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Patents Don't Pay
tarball_tinkerbell sends us to the NY Times for word on a book due out next year that claims that beginning in the late 1990s, on average patents cost companies more than they earned them. A big exception was pharmaceuticals, which accounted for 2/3 of the revenues attributable to patents. The authors of the book Do Patents Work? (synopsis and sample chapters), James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer of the Boston University School of Law, have crunched the numbers and say that, especially in the IT industry, patents no longer make economic sense. Their views are less radical than those of a pair of Washington University at St. Louis economists who argue that the patent system should be abolished outright.
It doesn't surprise me that patents tend to be expensive & useless. The only place they are of any real use is in court. Any business model that has "time in court" from the get-go is probably not such a great model.
The purpose of patents were to improve inovation and make the results available to society. Before patents were introduced, people would try to protect their inventions by keeping the details as secret as possible. Patents are supposed to get them to reveal the details by getting a timelimited monopoly in return. Then others can keep inovating by building on top and eventually the inventions will become free for everybody to use. And anybody who sticked with the old habbit of keeping the details secret rather than patenting it would run the risk of somebody else being granted a patent on the intention.
That is how it was supposed to work in the theory.
In reality we see abuse such as companies patenting things they didn't really invent, companies patenting trivialities, and patents that don't include all the details which were the purpose of patents in the first place. If software patents weren't bad enough in itself, it is made even worse by them not containing the full source of a working implementation. If patent applications were really being treated within the original spirit of patents, any software patent application not comming with the full source would be rejected. And of course once the patent is granted, the source is published available for anybody to use as long as they have a licensee for the patent. Once the patent expires, the source can be used essentially the same way you can use BSD licensed source.
Somebody seems to have forgotten why patents were introduced. And some companies seems to want to not only keep, but also extent patents (and copyright as well) because they want to make money from it. If making money is the only reason for keeping those kinds of protections in place, they should be abandoned. But for gods sake, don't make the big mistake of abandoning them only for economical reasons. Rather think the system over again and adjust it to serve its original purpose, even if that means companies will make less money on average.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Patents weren't supposed to be about ideas. They were supposed to be about implementations, specific ways of making ideas work in the real world. The Founders were pretty clear about that. The problems came in (as so many do) when we stopped listening to them.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I have always wondered where people get this idea that drug companies dont do research, they just take something from universities, slap a patent on it and sell it. Yes, some of this stuff is based on things that had some basic work done in universities, but guess who funds that research! Yup, evil old big pharma! These university departments get huge sums of money from those nasty drug companies.
Pfizer spent 8 billion dollars on research and development last year.
Merck spent 5 billion.
Novartis spent 5 billion.
And so on, all the big pharma companies have R&D budgets of that size.
So my question then, is if you honestly believe that this R&D isnt producing anything meaningful, where on earth is this money going? You think they are just flushing money down a rathole since according to you they have never actually produced anything meaningful? Really, I want to know, do you seriously believe that all these billions in R&D are just wasted? Do you think that for the past century they have continued blowing all this money, never seen any results from it, and noone ever stopped to say "oh hey where are all those billions going?"
Drug companies may try to game the system some with patents, but its not like they are just sitting there not producing anything of value. There may be some validity to the complaints people have about big pharma, but you lose credibility when you claim that they dont produce anything of value.