5 ms·

Patents have always struck me as a bit like a mob protection racket. Either you pay for the right to do business or they send lawyers in to make your life hell.

by beloch 13y ago

Patents have always struck me as a bit like a mob protection racket. Either you pay for the right to do business or they send lawyers in to make your life hell. The business landscape is a bit like New York back when it was ruled by gangs. A business might openly pay protection to one gang while secretly paying another gang to shake down their rivals. These patent troll companies are a bit like those shake-down gangs, only even less discriminating. They wouldn't exist if respectable companies weren't lining up to sell them patent rights. Perhaps patent law, as it currently stands, really is analogous to DIY justice. If you want a patent, it is entirely incumbent on you to pursue it. There isn't any kind of public authority running around trying to determine who came up with what first and making sure they get compensated for it. Lawyers are the new hired assassins and goons. Perhaps the only way to tame this jungle of gangland warfare is to develop something like police for the business world.

studentrob 13y ago
I think we need to look at the reasons why patents were formed in the first place in order to determine how to modify patent law going forward. Part of the reason patents came about was to prevent permanent monopolies, the idea being that you make your innovation public in exchange for a short term monopoly or what I will call "short term money." This is just one reason but it will let me illustrate an example that makes my point. The problem with the exchange of knowledge for short term money is that the amount of time you are protected doesn't scale to the degree of innovativeness of your idea; the short term money now seems like way too much money for many patents, essentially creating the long term monopolies that patents were meant to prevent. Rather, certain things are patentable for a certain length of time, and that's that, regardless of the degree of innovativeness. To further compound the problem, the degree of innovation of idea x diminishes as we move into the future. Consider idea x, selling images using the internet. Simple, right? This may have been considered innovative from 1980 until 1990 (this is hypothetical, please don't nit pick), because at that time not everyone has a computer, the internet, or a way to pay for things online, and maybe you have ideas for how to solve all that. But if you were to come up with that idea in 1990 it might only be truly innovative for 5 years. And if someone were to try to patent this today, assuming the USPTO worked flawlessly, we would laugh at them. It wouldn't be considered innovative for any amount of time because everyone has a computer, a way to pay for things online, and fast internet. Yet the USPTO may grant this patent today anyway (again, hypothetical), causing companies to endure years of headaches and fork over thousands or millions in attorney fees. What's the solution to that? I don't know, but I do know there's something wrong with the incarnation we have now, because patent law is creating something it is meant to prevent (monopolies). The point is, to modify patent law, we must first go back and look at the founding reasons of why patents were created in order to determine (a) whether we still agree with those reasons, and (b) how to modify law that nurtures those reasons going forward. It's only then that we'll be able to correct things because the situation has gone too awry for minor adjustments. I like the direction the FTC is taking, however, and I see this as a fact finding mission which must come before everything else.
eps 13y ago
> Patents have always struck me as a bit like a mob protection racket Always? Seriously? Just like that? Even when a pharma company invests huge sums into R&D of a new drug and relies on patents to try and recoup this money? That's too a mob protection market for you? The concept of the patent protection is solid. It's the execution that went astray at some point when they started issuing very generic patents. Bitch about that.
- chongli 13y ago
  Always? Seriously? Just like that? Even when a pharma company invests huge sums into R&D of a new drug and relies on patents to try and recoup this money? Yeah, just as drug gangs invest large sums of money to try and expand their turf. The concept of the patent protection is solid. No, it isn't. It has big problems even in the pharma industry, especially as the gold rush on small molecules winds down. Patents are monopolies and monopolies are bad for consumers. The idea that we have to bribe inventors with such a dangerous power ought to be farcical and obviously wrong to most people at this point, yet it continues to be repeated. The other idea that markets will somehow align with the medical needs of the population is also wrong, as evidenced by the failure of health care in the US. If we want important medical research done we ought to do the obvious thing and pay universities and non-profit research labs/hospitals to do it. Hell, we're doing a ton of that already and then selling the patent rights away for pennies on the dollar.
  - beloch 13y ago
    Publicly funded research typically focuses on curiosity driven, high-risk, long-term research that doesn't have very good odds of ever producing a viable commercial product. Private enterprise focuses on short-term, low-risk research and engineering, packaging, marketing, etc. to bring safe-bets to market. For every big-pharma dollar spent to produce a new drug, ten government dollars were probably spent to get the underlying science to the point where pharmacorps were willing to touch it, and a hundred dollars more of government funding probably went off on various other tangents that turned out to be dead-ends. On the other hand, academics often suck at commercializing their research. Bringing a drug to market involves many years of careful study and clinical trials that are utterly boring to most researchers in academia. You can't get journal publications out of your twentieth double-blind study looking for side-effects! Big pharma companies do perform a valuable service, but the rewards they receive are out of proportion. Multiple decades of monopoly are an unreasonable reward for performing this last step in development, especially when a lot of drug patents are the result of meaningless changes to existing products that are made solely to restart the monopoly clock! Taking academic research and turning it into a commercial product does take time and money, and without patents this crucial last-step might not be adequately incentivised. However, If corporations want exclusive rights to commercialize publicly funded research, perhaps the public deserves a cut. Perhaps Pfizer, etc. should be on the hook to help fund some of the taxpayer funded research they benefit from. Either that, or some alternative way to fund commercialization of academic research needs to be found.
azernik 13y ago
Part of this is a wider American legal problem, in that instead of funding regulators to enforce laws (of all kinds - patents, environmental, consumer protection, etc.) we tend to let people sue each other. The result is regulation only when it benefits someone with the money to pay a lawyer.

by beloch 13y ago

studentrob 13y ago

I think we need to look at the reasons why patents were formed in the first place in order to determine how to modify patent law going forward. Part of the reason patents came about was to prevent permanent monopolies, the idea being that you make your innovation public in exchange for a short term monopoly or what I will call "short term money." This is just one reason but it will let me illustrate an example that makes my point. The problem with the exchange of knowledge for short term money is that the amount of time you are protected doesn't scale to the degree of innovativeness of your idea; the short term money now seems like way too much money for many patents, essentially creating the long term monopolies that patents were meant to prevent. Rather, certain things are patentable for a certain length of time, and that's that, regardless of the degree of innovativeness. To further compound the problem, the degree of innovation of idea x diminishes as we move into the future. Consider idea x, selling images using the internet. Simple, right? This may have been considered innovative from 1980 until 1990 (this is hypothetical, please don't nit pick), because at that time not everyone has a computer, the internet, or a way to pay for things online, and maybe you have ideas for how to solve all that. But if you were to come up with that idea in 1990 it might only be truly innovative for 5 years. And if someone were to try to patent this today, assuming the USPTO worked flawlessly, we would laugh at them. It wouldn't be considered innovative for any amount of time because everyone has a computer, a way to pay for things online, and fast internet. Yet the USPTO may grant this patent today anyway (again, hypothetical), causing companies to endure years of headaches and fork over thousands or millions in attorney fees. What's the solution to that? I don't know, but I do know there's something wrong with the incarnation we have now, because patent law is creating something it is meant to prevent (monopolies). The point is, to modify patent law, we must first go back and look at the founding reasons of why patents were created in order to determine (a) whether we still agree with those reasons, and (b) how to modify law that nurtures those reasons going forward. It's only then that we'll be able to correct things because the situation has gone too awry for minor adjustments. I like the direction the FTC is taking, however, and I see this as a fact finding mission which must come before everything else.

eps 13y ago

> Patents have always struck me as a bit like a mob protection racket Always? Seriously? Just like that? Even when a pharma company invests huge sums into R&D of a new drug and relies on patents to try and recoup this money? That's too a mob protection market for you? The concept of the patent protection is solid. It's the execution that went astray at some point when they started issuing very generic patents. Bitch about that.

chongli 13y ago
Always? Seriously? Just like that? Even when a pharma company invests huge sums into R&D of a new drug and relies on patents to try and recoup this money? Yeah, just as drug gangs invest large sums of money to try and expand their turf. The concept of the patent protection is solid. No, it isn't. It has big problems even in the pharma industry, especially as the gold rush on small molecules winds down. Patents are monopolies and monopolies are bad for consumers. The idea that we have to bribe inventors with such a dangerous power ought to be farcical and obviously wrong to most people at this point, yet it continues to be repeated. The other idea that markets will somehow align with the medical needs of the population is also wrong, as evidenced by the failure of health care in the US. If we want important medical research done we ought to do the obvious thing and pay universities and non-profit research labs/hospitals to do it. Hell, we're doing a ton of that already and then selling the patent rights away for pennies on the dollar.
- beloch 13y ago
  Publicly funded research typically focuses on curiosity driven, high-risk, long-term research that doesn't have very good odds of ever producing a viable commercial product. Private enterprise focuses on short-term, low-risk research and engineering, packaging, marketing, etc. to bring safe-bets to market. For every big-pharma dollar spent to produce a new drug, ten government dollars were probably spent to get the underlying science to the point where pharmacorps were willing to touch it, and a hundred dollars more of government funding probably went off on various other tangents that turned out to be dead-ends. On the other hand, academics often suck at commercializing their research. Bringing a drug to market involves many years of careful study and clinical trials that are utterly boring to most researchers in academia. You can't get journal publications out of your twentieth double-blind study looking for side-effects! Big pharma companies do perform a valuable service, but the rewards they receive are out of proportion. Multiple decades of monopoly are an unreasonable reward for performing this last step in development, especially when a lot of drug patents are the result of meaningless changes to existing products that are made solely to restart the monopoly clock! Taking academic research and turning it into a commercial product does take time and money, and without patents this crucial last-step might not be adequately incentivised. However, If corporations want exclusive rights to commercialize publicly funded research, perhaps the public deserves a cut. Perhaps Pfizer, etc. should be on the hook to help fund some of the taxpayer funded research they benefit from. Either that, or some alternative way to fund commercialization of academic research needs to be found.

azernik 13y ago

Part of this is a wider American legal problem, in that instead of funding regulators to enforce laws (of all kinds - patents, environmental, consumer protection, etc.) we tend to let people sue each other. The result is regulation only when it benefits someone with the money to pay a lawyer.