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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."
Grease keeps systems working smoothly. Lawyers, money speculators, used car salesman, and a zillion other occupations are society's grease. In a frozen static society, you could get rid of them once you had polished the system to the nth degree. But in a dynamic society, these greasers keep the various diverse parts all working together relatively smoothly.
But too much grease in a gearbox bogs it down. That's what has happened with intellectual property in general. Those idiots in Washington listened to their corporate sponsors and believed what they said about the more the merrier.
At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, business and politicians will notice what the true innovators and researchers have long since learned the hard way, and cut back on the flow of grease. In the meantime, the rest of us are stuck with completely counterpdocutive IP legal wrangling getting in our way. It may take a long time to notice the drop in innovation and productivity, but I sure hope not.
Infuriate left and right
Hear hear! Grandparent post has clearly not read the article, the basic logic of which is as follows:
(1) Inventions are now patented which would not have been patented previously because researchers could not *automatically* get patents for federally-funded research. There was a complex process that wasn't invoked for relatively trivial or cumulative research.
(2) The change in law led to a cash grab, and a research culture in which universities encouraged staff to patent any new developments, even those growing out of collaborative research. This led to commercial barriers being formed (licensing) which inhibited research and industrial application.
(3) As a result of #2, the amount of research flowing back into the academic commons is being sharply reduced. This is also inhibiting research.
(4) As a result of #2 and #3, there is a visible and statistically significant reduction in the amount of innovation in the drug industry since 1980, measured in terms of the amount of significant new drugs being made available to the public, and those which are significant enough to merit fast-tracked approval.
So parent post is correct. You *do* pay twice, because you are paying licenses to use technology which was never previously patented because it grew out of the public domain and so there were greater barriers to patenting it because a bureaucratic approval process was required.
The argument is that the law made it possible to commercialize things which were not commonly commercialized before.