Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat • Hacker News Board

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#191

Post by TimPC » Tue, Jun 06, 2023, 1:25 PM UTC

loup-vaillant wrote: post #131

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure radicalising this debate helps anyone. We are trying for a narrow victory of preserving IPR. Turning that into a broader argument about software patents plays into the opposition’s hands.

> I’m not sure radicalising this debate helps anyone. Oh but it does. That’s in part how we ended slavery and gave women full human rights and citizenship. If anything radical ideas shift the Overton window into making progress actually happen. The second point is that the only correct position here is the radical one: as far as I can tell, the truth here is that (i) patents do far more harm than good, and (ii) they…

Abolishing patents is likely to substantially hinder innovation. Maybe if it is accompanied by reasonable changes to other processes. But without patent protection there is a zero reason to spend $2 billion to $3 billion to get a drug through FDA trials when a competitor can make a generic afterwards for roughly $5 million and undercut you dramatically in the market as a result. People complain about patents endlessly without offering a realistic solve for this problem and think that innovation in fields where innovation is expensive won't be hampered at all despite this clearly not being the case.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#192

Post by Spivak » Tue, Jun 06, 2023, 1:39 PM UTC

feoren wrote: post #125

patrec wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US4405829A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7478074B2/en

-- Method for node ranking in a linked database (PageRank) An application of Bayes' Theorem (1763) and heavily related to Markov chains (1906). Build a Markov chain of simulated users clicking around the internet and build its weights with Bayes' Theorem and you basically have PageRank. It's clever, but no more clever than what thousands of software engineers invent every day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_t…

> An application of Bayes' Theorem...

> but largely based on Diffie-Hellman key exchange published

Novel applications are patentable.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#193

Post by CogitoCogito » Tue, Jun 06, 2023, 1:52 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #175

thfuran wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term (in the US) wasn't originally that long. It was decided individually but not to exceed 14 years. That's long, but much more reasonable in a time when it could take months for just some basic roundtrip long-distance correspondence.

I don't think you can just state that in good faith while ignoring how much harder/more expensive R&D is these days.

How much harder/more expensive is R&D these days?

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#194

Post by account42 » Tue, Jun 06, 2023, 2:54 PM UTC

TimPC wrote: post #189

pclmulqdq wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But here's the value proposition: It's just not wrong to challenge a government subsidy or monopoly. Period. Especially on computer software and hardware, because they're often wrongly granted. I see where you're coming from, but I would suggest that this is pretty much an extremist point of view on intellectual property protections. It's easy to say that the online shopping cart is a dumb patent (because it is, an…

They aren't making a noticeable change to the system at all. This method challenges roughly 350 patents a year while roughly 300,000 patents are granted per year. That's in the area of 0.1% of all patents. I think these numbers are very consistent with the predominant use case being the challenging of bad patents and there are very few examples of people trying to overturn good patents.

The percentage of total patents is irrelevant as not all patents are actively abused by patent trolls.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#195

Post by AlbertCory » Tue, Jun 06, 2023, 3:31 PM UTC

yebyen wrote: post #186

AlbertCory wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there any evidence that drug patents can actually enter the public domain productively at their end of their expiration period? Practically all generic drugs are available because the original drug is off-patent. You picked one (insulin) and ignored all the others: https://www.healthgrades.com/right-care/patient-advocate/dru...

I picked the one that was donated on purpose by its creators though, and it's still making profits for the drug companies 100 years later. So why do we need patents, then? From the page you linked: > While these drugs are nearing the end of their patent term, the release of generics may be delayed due to litigation, acquisitions, or other exclusivities. As a result, some expected generics from previous years may stil…

First of all, you made a general statement and I demonstrated its falsity. Now you're changing the subject to, "Oh, but not all patented drugs become generics."

I never said they did. However, there are giant companies that do almost nothing but generics, like Teva, so obviously lots of generics exist:

https://www.tevapharm.com/our-company/teva-facts-figures/

As for "what doctor will prescribe "worse-pirin" when there's a better aspirin on the market now? What insurance company will cover it?"

nearly all insurance companies require a generic to be used unless there's a very strong reason to use the branded product. In your example, if the new drug genuinely is better, then the patients deserve to have it. If it's a trivial improvement then it won't get approved.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#196

Post by jjk166 » Tue, Jun 06, 2023, 3:44 PM UTC

thfuran wrote: post #137

jjk166 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What course of action doesn't come with a cost? Fixing things well is expensive but fixing things poorly is generally more expensive in the long run.

But the point is that what fixing something well means depends on the context. Total software re-writes are rarely a good idea for large production systems, and software isn't special in that regard.

Yeah, but we don't care about preserving the existing large production system, we explicitly want to switch to a different, more appropriate system.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#197

Post by omginternets » Tue, Jun 06, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #179

omginternets wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARC cache is only obvious after it’s been shown to you. Whether or not software patents are a good thing is an entirely separate question (one on which I suspect we agree, in fact) but software patents can and do contain actual non-obvious inventions.

ARC is not completely obvious, sure, true, but it's a very very very hard stretch to call it worthy of 20 years of monopoly. It simply seems like a multi-tier cache (which it is, after all, it's 4 LRU duct taped together in a useful way). And, maybe there's nothing wrong with the 20 years, the problem is how hard much it costs to license it, how much the whole discovery process costs to the whole industry.

Again, we're in agreement that software patents have many flaws, but the statement "only obvious things are patented" is plainly false.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#198

Post by yebyen » Tue, Jun 06, 2023, 4:27 PM UTC

AlbertCory wrote: post #195

yebyen wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I picked the one that was donated on purpose by its creators though, and it's still making profits for the drug companies 100 years later. So why do we need patents, then? From the page you linked: > While these drugs are nearing the end of their patent term, the release of generics may be delayed due to litigation, acquisitions, or other exclusivities. As a result, some expected generics from previous years may stil…

First of all, you made a general statement and I demonstrated its falsity. Now you're changing the subject to, "Oh, but not all patented drugs become generics." I never said they did. However, there are giant companies that do almost nothing but generics, like Teva, so obviously lots of generics exist: https://www.tevapharm.com/our-company/teva-facts-figures/ As for "what doctor will prescribe "worse-pirin" when ther…

> First of all, you made a general statement and I demonstrated its falsity

This is an extremely disingenuous reading of our conversation. I made a specific statement about a particular instance (which you dismissed as cherry-picking), and I asked a question at the same time. Which you reduced overall to a "general statement" while dismissing the specific example that was really important to the context of what point I was trying to make:

> James Collip and Charles Best [donated] the insulin patent "so that everyone could have it" and we still don't have universal low-cost insulin over 100 years later, and prices continue to skyrocket

> Is there any evidence that drug patents can actually enter the public domain productively at their end of their expiration period?

There's an impedance mismatch between "nearly all insurance companies require a generic to be used" and "drug patents should be clearly in the public interest" when "drugs have to be profitable or they are not made by companies anymore."

Why not engage a bit more directly with the original example, if you're going to accuse me of generalizing now? Let's talk about insulin, I'm sure I picked it for a reason.

Is there a generic insulin that is chemically identical to a name brand insulin with the same efficacy? No, there apparently is not [1] – I won't claim to be fully informed on these issues, but it seems pretty clear from reading that the issue cannot simply be reduced to "lots of generics exist, so you are mistaken."

Why can't we have low cost insulin from an entity that operates like the post office, that exists as a public benefit corporation without any profit motive?

Does it really make sense that people who have insurance that is not "top tier" will not have access to the better (still patented) drugs, if they are really better? Are they better, or are they really just "evergreening" patents? If insurance typically only covers generics, then it's really problematic that there is no generic form of this lifesaving drug, and the monopoly persists more than 80 years after the patent should have expired on the original invention!

The deal was supposed to be 20 years. What went wrong, does it "go wrong" a lot, and does it "go wrong" more or less frequently when human lives are at stake? These aren't unfair questions, and if Teva (or any company other than Eli Lilly) made a generic form of Humalog insulin then I probably would not ask them at all. But only Eli Lilly does, only Eli Lilly can.

The same company apparently makes the so-called "generic" insulin that also makes the top-tier patented "Humalog" so maybe there are too many regulatory hurdles or something else is wrong. (I thought that the generics were supposed to represent the competition, that comes to save the day after patents expire...)

If we're central planning, wouldn't we want to promote a resource arrangement such that the best drugs with the most promise and the greatest life-saving properties will go to the most people? Is it really so off-base to conjecture that a resource arrangement that actively does something else is "really evil?"

[1]: https://www.healthline.com/diabetesmine/why-is-there-no-gene...

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#199

Post by feoren » Tue, Jun 06, 2023, 4:43 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #192

feoren wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-- Method for node ranking in a linked database (PageRank) An application of Bayes' Theorem (1763) and heavily related to Markov chains (1906). Build a Markov chain of simulated users clicking around the internet and build its weights with Bayes' Theorem and you basically have PageRank. It's clever, but no more clever than what thousands of software engineers invent every day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_t…

> An application of Bayes' Theorem... > but largely based on Diffie-Hellman key exchange published Novel applications are patentable.

> Novel applications are patentable.

If they're non-obvious. Remember, the challenge was: show me the strongest, most defensible examples of software patents you can. GP did a great job coming up with 3 very strong examples of patents (taking his word that the SVM patent he meant to show is much stronger). And yet even in those top examples, there are (IMO) reasonable arguments that they still do not deserve protection. I'm not convinced either way, but there are arguments.

My point is that "novel applications" are most of what software engineers do, every day. I contend that there are 10,000+ ideas equally as novel as PageRank invented every day. Senior software engineers probably come up with one every few weeks. This strongly challenges the idea that these are "non-obvious".

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#200

Post by jsdeveloper » Tue, Jun 06, 2023, 4:44 PM UTC

throwaway485 wrote: post #166

jsdeveloper wrote: post #43

patent are necessary, but they must be only granted for 5 years of time span. 5 years of leverage to patent holder is more than enough for them to cover up there research cost

I don't think you should be downvoted for suggesting this. I have wondered if it makes sense to adjust the amount of 'research hours' to how long it would take a competitor to produce the same result, and protect a patent for that length of time. To me 5 year seems arbitrary, and the rate at which people are innovating seems to get faster and faster. 5 years used to sound reasonable, but may be exceedingly unfair at…

non-patent holder can use those 5 year to improve the product in parallel (in shadow, without commercialization), so once those 5 year completes they can compete with the patent holders evolved product after 5 year. it do not stops innovation, neither prolong human progression for too long.