A patent is, first and foremost, a fence. It creates property rights. Do fences increase productivity? Should they? It probably is more productive if your neighbor's dog shits on your lawn, or your clever invention is taken apart and immediately copied by a larger competitor. But is it right?
The Case Against Patents (2013)
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Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#102Drug patents are ten years. It's common to say without patents no drug company would spend the billions it takes to bring one drug to market. But I remember doing the back of the envelope math in college on the socially optimal length of a drug patent based on the cost, profit motive and public benefit, and it worked out to only about three years.
Post-AIA, US utility patents (including APIs, biologics, methods of manufacture/use, etc.) are 20 years with possible adjustments to term length.
I was in college a while ago :) Appreciate the correction
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#103Drug patents are ten years. It's common to say without patents no drug company would spend the billions it takes to bring one drug to market. But I remember doing the back of the envelope math in college on the socially optimal length of a drug patent based on the cost, profit motive and public benefit, and it worked out to only about three years.
Is that assuming the patent only comes into effect when the drug reaches market?
Yes
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#104I am against (all) patents on the following grounds: The article talks about first-mover advantage.. it seems to me that the case for or against patents depends on how you model it. If you model it as a single-shot prisoner's dilemma, then without patents, there is no incentive to make result of research public. This is a classical argument in favor of patents. On the other hand, if you model it as a many-rounds pris…
IP is fundamentally different from property as me know it.
Something is your property if you have exclusive control over it. Since IP is not exclusive (two people can have the same thought), it is not property.
Patents are the worse form of IP, since it is possible to accidentally infringe on them.
Copyright is almost as bad, especially at current timespans, and because it has such a chilling effect on the internet and other media.
Trademarks are essentially just defenses from fraud, so they aren't really IP.
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
That may be true, but I suspect you're underestimating the value created by patents. Three examples: 1) Patents enable "benevolent monopolies." Companies that can afford to splurge on fundamental research because they have a revenue source protected by some sort of barrier to entry or network effect. Xerox PARC, for example, created many of the technologies fundamental to modern computing. PARC was bankrolled by Xero…
> 2) Patents enable business models that separate design from production. ARM and MIPS, for example, design chips incorporated into designs from myriad manufacturers. Their designs are already protected by copyright, though.
If that were true, then no one would file patents for 36 years, they'd just enjoy copyright protection or 150 years.
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that this would be an efficient use of anyone's time but... Assuming the purpose of patents is 1) to eliminate trade secrets, 2) that patents must be novel, and 3) that patents must be non-obvious to someone skilled in the art, then perhaps a solution would be: take a handful of people skilled in the art, tell half of them to implement the patent and tell the other half only the end goal and see if any of them co…
What's the incentive on the first group to not just say oh it didn't work and then do their own implementation later?
Ban those people from doing that.
Now I'm curious if patent officers have ever been fired, sued, or prosecuted for profiting from the information in a rejected or granted patent.
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
the costs of your system are probably way more than the value created for society via patents.
That may be true, but I suspect you're underestimating the value created by patents. Three examples: 1) Patents enable "benevolent monopolies." Companies that can afford to splurge on fundamental research because they have a revenue source protected by some sort of barrier to entry or network effect. Xerox PARC, for example, created many of the technologies fundamental to modern computing. PARC was bankrolled by Xero…
> 1) Patents enable "benevolent monopolies." Companies that can afford to splurge on fundamental research because they have a revenue source protected by some sort of barrier to entry or network effect.
The value in "benevolent monopolies" isn't the revenue source. Money is fungible. If there is something worth investing in, it will attract VC money. And if a company has revenue from a monopoly, they could just as easily invest it in real estate or the S&P 500 as their own industry.
The value of a monopoly is that it excludes free riders from improvements. The best example of this was Ma Bell and Bell Labs. If you can improve the phone network, e.g. with lasers (fiber optics), or information theory (data compression), or transistors (microprocessors), then you can invest in those things and capture the benefits directly without incurring a competitive cost disadvantage, because you have no competitors.
But the AT&T monopoly wasn't due to a patent. They never expected their monopoly to expire as patents do. The patent monopoly isn't designed to be long enough to engage in this kind of behavior in general. Which is why we see this much more often in monopolists whose monopolies aren't derived primarily from patents -- AT&T, Microsoft, Google, etc.
And the other side of it is that you're excluding the whole rest of the world from making improvements. You have to buy your phone from AT&T. No modems, no iPhones, no third party ISPs or open internet. Just the original monopoly extended into everything it touches, with all the deficits that make monopolies terrible.
That this is a net-negative is the reason we have antitrust laws.
> 2) Patents enable business models that separate design from production.
The simple version of this where you have a core design but not a fab is solved by having the fab you use sign an NDA, or you can sell the secret to the implementer outright. The version where you design part of the core and someone else improves on it or you have multiple customers is really this:
> 3) Patents enable technology sharing. Dozens of different companies have technology that is included in DVD, Blu-Ray, 2G/3G/4G, Wi-Fi, etc.
The counterargument is that it's difficult to keep a lot of these things secret. And there are reasons to enter into technology sharing agreements independent of patents, like the network effects of interoperability. You want your movies to play on every customer's DVD player and your phone to work on every carrier's network.
The patented technology sharing cartels are also currently used to exclude new entrants to the market, or impose unrelated conditions like requiring all DVD player manufacturers to not let customers skip particular ads as a condition of the patent license.
The best case to be made for patents is that they prevent free riding. But that's maybe the biggest problem with the existing patent system -- independent reinvention is not free riding but is patent infringement. Which is the root of all patent trolling.
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#108I 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…
I mostly read patents about chemistry, materials, and electronics. I find a lot of older patents to be straightforward and informative. Occasionally I will run across a 21st century patent that is as readable, but they're a lot rarer now. If I had to estimate when the transition happened, I'd guess around the 1980s, maybe late 1970s. Weirdly, this is also about the time that academic publications appeared to decline…
That's because the PTO is granting garbage patents, even in the case of legitimately patentable inventions. It a main problem with patents today (along with the lifetime of a patent which was originally chosen during a much slower time for humanity's intellectual advancement).
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That's voodoo perpetuated by VCs, not real value. 99% of granted patents wouldn't hold up in court.
Look at the garbage patents Dropbox has, and and the fact that they haven't used those patents to sue competitors out of existence or licensing fees. https://patents.justia.com/assignee/dropbox-inc https://patents.justia.com/patent/8855605
including "logging into your account from your phone"
Re: The Case Against Patents (2013)
#110This seems like as good a thread as any to mention one of my favorite unrealized enterprises: Patent Trolling for Good (PTG) The idea is simple: take the traditional model of a patent troll, but alter the settlement terms to create a cascade that ultimately ends or significantly reduces the exclusive ownership of facts (aka IP). Patent Trolling for Good acts like a traditional Patent Troll in that it takes any IP it…