The Law of Unintended Consequences: Patents

An anonymous reader writes "Fortune has an interesting article about the relationship between patent law and innovation. It compares the biotech industry with the computer industry and discusses the effects of the Bayh-Dole amdendment, which has allowed universities to make a lot of cash. But in the process innovation and scientific collaboration seem to have been stifled."

Comments

Re:The fundamental problem with Bayh-Dole ...

[biodork]

Problem : I work as a "suit" in a Biotech. I have a Ph.D. not an MBA.

Yes - scientists (myself included) would do it for the love.

Problem - in general a proect I work on or am involved with will burn $1 million before we have a good handle on whether it will work or not.

For a million, you better have the commercial side locked up before you risk it.

Re:The fundamental problem with Bayh-Dole ...

[laughingcoyote]

Your post makes it sound like that's a requirement, and it is indeed in the Constitution. However, its enumeration is in the "Congress may" section, not "Congress must".

In context, it reads:

The Congress shall have power...To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries

It's not recognized as a fundamental right, like property, free speech, and freedom of religion-only as a power granted to Congress to exercise, and only GIVEN THAT the exercise of that power does indeed promote the progress of science and useful art. That point can (and will) be debated here, but I felt compelled to point out that the ability to exclusive control of an idea is not considered a right-it is enumerated as a fully revocable privilege which Congress -may- grant.

Re:Patent Reform Act of 2005 to hurt innovation mo

[Halo1]

hy? Because it sets limits on damages for willful and even fraudulent patent infringement so that large corporations will find patents easy to ignore.

They already do so today. The problem with the willful damages is that they kick in as soon as you read a patent, which means there's a huge disincentive to read any patents, reducing their potential value as knowledge source even further (yes, "even further", it's not like e.g. software patents are written to be understood by developers or scientists).

In other words, if you are a big corporations, you might be able to knowingly ignore patents while startups and inventors don't have the same benefit.

Large companies have always been able to do whatever they want thanks to their huge portfolios, see e.g. IBM vs Sun in the eighties.

There are some good improvements in the Patent Reform Act of 2005 but this fundamental flaw is going to hurt innovation by making the patent system benefit a small percentage of companies at everyone else's expense.

I doubt it. Afaik we don't have this willful infringement equals treble damages clause in Europe either, and the patent problem here is less bad than in the US for now. Less chance at a huge payoff may in fact reduce the number of court cases and thus benefit innovation, because more is invested in R&D and useful things, instead of in lawyers.