Question for anti-patent folks. Do you like a system where Chinese companies just copy products listed on Amazon and sell them for less?
Yes?
The Case Against Patents (2013)
91–100 of 140 posts
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#92Dragging out the old one-click patent I see. I guess I missed where the development of ecommerce was stymied by this patent. A patent can promote innovation in at least two ways: (1) rewarding the inventors for their toil and risk taking; and (2) by forcing competitors to try to solve the same problem with a different solution. People seem to forget about the second one.
(1) is addressed by the article. As for (2), well... do you have any evidence this outweighs all the downsides of the patent system?
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#93I never thought that the case for patents was to increase productivity. I always thought that their purpose was to eliminate trade secrets: people are going to invent stuff whether you want to or not, but without patents, they'll take the secrets to the grave. My favourite patent of all time is Michael Jackson's smooth criminal patent: https://mashable.com/2015/03/28/michael-jackson-shoe-patent/... This is the patent…
The decline of practical enforceability in some patent areas has created adverse incentives with respect to how you use the patent system, leading to much of the mess you see today. As a practical consequence, less R&D is being patented since disclosure is not adequately protected, and patents are instead used strategically to increase the cost of reverse engineering a trade secret. This leads to the large number of…
"Even trade secrets often only buy you a small amount of time these days before a competitor reverse engineers your technology" -- this tends to undermine the idea that good algorithms would remain secret without software patents.
Someone else suggested that you can hide some kinds of algorithms if you only provide software-as-a-service. That way there's never even a binary available for reverse engineering. The same applies for software that is used just internally, like if an aircraft manufacturer has their own geometric modeling kernel that aircraft buyers never get near. But even with NDAs for employees and no external distribution of software, good ideas leak as people change jobs and find inspiration from systems they built/used before. Sometimes the main thing you need to know is that a particular line of research was fruitful; exactly reproducing the original implementation is less important.
I tend to think that it would usually take less than the 20 years of patent exclusivity for a good, intended-to-remain-secret algorithm to diffuse out of a for-profit company, or to be independently invented again by somebody who will publish regardless of patentability. Pondering a world without software patents, is it worth it to learn about a good idea 10 years "late" (assuming secrecy is attempted), in exchange for being able to freely use that idea 10 years "early"? I say with complete confidence: maybe.
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not exactly clear if patents help or harm the drug industry. It's clear they play some very important roles, and the entire industry is structured around them. So, I sympathize with people that think it's too risky to change them. But I can't agree with that certainty on your comment.
Drugs are trivial to reverse engineer vs develop. So, without patents their would be zero incentive for private drug R&D funding. It's very clear that patents are required by the drug industry before they will invest in Research or as often happens buy companies that have done research. Now, if we give up all private R&D we could still manufacture existing drugs at much lower prices. But, turning over all drug resear…
FWIW, we will probably need to figure out an effective way to fund non-commercial drug research anyway, since pharmaceutical companies are really only interested in certain classes of drugs (mostly drugs that treat symptoms of chronic conditions, rather than drugs which permanently solve diseases or drugs which treat short lived conditions).
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#95Dragging out the old one-click patent I see. I guess I missed where the development of ecommerce was stymied by this patent. A patent can promote innovation in at least two ways: (1) rewarding the inventors for their toil and risk taking; and (2) by forcing competitors to try to solve the same problem with a different solution. People seem to forget about the second one.
(1) is addressed by the article. As for (2), well... do you have any evidence this outweighs all the downsides of the patent system?
Most of the so-called downsides of IP are subjective or viewpoint based. Or, they are imaginary/hypothetical.
But there is this, countries with the strongest IP protection are the most innovative and successful. So there must be something beneficial going on.
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#96I never thought that the case for patents was to increase productivity. I always thought that their purpose was to eliminate trade secrets: people are going to invent stuff whether you want to or not, but without patents, they'll take the secrets to the grave. My favourite patent of all time is Michael Jackson's smooth criminal patent: https://mashable.com/2015/03/28/michael-jackson-shoe-patent/... This is the patent…
The decline of practical enforceability in some patent areas has created adverse incentives with respect to how you use the patent system, leading to much of the mess you see today. As a practical consequence, less R&D is being patented since disclosure is not adequately protected, and patents are instead used strategically to increase the cost of reverse engineering a trade secret. This leads to the large number of…
tl;dr version: We currently have software patents and research is being kept secret. We should not ban software patents because then research would be kept secret.
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
the costs of your system are probably way more than the value created for society via patents.
The cost of creating artificial exclusivity, enforced by the state against natural human learning/discovering capabilities, is even higher.
Patents cover stuff that is already invented and put into public use. How does that go against natural learning/discovery?
Patents may stop someone from on purpose or accidentally copying someone else invention, but that isn't stopping discovery.
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#98The pharmaceutical industry is usually given as the prime example of an industry where patent protection is necessary; however, this is far from obvious. See Robin Feldman's book Drug Wars (there is an interview with her about it here: http//www.econtalk.org/robin-feldman-on-drug-patents-generics-and-drug-wars/)
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I think that all patents aren't created equal. We'd have less issues if software patents were only valid for like 5 years. You still have protection but you get rid of a lot of the trolls and the IBMs of the world having 10K patents. For more physical things, the protection can be longer since it takes longer to recoup your investment.
There often isn't even any "investment" in patents. Richard Feynmann would describe how his superiors would just walk around the labs and say, so! who has some ideas we could patent? And Feynmann's fellow scientists would say, well, you could grab this nuclear reactor and stick it into a submarine to power it, but that's pretty dumb and obvious. "Nonsense!" replied the superiors. "Patent that right away!" I don't kno…
For tech startups, patents are very important for staking out their product space. Those first 3-10 patents can be critical for funding or exits strategies.
A company that does not have patents around its core technology or products is worth much less than one that does have patents. If your ideas are not worth patenting (e.g., protecting) why should your investors keeping putting money in?
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great, let's see what the fine article has to say about these things. 1) "In less than 30 years, the flow of patents more than quadrupled. By contrast, neither innovation nor research and development expenditure nor factor productivity have exhibited any particular upward trend." In other words, more patents does not appear to encourage people to splurge on fundamental research in aggregate. But it gets worse, "The c…
> So at least we've identified where some of the money being brought in from all of these monopolies is going (it isn't to the scientists and engineers). You're not trying to minimize litigation costs, but rather maximize R&D investment net of litigation costs. So the question is, if competitors could quickly copy the results of R&D efforts, would R&D investment be more or less than 14% lower? Also, it's not like lit…
>You're not trying to minimize litigation costs, but rather maximize R&D investment net of litigation costs. So the question is, if competitors could quickly copy the results of R&D efforts, would R&D investment be more or less than 14% lower?
I think you missed the part where, "during the 1990s such costs rose substantially." To give further evidence, from 2006 to 2012 the number of patent troll lawsuits increased by a factor of six [3]. But, "the US economy has seen neither a dramatic acceleration in the rate of technological progress nor a major increase in the levels of research and development expenditure." So the answer is no, all of this litigation is not encouraging R&D spending (for some reason).
> That incorrectly assumes that the only "contribution" is producing an end-user product.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm not saying that ARM doesn't contribute value. I'm saying that a system that allows the separation of "design from production" also allows patent trolls, and you have to trade the benefits of one against the costs of the other. For the benefit of your one ARM example we pay the cost of 2,900 lawsuits by trolls in the year 2012 alone [3], making up 61% of all patent cases [4] (I wish I had more recent numbers).
> If standards don't embody important technical contributions, then why don't implementers rush to create alternative, unpatented standards?
You mean like " rel="nofollow">https://aomedia.org/>? They do, but I think that there are a few reasons that this doesn't happen more often:
(a) Avoiding patent thickets once they have already been created is incredibly hard work. Much harder than just developing the technology, in my opinion.
(b) It is even harder to collaborate without incurring substantial legal liability. But no such collaboration is required to create the thickets.
(c) Standards organizations often have policies which make it difficult or impossible to achieve these results, and many participants have strong incentives to prevent you from achieving them.
(d) Even if you make something "better", it is not "the standard". Displacing entrenched incumbents is incredibly hard (again, because of the network effects).
The places where you will see this happen is where there are business models that cannot support any per-unit royalty (e.g., giving away your software for free on the internet), because that provides strong incentives to make it happen.
Laptops and routers are not such an industry. They can just pass on the cost to consumers, who are not represented when these standards are set. This is the basic public goods problem.
Again quoting the article: "Notice, too, that many patent lawsuits have a public goods aspect. Consider a case in which the plaintiff is asserting that its patent has been infringed. If the plaintiff wins the lawsuit, by confirming its monopoly position it appropriates all the benefits of winning the lawsuit. A victory by the defendant, by contrast, benefits partly itself, but also other firms that might be sued by the plaintiff for patent infringement as well as consumers who would have a more competitive market. Thus, the defendant receives only a slice of the overall benefits from winning the lawsuit, and will be willing to spend less on such lawsuits than it would if it were to receive all the benefits." The parallel with getting your patent-encumbered technology into a standard vs. some other firm trying to keep it out is exactly equivalent. The correct play is for the other firm to just file their own patents, but this tragedy-of-the-commons result isn't exactly ideal.
[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323469804578525...
[4] https://money.cnn.com/2013/07/02/technology/enterprise/paten...