.
- Confusion 14y ago
  Corporation != large corporation. A small neighbourhood family shop is a corporation if they've legally separated their personal and business finances, which is usually advisable. Limiting individual liability and being able to share ownership were the original reasons for allowing corporations. This is true for small and large corporations. Corporations also exist for the good of society. They allow individuals to limit their liability and share a risk with others. Patents are granted to individuals, but those individuals are free to bequeath them to the corporations they are part of. Or they have freely signed an agreement that they will bequeath them to the corporation. Now I agree the original reason for patents wasn't to encourage corporations to do R&D. I only gave a nutshell outline of the argument: I wasn't trying to be historically, philosophically or legalistically thorough, so I don't think this kind of criticism is very appropriate. I'll happily admit being wrong, but it is certainly not 'completely wrong': corporations were never restricted from being granted patents, even though that has been suggested. The common argument is the same argument given for individuals: protect the inventor or his corporation. Neither corporations nor patents came into being with immoral intentions. Both ideas have actually proven quite successful. Unfortunately, we are now seeing some excesses of (the combination of) them that suggest the rules need to be changed.

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.
- wissler 14y ago
  Next time you're seething with rage that someone crossed your arbitrary line about what you mistakenly think is "civil", save your breath and save your energy. As to your silly play by play, it's all just your own self-serving spin. You have some bogus theory of civility that you mindlessly cling to as if it were a religion, it's a wrong theory, and that's really all the substance there is to your "criticism." I see your remarks in the same way as I'd see a religious zealot reading me the riot act over violating one of his beloved precepts. If inside of that babbling rant of yours there is something you actually consider to be a reasonable disagreement, not with my style, but with the logic of my point, then go ahead and point it out without ranting and I'll try to elaborate for you.
- wissler 14y ago
  One more thing. I regard patents as nearly tantamount to cannibalism: patent trolls eat the efforts of honest, productive people. I don't think gentle words are appropriate and civilized for cannibalism proper, nor for the evil of patents. On the contrary, to treat these leeches as if they were somehow being reasonable is the height of being counter-produtive. The trolls don't mince words: they readily call it "theft" if you happen to be using something they patented. If we mince words then we loose from the very start, for the moral argument is the most powerful. Which is precisely why you try to turn it on me given all your hypocritically impolite scolding about me not being polite enough for your tastes. If you're opposed to moralizing, don't moralize, not even about people who moralize.

sp332 14y ago

This is completely wrong. Patents are supposed to protect small or individual inventors from having their work ripped off by larger manufacturers. Large companies are not the reason we have patents. They don't need patents because they're hard to compete with anyway. Patents are for the good of society by helping individuals, not by helping large corporations.

Confusion 14y ago
Corporation != large corporation. A small neighbourhood family shop is a corporation if they've legally separated their personal and business finances, which is usually advisable. Limiting individual liability and being able to share ownership were the original reasons for allowing corporations. This is true for small and large corporations. Corporations also exist for the good of society. They allow individuals to limit their liability and share a risk with others. Patents are granted to individuals, but those individuals are free to bequeath them to the corporations they are part of. Or they have freely signed an agreement that they will bequeath them to the corporation. Now I agree the original reason for patents wasn't to encourage corporations to do R&D. I only gave a nutshell outline of the argument: I wasn't trying to be historically, philosophically or legalistically thorough, so I don't think this kind of criticism is very appropriate. I'll happily admit being wrong, but it is certainly not 'completely wrong': corporations were never restricted from being granted patents, even though that has been suggested. The common argument is the same argument given for individuals: protect the inventor or his corporation. Neither corporations nor patents came into being with immoral intentions. Both ideas have actually proven quite successful. Unfortunately, we are now seeing some excesses of (the combination of) them that suggest the rules need to be changed.