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Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

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Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#151
post #6

Why Software Patents are Bad, Period. https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0027 Patents are out of control, and they’re hurting innovation https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/patents-are-out-of-control... Economic and Game Theory Against Intellectual Monopoly https://web.archive.org/web/20120121014753/https://levine.ss... PATENTS AND INNOVATION IN ECONOMIC HISTORY https://gwern.net/doc/economics/2016-moser.pdf Historical rec…

I am glad Hacker News is still against massively centralized things of SOME kind. I remember when the cypherpunks here were in favor of blockchain and crypto. The latest zeitgeist of being against decentralized stuff (witness the hate of plebbit) is leading the “hackers” here to learned helplessness and support online feudalism (big tech monopolies). And I was worried people started to embrace patents too.

Y’all will love decentralization next summer again.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#152
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maximized is not "totally made up." You will find software companies maximizing R&D tax credits, too, for example. A JHU study found median costs for clinical trials of $19 million. That's expensive relative to software. If I piled HIPAA, payments processing, and whatever telcos might require for hooking up to SS7 in one app (call it "X") I doubt I could get halfway to $19 million. But $19 million is peanuts compared…

> I stand by the assertion that pharma gets undeserved sympathy for long patent terms. Sure. That's an assertion that's easy to stand by because it's so easy for it to be true because it's so open ended and unbounded. I think most people believe the pharma companies are playing it up some and getting some undue sympathy, but 10x the sympathy and 10% more sympathy are vastly different situations and your assertion is…

How is an industry-wide median cost "disjoint?" What number would better represent typical clinical trials costs?

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are in the game, you have to play it. You don't have to advocate for it, and you can advocate against it. But you may not have much a choice on playing. Anyway, defending a patent requires some deep pockets, and if you don't defend them, they are just cost with no benefit. Besides, the IBM legal team will come knocking, won't tell you anything that can let you understand why, and you will have no other option…

Good points > Anyway, defending a patent requires some deep pockets, and if you don't defend them, they are just cost with no benefit. unless you just need them for gov't grants that require them - in this case it's an investment into a pre-requisite and if the net capital from the grant is higher than the cost of the patent you got then hypothetically you are ahead; unless there are recurring/other expenses involved…

Can anyone comment on which government grants require a patent?

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#154
post #147

The most useful thing about software patents IMO is what you uncover during the patent writing process. When you’re sitting there writing the equivalent of a 10-20 page college essay on the problem background, operating environment, then all the present and future uses of something novel (the provisional stage), it forces you to think in a way that no typical product management process does. There are few (any?) othe…

And then the legal team runs it through the legalese obfuscator 9000 to make sure no one else will have any idea what it's even about. Seriously, Google needed insider information at Sonos to infringe on their multi-room audio patent. Go read it and see if you could implement a working system from it https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/07/ef/fb/ac27ac8...

That’s true. The narrative can get lost or at least watered down in the process.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this true of all patents. Patents for drugs are obviously necessary in the current environment. But software patents are definitely bogus.

Not sure why drug patents are obviously necessary. There are tons of issues with them including big pharma gaming the system to keep drugs protected for decades.

Without patents existing, who would pay for the trials required to bring a drug to market?

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this true of all patents. Patents for drugs are obviously necessary in the current environment. But software patents are definitely bogus.

It is funny that pharma is always brought up as an example for industries where patents "obviously" make sense. Pharma is in fact a pretty good example why patents don't make sense and hinder innovation. Historically, before the homogenization of IP law, pharmaceuticals had different patent protection in different countries, ranging from very strong (the US), to weak (most of Europe) to excluded (Switzerland). The mo…

Do you have a link to an article or book that covers this?

I’m trying to workout why Swiss companies would outspend the rest, is it that patents incentivise sitting on your laurels? And did drugs require the huge testing they need now?

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#157
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I stand by the assertion that pharma gets undeserved sympathy for long patent terms. Sure. That's an assertion that's easy to stand by because it's so easy for it to be true because it's so open ended and unbounded. I think most people believe the pharma companies are playing it up some and getting some undue sympathy, but 10x the sympathy and 10% more sympathy are vastly different situations and your assertion is…

How is an industry-wide median cost "disjoint?" What number would better represent typical clinical trials costs?

Is it the median cost for a trial or for all trials that a company does? A company might have many trials going on at once, of greater or lesser costs, but revenue is an aggregation of everything over a year. A company with $100 million in revenue and 10 trials ongoing and a company with a $1 billion in revenue and 10 trials ongoing would possibly lead one to specific conclusions, but even when it's broken down that much it doesn't really mean anything for the examples presented, because the mean cost of the trials that the company in question has ongoing could be entirely different. The 10 trials the $100 million revenue company is administering could average $1 million, and the 10 trials the $1 billion company is administering could cost 80 million each, by nature of the types of drugs they and markets they are aiming for.

It could also be that there's lots of low cost trials around $20 million, but slightly less than half of the trials that are done are very expensive, and 4-5 times the cost. This would be more obvious if there were values for bot mean and median, instead of just median.

The looser the data, the less you can actually infer. Any time someone tells me the median cost for something across an entire industry, my immediate reaction is to wonder what that means, not assume I actually know what it means, because it's far too little data to really know. How many trials are done in a year on average? How many a year do companies average based on revenue? Or simple, what's the actual amount spent on trials compared to revenue, and over how many years are those trials run? Is yearly cost of a trial really a good indicator, if trials take 5-10 years to run, so a failed one results in not just loss of money spent but opportunity cost over many years?

Note: If you provided a reference for that median number I would have actually looked it up to see if it made sense to me, or if I had additional questions about how they went about their measurements. Instead, all I have a questions about what the numbers mean because I have no context.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to believe that all patents are at best ineffective, and at worse harmful in a globalized world, because it's not like airpods clones off aliexpress are actually being stopped at the port all too often.

Besides, airpods clones off aliexpress are supposed to be stopped by trademark law to begin with…

They're typically not in breach of trademark, but airpods are protected with a bunch of "design patents" as well.

https://www.patentlyapple.com/2020/08/apple-has-been-granted...

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#160
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is an industry-wide median cost "disjoint?" What number would better represent typical clinical trials costs?

Is it the median cost for a trial or for all trials that a company does? A company might have many trials going on at once, of greater or lesser costs, but revenue is an aggregation of everything over a year. A company with $100 million in revenue and 10 trials ongoing and a company with a $1 billion in revenue and 10 trials ongoing would possibly lead one to specific conclusions, but even when it's broken down that…

Here is a link to the JHU announcement: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2018/cost-of-clinical-trials-fo...

You will like some of the numbers on that site even less than the $19 million median cost for a trial.

The study was published in JAMA, link on the JHU page. I hope this does not sound like an appeal to authority, but good luck discrediting the numbers.

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