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I think patents may sometimes have the opposite effect than the one intended. Instead of encouraging innovation and stimulating the economy through entrepreneur

I think patents may sometimes have the opposite effect than the one intended. Instead of encouraging innovation and stimulating the economy through entrepreneurship and business, it may have a chilling effect. Who knows what patents are out there that may lead you to also face a steep penalty that could ruin your entire business?

shrughes 14y ago
This has not been mentioned on all the other patent threads.
- praxeologist 14y ago
  It needs repeating because it is it is up there as one of the most widely believed and repeated falsehoods. >Marvell lawyers said CMU's closing statement was "rife with misrepresentations," including suggestions that Marvell "broke the chain of innovation by not paying the royalties that they now owe," and noting those payments would be used "to fund further research, to lead to further innovation." That resulted in a short conference at the side bar, in which the judge warned "you can't dig deep into all of CMU's contributions to society and mankind." There are tons of studies showing that IP law hampers innovation and not a single one showing it aids it.
  - cobrausn 14y ago
    There are tons of studies showing that IP law hampers innovation and not a single one showing it aids it. What about pharmaceuticals? 'Tech' (as we use the term) isn't the only industry in existence.
    - praxeologist 14y ago
      What about it? Find a study to support your belief if you think patents aid innovation in pharmaceuticals. I can refer you to my comments the last time I challenged people to show a study in support of this idea. The paper attempted to measure innovation in the number of patents issued. Hopefully the problem with doing that is blatantly obvious. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901756 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901756
    - jrogers65 14y ago
      http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h... Chapter nine.
      - cobrausn 14y ago
        It's a longer read than I have time for (at work), but thanks for the link. I'm curious to see how they resolve the problem of the major upfront cost of R&D that is usually (so far as I know) recouped only via temporary monopoly.
      - Daniel_Newby 14y ago
        That chapter is very silly. It compares British and German chemical companies and explains the difference with patent laws. But any company can build a chemical factory wherever the patent laws are favorsble. In reality the difference was cultural: Germans have had a kick-ass chemistry culture since alchemy turned into chemistry. The chapter explains dye manufacturing changes with patent laws. To anyone with chemistry knowledge, this is ludicrous to the point of deliberate dishonesty. Dyes are embarrasingly easy to discover. If you take an existing dye structure and make a tiny chemical change, the new material is probably colorful and is not covered by the patent on the original dye. In fact, a lot of early pharmaceutical work was done by taking chemical libraries from dye companies and screening their thousands of structures for biological activity. The argument against patents on the basis of "me too" drugs is also ludicrous. The chapter actually says that patents are damaging because they give patients too many choices: there is no need to waste the money on having all those alternatives. In reality, there is huge variation between similar drugs. Many variants turn out to work better for different people, and some variants turn out to have unacceptable side effects. The only way to find out is to make a bunch of alternatives and try them all out. The chapter becomes even more ludicrous by saying thst the COX-2 inhibitors are just a wasteful duplicate of cheap ibuprofen. Folks, ibuprofen and related drugs kill probably a few hundred thousand people a year with side effects. They're more dangerous than Al Qaeda. (Although by bad luck it turned out that the aCOX-2 inhibitors were worse, but in a different way.) The chapter makes the absurd claim that patents hurt drug discovery and patients, ignoring the elephant in the room of generics manufacturers. If patents were so harmful to innovation, the the generic companies would be leading they way with new drugs. They are most emphatically NOT. Except for a few minor formulation chsnges, they do nothing of their own.
  - hackinthebochs 14y ago
    >There are tons of studies showing that IP law hampers innovation and not a single one showing it aids it. I hope you're not implying that a lack of studies proves that patents don't encourage innovation. The explanation is simply the difference in motivation for parties on either side. I would like to see some of these studies that show IP laws hamper innovation in general. All the ones I've seen do no such thing. It's easy to cherry pick certain fields and then try to extrapolate to patents as a whole. The pharmaceutical industry is still the prime case for patents. When a drug takes a billion dollars to reach market, a government granted monopoly can be the only thing that makes it profitable to even bother. Please explain how a system without patents can produce the same drugs while still being possible.
Natsu 14y ago
The most valuable patents are the worst patents: the ideas that everyone else will come up with on their own and only later discover that they infringe when it's too late to do anything about it. Oddly enough, the fact that something is repeatedly reinvented independently does not appear to have any bearing on whether a patent fails the legal 'obviousness' test, because everyone is assumed to know about every patent (in the sense that they won't believe that you came up with it on your own even if you did), in spite of the fact that you get punished for having any knowledge thereof.
linuxhansl 14y ago
This is very obviously and sadly true. Where I work we are encouraged to not even look at patents, because then we would know about the "invention" leading to triple damages if we are found infringing. This is clearly nonsense and the diametric opposite of what was intended.
jrogers65 14y ago
That the idea of a monopoly somehow facilitating innovation and competition is accepted by so many people is the mark of a political and economical system which is corrupt at it's very core. I'm not just talking about software or hardware patents - medical patents have caused regressions in innovation just the same (see chapter 9 in the link below). How something so fundamentally and obviously incorrect has seeped into common culture is something which needs to be investigated and taken seriously. That this has happened in the software industry in particular, where since day one everybody rejected the idea, is a testament to the notion that there are social and political factors which are actively spreading misinformation. Naming names might be an effective way to shunt them out of the economy by refusing to do business with them. http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...
- kvb 14y ago
  The evidence in that article seems quite weak to me. It reads like an opinion piece - it nicely fits some statistics into a narrative, but it hardly seems like a conclusive demonstration that "medical patents have caused regressions in innovation".
rayiner 14y ago
In my experience patents are a tremendous driving force for innovation. Universities use patents to be able to get a cut of the revenue stream generated by the inventions they produce. Start-ups in engineering fields with high capital costs depend on patent protection to compete with bigger players that could otherwise steam roll over them with their manufacturing prowess. The whole wide world of engineering doesn't all look like Web 2.0. Innovation in "Big Engineering" is not by and large someone thinking "gee, wouldn't it be cool if we had a site that did this" and whipping up an RoR app to do it. Rather, it's PhD projects that take years of painstaking research and access to specialized equipment. It's teams of researchers analyzing reams of data and doing hundreds of experiments. I worked at a very small tech company doing defense research, and we had individual pieces of equipment that cost as much as the YC VC fund gives to YC alums. We blew through double-digit millions of dollars just at the basic research stage, long before bringing a real product to market was on the table. In this sort of environment, you need some way to keep other people from taking your ideas, after you've done the hard part, and competing with you using your own work. If you can't protect the designs, then all the competition comes down to who can most efficiently outsource manufacturing to China or who has the most efficient supply chain. And that's not exactly good for innovation either.

shrughes 14y ago

This has not been mentioned on all the other patent threads.

praxeologist 14y ago
It needs repeating because it is it is up there as one of the most widely believed and repeated falsehoods. >Marvell lawyers said CMU's closing statement was "rife with misrepresentations," including suggestions that Marvell "broke the chain of innovation by not paying the royalties that they now owe," and noting those payments would be used "to fund further research, to lead to further innovation." That resulted in a short conference at the side bar, in which the judge warned "you can't dig deep into all of CMU's contributions to society and mankind." There are tons of studies showing that IP law hampers innovation and not a single one showing it aids it.
- cobrausn 14y ago
  There are tons of studies showing that IP law hampers innovation and not a single one showing it aids it. What about pharmaceuticals? 'Tech' (as we use the term) isn't the only industry in existence.
  - praxeologist 14y ago
    What about it? Find a study to support your belief if you think patents aid innovation in pharmaceuticals. I can refer you to my comments the last time I challenged people to show a study in support of this idea. The paper attempted to measure innovation in the number of patents issued. Hopefully the problem with doing that is blatantly obvious. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901756 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901756
  - jrogers65 14y ago
    http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h... Chapter nine.
    - cobrausn 14y ago
      It's a longer read than I have time for (at work), but thanks for the link. I'm curious to see how they resolve the problem of the major upfront cost of R&D that is usually (so far as I know) recouped only via temporary monopoly.
    - Daniel_Newby 14y ago
      That chapter is very silly. It compares British and German chemical companies and explains the difference with patent laws. But any company can build a chemical factory wherever the patent laws are favorsble. In reality the difference was cultural: Germans have had a kick-ass chemistry culture since alchemy turned into chemistry. The chapter explains dye manufacturing changes with patent laws. To anyone with chemistry knowledge, this is ludicrous to the point of deliberate dishonesty. Dyes are embarrasingly easy to discover. If you take an existing dye structure and make a tiny chemical change, the new material is probably colorful and is not covered by the patent on the original dye. In fact, a lot of early pharmaceutical work was done by taking chemical libraries from dye companies and screening their thousands of structures for biological activity. The argument against patents on the basis of "me too" drugs is also ludicrous. The chapter actually says that patents are damaging because they give patients too many choices: there is no need to waste the money on having all those alternatives. In reality, there is huge variation between similar drugs. Many variants turn out to work better for different people, and some variants turn out to have unacceptable side effects. The only way to find out is to make a bunch of alternatives and try them all out. The chapter becomes even more ludicrous by saying thst the COX-2 inhibitors are just a wasteful duplicate of cheap ibuprofen. Folks, ibuprofen and related drugs kill probably a few hundred thousand people a year with side effects. They're more dangerous than Al Qaeda. (Although by bad luck it turned out that the aCOX-2 inhibitors were worse, but in a different way.) The chapter makes the absurd claim that patents hurt drug discovery and patients, ignoring the elephant in the room of generics manufacturers. If patents were so harmful to innovation, the the generic companies would be leading they way with new drugs. They are most emphatically NOT. Except for a few minor formulation chsnges, they do nothing of their own.
- hackinthebochs 14y ago
  >There are tons of studies showing that IP law hampers innovation and not a single one showing it aids it. I hope you're not implying that a lack of studies proves that patents don't encourage innovation. The explanation is simply the difference in motivation for parties on either side. I would like to see some of these studies that show IP laws hamper innovation in general. All the ones I've seen do no such thing. It's easy to cherry pick certain fields and then try to extrapolate to patents as a whole. The pharmaceutical industry is still the prime case for patents. When a drug takes a billion dollars to reach market, a government granted monopoly can be the only thing that makes it profitable to even bother. Please explain how a system without patents can produce the same drugs while still being possible.

Natsu 14y ago

The most valuable patents are the worst patents: the ideas that everyone else will come up with on their own and only later discover that they infringe when it's too late to do anything about it. Oddly enough, the fact that something is repeatedly reinvented independently does not appear to have any bearing on whether a patent fails the legal 'obviousness' test, because everyone is assumed to know about every patent (in the sense that they won't believe that you came up with it on your own even if you did), in spite of the fact that you get punished for having any knowledge thereof.

linuxhansl 14y ago

This is very obviously and sadly true. Where I work we are encouraged to not even look at patents, because then we would know about the "invention" leading to triple damages if we are found infringing. This is clearly nonsense and the diametric opposite of what was intended.

jrogers65 14y ago

That the idea of a monopoly somehow facilitating innovation and competition is accepted by so many people is the mark of a political and economical system which is corrupt at it's very core. I'm not just talking about software or hardware patents - medical patents have caused regressions in innovation just the same (see chapter 9 in the link below). How something so fundamentally and obviously incorrect has seeped into common culture is something which needs to be investigated and taken seriously. That this has happened in the software industry in particular, where since day one everybody rejected the idea, is a testament to the notion that there are social and political factors which are actively spreading misinformation. Naming names might be an effective way to shunt them out of the economy by refusing to do business with them. http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...

kvb 14y ago
The evidence in that article seems quite weak to me. It reads like an opinion piece - it nicely fits some statistics into a narrative, but it hardly seems like a conclusive demonstration that "medical patents have caused regressions in innovation".

rayiner 14y ago

In my experience patents are a tremendous driving force for innovation. Universities use patents to be able to get a cut of the revenue stream generated by the inventions they produce. Start-ups in engineering fields with high capital costs depend on patent protection to compete with bigger players that could otherwise steam roll over them with their manufacturing prowess. The whole wide world of engineering doesn't all look like Web 2.0. Innovation in "Big Engineering" is not by and large someone thinking "gee, wouldn't it be cool if we had a site that did this" and whipping up an RoR app to do it. Rather, it's PhD projects that take years of painstaking research and access to specialized equipment. It's teams of researchers analyzing reams of data and doing hundreds of experiments. I worked at a very small tech company doing defense research, and we had individual pieces of equipment that cost as much as the YC VC fund gives to YC alums. We blew through double-digit millions of dollars just at the basic research stage, long before bringing a real product to market was on the table. In this sort of environment, you need some way to keep other people from taking your ideas, after you've done the hard part, and competing with you using your own work. If you can't protect the designs, then all the competition comes down to who can most efficiently outsource manufacturing to China or who has the most efficient supply chain. And that's not exactly good for innovation either.