The US Supreme Court is hearing a case about patent law’s “exhaustion doctrine”

Why can't patents have a duration? If you're the first to come up with an idea, you get 5 years head start before competitors can use your patent for their own ends. If you never have the resources to materialize your idea or can't find a seat in the market, that's unfortunate but oh well. We can't keep allowing battery technology to be held back because Exxon bought up all the patents years ago.

I don't believe patents, as they are, are doing very much toward their original goal. Right now, and perhaps this is my frustrated cynicism here, they just look like one more method for those with money to bully those without.

Drugs fall into a problematic territory here. I don't know enough about big pharma to have an informed conversation but I feel like there are other options available to us. Pharma R&D is what is always, always, always trotted out as a defense for our absurd patent system. The whole world has to get shafted with a bad system because one industry can't figure out another way?

I see this sentiment a lot- "yes patents are bad for individuals and from a macroeconomic perspective, but we need them so that Big Pharma can ultimately improve our quality of life."

I wonder though, has anyone studied to see if that holds up? I suspect that our quality of life improvements come from infrastructure like access to safe drinking water, and general accessibility to medicines not protected by intellectual property monopolies.

While I agree with your overall sentiment, the Levine book is not a good reference. Here's a comment I'd posted about the book in the past:

I would be wary of taking that book at its word. The authors have an agenda and they are not afraid to twist historical facts to suit their narrative. I mean, their very first chapter begins with a lie which perpetuates the myth that Watt's patent retarded steam development [1].

When the authors of [1] called out Boldrin and Levine on this, the latter responded by fabricating new myths rather than admit that the truth undermined their narrative [2].

The very chapter you cite itself has such inaccuracies. I did not track down all the stuff they cite, but I did find an instance of mischaracterizing references to suit their view points. For instance, when they discuss the German dyestuff industry, they cite a study by Murmann to support their narrative that Germany dominated in that industry due to the lack of patents. But if you look at the actual study itself, Murmann paints (heh) a very different picture: German dominance in that industry was fueled by close ties with academic research, and later by R&D labs encouraged by, of all things, the newly introduced patent laws:

>When in 1877 German patent law protected dye innovations, a few German firms such as Hoechst, BASF, and AGFA saw the advantage of hiring organic chemists whose sole task was to synthesize new dyes. After these research chemists turned out economically successful dyes, firms hired more and more chemists and pioneered an entirely new corporate function, formally organized research. The birth of corporate research and development (R&D), which today is a standard activity in high-tech industries ... can be traced to the German synthetic dye firms in 1880s. By the 1890s the vast majority of dyes were being discovered in the R&D laboratories of Bayer, Hoechst, and BASF.

> Whereas in the early days of the industry a firm could exist by copying dyes invented somewhere else, patent laws made the systematic application of science within the boundaries of the firm a critical dimension of remaining a leader in the industry.

Moreover:

> The most important institution in the early success of the German dye industry was the university system, but patent laws were a second key factor that allowed the German firms to capture a dominant position.

With that many assertions in the study that refute their view, they cherry-pick a few comments and actually cite the study as one that supports their view.

With so many accuracies in there, I find it hard to take anything else they say in that book at their word.

1. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1589712

2. http://econpapers.repec.org/article/bpjrlecon/v_3a5_3ay_3a20...

3. Murmann JP, 2003, "Knowledge and Competitive Advantage – The Coevolution of Firms, Technologies and National Institutions." - http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam041/2003043048.pdf

raises hand me too

They do this everytime. Pretty much any EFF post that makes it to the top of HN, I see a comment pointing out how the post is flawed and clickbaity.