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Another Call For Abolishing Patents, This One From the St. Louis Fed
New submitter WOOFYGOOFY writes "The most recent call for curtailing patents comes not just from an unexpected source, the St. Louis Fed, but also in its most basic form: total abolition of all patents. Via the Atlantic Monthly: a new working paper (PDF) from two members of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, Michele Boldrin and David Levine, in which they argue that while a weak patent system may mildly increase innovation with limited side-effects, such a system can never be contained and will inevitably lead to a stifling patent system such as that presently found in the U.S. They argue: '...strong patent systems retard innovation with many negative side-effects. ... the political demand for stronger patent protection comes from old and stagnant industries and firms, not from new and innovative ones. Hence the best solution is to abolish patents entirely through strong constitutional measures and to find other legislative instruments, less open to lobbying and rent-seeking.' They acknowledge that some industries could suffer under a such a system. They single out pharma, and suggest other legislative measures be found to foster innovation whenever there is clear evidence that laissez-faire under-supplies it."
...why not change the duration, or require active production to defend a patent?
For some industries, 17 years is a very long time. If the duration were lowered for software to something like five years that'd make more sense to me.
For physical device patents, patent holders who fail to produce goods (and I don't mean to license the patent to another manufacturer without self-producing) a lack of production should spell the end. If they won't produce it then someone else could have the right to do so.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
you're going to call out pharma as an example where the patent process provides a positive influence?
may as well defend the patenting of gene sequences. or business models.
the whole thing is corrupt
What a shame, in your rush to get the first post, you mistook patents for copyright. Sadly, this is not the case. The industries that (ab)use patents are much, much bigger than a few pathetic media companies that don't even total up to a trillion dollars a year in profit. Removing patents would really anger manufacturing, engineering firms, software companies, and especially pharmaceutical companies. Do they influence the government more than the banks? I can't say, but they have the advantage, as they only have to convince congress to continue not changing a thing.
the constitution may be a pretty substantial roadblock, just sayin'.
That's where the power is granted, and Congress isn't likely to give it up any other way.
It takes years of testing to get a drug approved by the FDA, and that costs big big money to do. You get the drug approved by the FDA and then a chemist comes and makes the exact same thing, and your years of investment into research and development and clinical trials of that drug are going to not be paid off. Somebody would essentially walk the path that you made and they would reap the same benefits just simply by copying what you have done.
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
Why just patents? Copyright must go too.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Apple! Google! Did you hear that? You old and stuffy!! Clearly the movers and shakers have ceased with the moving and shaking.
However i do agree with the overall theme. Down with the patents!
Patents are supposed to be a (time-limited) barrier to competition. They're supposed to be the way the inventor gets payed for his invention. Without patents there's little incentive to develop inventions into technologies --- technologies that would be quickly copied. People who don't understand this probably would really suck as businessmen.
The present patent system is a travesty, a farce, an outrage --- not much more than a license for lawyers to steal. But the answer to a broken patent system is a fixed patent system, not no patent system.
p. 3: "The history of the various smart-phones is documented, for example, in Wikipedia."
...to get people on board for Audit the Fed. This could cause billions of lobbying dollars to head to congress to promote auditing and ending the Fed.
This is not actually new, by the way -- Levine and Boldrin have been making this argument for years. I had Levine for a seminar on this matter four years ago when I was at Washington University, and it seemed like this was already a well-grooved line of rhetoric for him. Heck, they've even got a book that's been out since 2005. Here are some of the places where they're making this argument:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm
http://www.againstmonopoly.org/
Wow, someone should patent that idea!
From the QE3 Cunar.....Canard dept? It sure sounds good, and they've manged to print something other than currency - a PDF file! Not quite sure whether to remain skeptical, be pleasantly surprised, pinch or patent myself. Wonder what The Chairman's got to say about this? Ben, will you lend us some advice? ...Ben?
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
False, the IP problem predates the Apple v Samsung case. The case just brought far more attention to the now exploding problem with the patent system...it won't be abolished though, there is too much money tied up on both ends. The government makes revenue, employs people...and Congressmen and DoJ are lobbied by big corporations that want the protections and the patent lawyers should make their millions filing. If you think the system doesn't need MASSIVE reform then you're delusional. I do think there are instances where patents make sense (such as drugs, as someone mentioned) You have high R&D costs, and without an incentive that you'll eventually make that money in the future...you don't use R&D as much (stifling innovation.) Still the patents are probably too long, because now Pharma companies are becoming complacent in their cash cows and innovating less. However, for design patents...that requires minimal R&D cost, relative to a 5-10 year drug process that also has to meet FDA standards etc. It's just a giant clusterfuck as is.
and payment is a small percentage of price based on usage metering by something like the Patent Office. Except it wouldn't be the Patent Office. It'd be the Usage Office or something. The money for the payments would come from a surcharge on things invented within the last however-many years. And payments would be made for, say, half that many years. After that, the thing would enter the public domain.
People would still get paid for being brilliant inventors, but they couldn't rest on a useless monopoly.
And the other essential rule is that only the actual inventor(s) could get payment. None of this BS of selling intellectual "property."
If this were really a war, the Fed would win. They own the government and the economy. Literally - they can show you the paper.
But I imagine this is just an academic exercise by a couple guys, and the Fed as a whole doesn't really give a damn.
I'm probably one of the biggest supporters of abolition of the IP regime, but...
Are you violating the Bill of Rights by seizing private (intellectual) property? Would we be required to either let existing patents expire, or to pay off the owners?
Could we use the example of ex-post-facto copyright extensions to ex-post-facto cut terms?
Could we declare all copyrights invalid due to the ex-post-facto extensions, and then reinstate them for a limited time?
I believe that copyrights on software should expire faster than patents on devices that do not follow Moore's Law. I believe copyrights on software should last 10 years.
Even the Bible says that a worker is worthy of his wages. If someone works hard to invent a new technology, he or she must be fairly compensated but the compensation must not restrict the liberty of others. Above all, the system must not be a carte blanche for a few to bully all others out of the market. We need something like this:
1. A special independent fund must be set aside to compensate inventors for their inventions.
2. A retroactive formula must be adopted to calculate the amount of the compensation.
3. The formula must be adjustable so as to reach the best return to society at large in terms of innovations.
4. Last but not least, whatever the formula chosen, it must never infringe on the right of the individual to copy and use any invention for whatever purpose.
Inventors should publish their findings as soon as they can because their compensation will depend on how much society like their ideas. Of course, we still need a Patent bureau and a system to manage claims and the proper registrations of inventions. The system should be as automated as possible.
PS. The system could work for copyrights as well. Create a work of art, register it, publish it for everybody to download and copy and wait for the money to start flowing in.
Not actually sure Google and Apple wouldn't be happier in a patent free world. Apple learned in the 1990s, after MS copied their OS, that you have to focus on innovation and make copy cats out of date and this works better than litigation. At the same time, they still do litigate because, why not?
There goes my 2 finger slide to unlock patent. Damn you to hell America!
No patents, no inventors.
Probably inadvisable.
The problem is not patents per se. The problem--as the submission correctly points out--is the frivolous and unscrupulous nature of the patent system these days. The same is true of the copyright system.
Patents and copyrights exist only for the purpose of furthering the common good. Abolishing them so everything is 'free' for everyone does not necessarily further the common good if it discourages innovation or allows large corporations to steal blindly from smaller inventors. Using the patent system like a Banker uses Other People's Money for greedy profiteering doesn't do much for the common good either.
IMO the right solution is for the government to do what it is supposed to do: level the playing field, but not pick the winners. For example, modify the patent system so that the loser pays in any patent case. If you file in court with a weak patent and lose, you pay the defendant's legal fees. Require patent winners to license patents on fair and equitable terms--no more blanket injunctions against a competitor's products. Prohibit the operation of patent-troll firms whose only business is acquiring and filing patent suits. Limit software patents to 5 years max, or abolish them altogether. Limit copyright to life of author and/or 50 years for a business entity.
There's probably a number of other changes that could be made as well that would discourage the dead wood from damming up innovation while still allowing true innovators--and society--to profit from good ideas. It just requires politicians to govern, not pander. That, unfortunately, I don't see happening anytime soon.
If patents were abolished, the only thing left to protect inventions is copyright.
Patents are not intended to promote invention, they are intended to promote publication of documentation on those inventions.
Without patents, such publication would likely cease for the most part and the implementations of these inventions would be protected by copyright, which may arguably be worse.
Without patents and the documentation they produce, building upon the work of others (which is what invention is) would become more difficult and may actually stiffle invention more than a reduced patent system, however difficult that may be to uphold.
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I'm not sure it would anger software companies, or certainly very few. Most seem to be *very* much against them, as it costs a large amount to retain the legal staff required in the system as it stands. It would anger patent troll companies.
Everyone take a deep breath and remember that the Federal Reserve is not a government entity nor is it owned by the US Government. It is a privately held entity. Ownership is not publicly documented but believed to include a laundry list of the usual suspects such as Warburg, Rothschild, Rockefeller, ad naseum. It's no surprise that this entity would endorse abolishing patents. After all, maybe Ford really did develop intermittent windshield wipers all by themselves after looking at Robert Kerns device.
Posting as AC because it's hard to get black helicopters off my lawn.
Friday I visited my U.S. Senator's office and requested that action be taken to fix our broken patent system. While many reforms are needed, I believe one quick fix could be implemented with minimal affect to the current system in practice but likely dramatic affect in actuality.
Free Patent Filings when entered into Public Domain
Essentially, most ideas are often conceived of by individuals before major corporations file. Seriously, does ANYONE believe Apple invented the idea of changing settings such as volume and tones played. Apple probably received several hundred feedback requests begging for those features. Long before Apple ever implemented the idea.
This would allow a filing, probably on par with a preliminary patent filing, which would establish a pre-existing prior art. And protect the inventor and all others from future lawsuits. Yes, the patent filer is giving up his or her rights to profit from the idea. But many times, an inventor begins work, and it goes slowly when you don't have billions of $$$ behind you. Only to see a mega corp get wind of the idea and beat the inventor to the punch and sue them for their own idea.
I believe many Americans would submit numerous ideas, essentially eliminating most of these frivolous patent suits.
Very very few new inventions are the result of anyone looking up existing patents and then extending them. Many many patents are if this sort however (find a patent and add "on the Internet" or "via mobile device").
There are a lot of smart people out there. They don't need documentation of ideas to be inspired and come up with a new iteration.
Patents offer little of value outside of a historical record (which is interesting to a few academics and random editorialists looking for a background reference).
Patents don't even really document a specific application anymore as the lawyers who write them make every effort to obfuscate the true use in many cases, while covering all of the areas of interest with examples that are typically useless.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Except that inventions can't be covered by copyright.. Boldrin and Levine also oppose copyright as well, anyway.
Also, patents as they exist now are virtually useless as documentation (often not even making sense to the listed inventor), and people don't seek patents on things that they can easily protect via trade secrets, so no real knowledge is gained via disclosure.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Central banking would be gone too.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I think you're undervaluing the power of part-time collective action. Take for example, Wikipedia.
To produce a conventional encyclopedia you need to hire a large editorial staff and pay numerous experts a decent amount to write the articles. But with thousands of people contributing and mutually editing each other in a more or less freely editiable online encyclopeida, you lose the need for a large staff and numerous contributors. With advances in computer automation, you could theoretically reduce your staff to a small team of programmers.
This method can be translated to the invention and manufacture of tangible things. How? By allowing for incremental improvements to existing designs and products whose blueprints have been made freely available or "open-sourced", what we might call "open" hardware.
The value of patents as an incentive for innovation decreases and even disappears altogether once you already have a substantial body of technology that thousands or even millions of people can improve incrementally. In time these thousands of incremental improvements translate into a giant leap in technology. In the presence of patents, incremental improvements can only be done by paying a "creative" tax to the patent holder, a barrier that reduces the number of makers.
Patents should be reserved for fields where we don't have enough technology to build upon, such as fusion reactors, space elevators, or practical immortality. I don't mind the inventors of technologies in these fields becoming richer than Larry Ellison. But please abolish patents for round corners and multiple fingers.
Implementations of inventions and documentation of patents CAN be covered by copyright though.
If the problem with patents is that they are virtually useless as documentation, then one change to patent law should be to force minimum quality standards for documentation. (i.e. implementable by any practitioner in the field).
There are other problems with current patents (i.e. duration, scope, review proces) that could be fixed by changing the patent system.
Abolishing patents entirely is throwing away any possible benefits of a patent system to society.
Understand that if you are talking about abolishing the patent system, you're not just talking about abolishing software patents, but all patents in all fields.
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Yes, implementations of inventions can be covered by copyright, but copyright allows for independent invention.
It is 'a' problem, not 'the' problem. Even within that particular issue, you seem to be focusing on one particular element of why they are useless as documentation. Yes, being in patentese is troubling, but more relevant is that patents are most often sought on things which are trivially easy to reverse engineer (if they aren't, a trade secret is generally a better choice). Documenting things which are evident upon usage provides no benefit. We learn things we would already know, even if the patents are written properly.
True, although patents have not demonstrated any possible benefits, and it is doubtful that the system can produce any net benefits.
That's fine. While in most fields, patents aren't as clearly problematic as in software, they are a neutral force at best.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Then arguably it's referenced again in 1 Timothy 5:18. As for slavery... well, it doesn't say the slave deserves his wages...
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
WTE is the St Louis Fed ?
I thought all Fed(eral institutions) were based in DC
If patents were abolished, the only thing left to protect inventions is copyright.
No, the only thing left to protect inventions is innovation. You know. The way it was supposed to be.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Getting patents on stupid shit is already illegal.
Obvious, non novel, and such are ALREADY criteria on which to reject a patent. Yet they are not being rejected because the USPTO is under severe pressure to rubber stamp everything while they drown in a sea of applications filed by an army of corporate lawyers.
Meanwhile, the courts are willfully blind to this and pretend that the USPTO is doing its job.
Worse yet, you cannot get a reexam without putting your own legal position in jeopardy, since the USC says that you are not allowed to use prior art as a defense in a patent infringement suit if you could have used it during a reexam but neglected to do so. So once you fuck up at the USPTO, you're screwed in federal court even if the prior art is blatantly obvious.
The USPTO needs to grow a spine and do its fucking job. Bullshit patents need to stop being issued in the first place.
If you want to stop a nuclear war, stop giving nukes out.
I used to work on patents for Canon at the time patents on software were beginning to be recognized in the US in the 90's. At the time Canon's patent filings were something 2nd or 3rd in the world after IBM, and split roughly 70% defensive patents, 30% patents suggested by inventors. I believe that figure was pretty representative for large patent portfolio companies at the time. So, there are both people with clever ideas, and land-grab speculators. I would class my patents as inventor patents, but many of them would ot have happened if I did not work for a company that was hungry for new patents.
Software patents were largely a US invention. The US represents a large slice of the technological market covered by a single patent written in English, so patent coverage in the US is particularly valuable. If you are outside the US, then you patent in your own county first (in my case, the UK), and then apply for the corresponding US patent. If US patent practice recognized software patents, and European practice does not, the a European could not patent software, and so could not patent software in the US. So, as the US started recognizing software patents - and this was not a sudden thing: it started with patenting a device controlled by an appropriately programmed computer, then the computer with the program stored on some hard drive, then the option of the program on some moveable drive - then the rest of the world followed. This was a massive land-grab, because many ideas that had been use since the earliest cays of computers had no well-documented prior art, and people tried patenting the file, the memory pointer, the set, and so on. By contrast, business practice patents - patenting selling cornflakes in a canteen but allowing people to help themselves to milk, for example, is a US phenomenon which hasn't really spread beyond the US.
Suppose the US patent bodies and WIPO together ruled that any complete computing machine, given sufficient time and memory, is capable of calculating anything that is calculable according to the Church-Turing thesis, and so constitutes prior art for any software patent. This would require no new drafting of laws, and could happen overnight.
Who would this hurt? In general, software innovation is buried in compiled code. A patent is an open announcement of what you are doing, allowing your rivals to do the same. Unless your patent is something to do with user-machine interactions, proving infringement can be very hard. This makes enforcing software patents something that is almost impossible for the individual, but favours very large companies with large patent portfolios and a large legal department. The private individual or small company is better defended by copyright law if a chunk of their code is ripped off directly, or unsubtly reverse-engineered. A good reverse engineering gob can be more effort than writing the job from scratch.
Who would it not hurt? You could still patent hardware that has been optimized for a particular purpose, such as graphics board design details. This means that physical devices which have long lead times and investment are still covered, but the program, which can be modified at will, is not.
I think the call to abandon all patents, is almost like calling to destroy all banks. There is a lot going on that we do not like, but the torches and pitchforks gang will end up destroying something that we needed along with the part we were glad to loose. However, software patents are a part of patent use that we could chop off cleanly. If innovation flourishes, then we could look at what else we could prune.
Technology, particular in software, pharma, semiconductors, autmobilles, has been stagnent the last several decades.
The software on my computer today is hardly any better than the software I had 30 years ago.
Thankfully, because the processor is my computer today is hardly any better than the pocessor I had 30 years ago, so it couldn't handle more software.
The care I drive today is almost identical to the one I had 30 years ago.
My phone today is marginally different than the one I had 30 years ago.
All of these products are covered by hundreds if not thousands of patents. .... f'ing ignorant tools ....
I first read this as: "Another Call for Abolishing Parents"
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
The right to a patent monopoly is not a fundamental human right.
The US Constitution is written with a specific sense regarding rights. It grants no rights because it takes the point of view that you have human rights, with, or without any government's say so. Instead, the Constitution grants powers to the government.
The right to a patent monopoly is not one of the rights the Constitution assumes you have. That's because, in the eyes of the authors of that document, it's not really a basic human right. Instead, the government is explicitly empowered to grant patent and copyright monopolies. And that power is conditional: "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."
If it isn't functioning as intended, is it still legitimate?
I wrote parts of this stuff
Their money can only buy what people are willing to sell them.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Pharma needs a reform too.
They only target drugs that are interesting from a commercial point of view.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I worked over a man year - on my own - trying to get USPTO Application 11/307259 patented. I had to abandon it because a Taiwan group came out with it first. Still, there is no way I would have even attempted it if I did not think I could get it patented. I am in my third round of back-and-forth with the USPTO with another software patent. This second one has taken me even longer, and has been even more expensive. It is far too difficult to do this sort of thing without hope of owning it when done. Those who rail against patents are NOT the innovators. Any innovators that might think otherwise are already rich.
There are two ways companies can take advantage of their inventiveness if patents were abolished. First is to ramp up company security and keep the inner workings of the patent a complete secret. This method is even available today, if a company were to elect to keep a patentable item secret instead of patenting it. This method will certainly work in the short run.
The second way to take advantage of their inventiveness is to be recognized as the most competent implementer of the patent. Say an inventor creates a "wave engine". It is a difficult engineering feat, and if the inventor works hard to stay ahead of the competition, then they will do well enough by being recognized as the world experts on the "wave engine". If they don't work hard enough, then competitors will take business away from them.
By keeping trade secrets and by becoming highly competent, all inventors will do well. They might not do quite as well as they would have if they had a "monopoly" on the idea for 17 years, but nevertheless, they would do well enough!
Society is the winner here. If there were no patents, then all competitors could jump on the idea, and innovation would be vastly accelerated, and costs would plummet. It would be harder for companies to make a dollar, but the industries as a whole would accelerate rapidly. There are numerous serious studies that support the abolition of patents. They examine cases where patents were granted and cases where patents weren't available. In all cases, in the long run, having a patent system slowed innovation, enriched some rent-seekers unjustly, and society always suffered. This is an idea whose time has come.
This is just another call from people with no imagination but a burning desire to try to profit from those who CAN innovate by copying other people's ideas and tweaking them for a market. The solution is to pay licensing fees instead of litigating, but the lawyers don't make as much from that strategy.
It would never work. Information would go underground.
The whole point about patents is to make proprietary
information public domain in exchange for the state
giving the inventor a monopoly on the sales of a product.
It was never meant to be corrupted by innovators,
politicians, copyright trolls, lobbyists, software patents, business
methods patents, patent trolls, patent troll
friendly patent offices, and patent troll friendly
courts undermining patents by setting up their own
interpretations of patent laws through setting
spurious precedents.
If I could make fist size diamonds at one tenth the
of the price of diamond powder, then its unlikely I would
tell anyone how to do it. The state can never
truly benefit from the invention if a patent didn't
get filed for it. The innovators, copyright trolls, patent trolls
and the politicians have truly forgotten the roots
of modern industrial civilization.
The problem with patents today is that
an army of innovators, patent trolls, politicians,
lobbyists, software patent holders, business methods
patent holders, copyright trolls and businesses
are lined up to kill patents and patent holders.
If you ask any of them why they want to storm the
gates of heaven and kill
patents and inventions, they don't know why.
If you break up the questions and ask if they want
to become inventors then out comes a more thoughtful
answer that not everybody can become an inventor.
Eventually after talking through the issues
it all comes down to money.
Inventors make or stand to make absolute tons of money.
And that winds up people no end.
To appease their senses, they let themselves be
corrupted by throwing every obstacle they can
in front of inventors and at the patent office.
In the thirties, there was a review of patents
and about what can be patented and the clock got
reset to more sensible normality.
That normality has been corrupted over the years
again and so its time to have another review and
reset the clock.
This time around, the patent office also needs
to issue guidance to patent holders and licensees
as to how they should behave.
To break up the money issues the patent
office needs another sister institution
created that gets more involved
at a monetary level making licensing official if patent holders
wanted it to go through them in exchange for handling
all the license fees, taking the tax cut for government
and deduct their management fees and then give the rest
to inventor. It prevents unreasonable use of patents
to block invention that leads to patent trolling.
Patents are big business compared to the time when they were
conceived and the state needs to be more involved.
Its more revenues for them, and fairer business environments
for the rest of us.
Reading through the entire comment stream here I catch a very simple misunderstanding about the patent system. Simply put, patents do not exist to protect the inventor. This is a misunderstanding, and is the result or erroneous extrapolation from copyright law.
Patents exist to encourage innovation. They accept that certain time-limited monopolies are allowable because they encourage investment in research and development that would not otherwise exist.
Or to put it another way: the law does not exist to benefit companies, it exists to benefit the consumer by ensuring maximum competition, with the proviso that in certain - exceptional - circumstances, there will be greater innovation if certain people may have a time-limited monopoly of production.
This is a mistake Steve Jobs and others make. (Innovators feel that the law should protect their innovations because that benefits them. But the law exists to benefit the greatest number of people, and that means patents should be granted rarely and narrowly.)
In the case of the iPhone, it is by no means clear that preventing Samsung from putting their icons in a grid, or producing a product with rounded corners is protecting R&D. Apple has become the largest (by market capitalisation) and most successful company in history *without* having previously relied on patent protection. Would consumers benefit from there being fewer makers of smartphones.
Let me drift back to the invention of the motor car: would it have benefited consumers if every innovation, such as the layout of brake, accerlerator, clutch, was patent-able?
--- My dad's political betting
They don't have "money", they have a magic wand.
The US government has granted them the power to conjure dollars from thin air, by issuing interest-bearing loans to whoever they want at any amount they want.
The fed has little need for mundane purchasing power. They have the absolute power to conjure and distribute any loan to whoever they see fit, with no obligation to report their activity to anybody.
It is in their interest to maintain public relations, disclosing much of their activity and staying engaged with officials, financiers, and the public.
But at it's core, it's independent in every way. If you'd like to see what they've done, ask your congress people. You'll find that they don't know. So encourage them to Audit the Fed.
If the FDA would allow the research from Ethnobotanists who made the world of Big Pharma possible by their research and categorization of hundreds of thousands of medicinal plants to be used as open products equivalent to the prescription drug derivatives that are patented by duplicating the active agents in these plants [minus the organic compounds within these plants that keep side-effects from happening] and recognize them as equivalents you'd see Big Pharma's strangle hold over Health Care crumble.
I'm not talking about the many medicinals like Echinacea or Ginseng, or St. John's Wart. I'm talking about the opiate based equivalents that would produce less addiction and better pain medicinal results for many forms of internal medicine and post surgical pain management. Not a single product produced by a Pharmaceutical Corporation with exceptions like LSD exist without first duplicating the effects provided by Mother Nature. South America's Rain Forrests have provided the globe with all its innovations, not to downplay the rest of the continents and all their ethnobotanical discoveries.
The history of our own US raping South America for large corporations from rubber, oil and pharmaceuticals continues today. Instead of creating joint import/export crops relations the US listens too much to it's Big Pharma lobby and we all suffer for it.
Except that inventions can't be covered by copyright.. Boldrin and Levine also oppose copyright as well, anyway.
Patents and copyrights both stem from the same simple phrase in the constitution, which mentions neither by name.
Also, patents as they exist now are virtually useless as documentation (often not even making sense to the listed inventor), and people don't seek patents on things that they can easily protect via trade secrets, so no real knowledge is gained via disclosure.
Agreed that patents have ceased to serve any rational purpose as written in law (specifically the constitiution), which states
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,
If there was any real intent to promote Science and the useful Arts, they would have established colleges.
But then, that was never the REAL intent anyway.
That was merely throwing a bone towards justification of handing control of writing and inventions to those that invented and wrote.
It seemed natural to people who had carved out a nation from the wilderness, and built cities and industry, that one should be able to profit from one's work.
Oddly, this belief was held side by side with the practice of slavery.
The intent of patents was ALWAY monetary. Even tracing patents back thru the English system that predated the US system. It was ALWAYS about protecting the income of the inventor. Its been this way thru history.
Patents originally were an attempt to protect trade secrets that were, by their very nature, not possible to keep secret.
(Back then, there were few secret sauces, either in chemistry, or manufacturing, and certainly not in software. If you had the device in your hand you could figure out what it did, and how to make it).
If we just went back to patenting physical things built by people, and not processes, genes, software, or business practices we would be well off.
If we banished all patents (might take a constitutional amendment and we would have to abrogate dozens of treaties), I suspect the world would go on inventing as it always had, except at a much faster pace.
I would wager Inventors would make millions as consultants, helping to integrate their inventions in multiple different fields.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The patent system is ridiculously destructive and my number one reason for not pursuing development of a number of ideas I've had over the years. For example, I have a project on sourceforge that would be valuable to my current employer (saving $10k+/year for just my group), but I did not tell them about it because I'm concerned there is a submarine patent that could bite me if the project got widespread use. It is a GUI for grep that searches files as you type (like type-ahead on your GPS). I developed it in 2005 (before google's type ahead search) and thought about commercializing it, but I'm afraid of whether some random company patented it. This isn't the only idea I've had, nor is my idea unique. Considering the number of developers out there, it is hard to conceive how many good ideas are not developed due to legitimate patents and trolling. Think of what the dot-com era would have been like if everything already had some cheap patent? As a concrete example, what if somebody had patented the idea of searching (and done a crappy job at it) before Google?
The main problem I have with patents is that once you have one, there is little incentive to actually develop a good product. Afterall, you have a monopoly. The second problem I have is that the majority of tech patents I've heard about are more about the what than the how. The reason you are supposed to get a patent is encourage others to build on your idea. The only way they can do that (historically speaking) is if you tell them how your complicated thing works. So, in exchange for telling people all about your invention, it becomes public domain later on for others to build and our society to progress. This is turned on its head in the modern system. Most ideas are exceedingly obvious once the functionality is observed and then a patent applied to prevent others from duplicating it. Then, since tech evolution has increased dramatically over the past several decades, you get what amounts to an eternal patent. 20 years ago, almost nobody was online. Today, even two year old children are. (I just heard of a 4-year old making an online purchase.)
So, where does this leave us? We're all losers. The large companies now spend a lot of money building up libraries of useless patents and arguing with each other over who violated what. They gobble up defunct large companies that are rotted through from within to add to their archives. And most of the developers within probably have no idea what their patent archive contains or what their opponents do. And forcing people to spend $10k+ just to determine whether their not-so-interesting idea violates a non-so-interesting patent seems intellectually vacuous and wasteful for society.
the general role of any company these days seems to be to be able to hide from any form of moral behaviour... the larger the company the more likely they are to behave "within the law" but despicably so. Essentially running a company means you can abandon any form of ethical or moral behaviour - and apparently that's fine.
Patents are a good example of that. They should foster innovation, but they dont for so many reasons. Take apple for example "slide to unlock", "searching the phone AND the internet" these are not innovation, they are simple ideas anyone could have come up with from 5 minutes in front of a phone and yet apple patent them because they can and it gives them leverage to abuse everyone else. In just about any other part of society that kind of behaviour would be considered highly corrupt, yet when it comes to company ethics well there are none and so things like this happen. The criteria for "invention" have become so unbelievable low that simply 3 lines of code might be considered invention if you spin it the right way - for a company this is acceptable, but not from an ethical perspective.
The reality is the patent system should award innovation, but all it achieves is a platform for abuse. From that point alone it probably deserves to die. The problem is that it really wont change much, will apple (and others) suffer terrible losses (which imho, they deserve) from the loss of the patent system? no, probably would work in their favour. Sure they do have patents, but without patents they wouldnt have to pay smaller people for the inventions they license (assuming they do). It might mean people like samsung could take what they want from anyone, copy it, the mass-market it more effectively and just destroy people. That too is wrong.
Sadly, if I working alone came up with some awesome bit whatever that really was "innovation" and "invention" i'd probably end up abused for it. Some large company would simply realise that as a singular individual i probably wouldnt be able to defend myself from their battery of lawyers and so i'd get destroyed anyway. So with or without the patent system, your kinda screwed anyway.
But then having said all that, isnt this exactly what the american capitalist ideal is all about anyway? So perhaps from an american perspective, this is exactly what the patent system was setup to achieve and its doing a great job. I personally just cant see how people can look at the things apple, microsoft, and many others have patented (and used against people) and go "yeah, thats innovation and invention". Its kind of pathetic really.
> I do think there are instances where patents make sense (such as drugs
Bullshit
We pay for it one way or another.
At the moment the US government both funds the research through NIH and then pays handsomely for the results through healthcare costs.
Or as they say:
another erectile disfunction drug
still no cure for cancer
[Did a quick search for a relevant link at The Economist.com but didn't come up with anything pharma specific, plenty of articles arguing that patents are an unfortunate and unpleasant big waste of time for most business.]
Because of the actions of corporations and government in recent years, a lot of people no longer recognize patents or copyrights.
One of the suggestions they make is to award a prize amount to companies which develop medications which the gov't deems as valuable to the public. This is a lot like something I've been wishing to see for years... to have the U.S. gov't just purchase patents for certain medications outright and then make them public-domain.
When you learn that pharmaceutical companies' largest expense is not R&D (as they try to make you believe), but rather marketing those drugs to get you to "ask your doctor about [medication]", you realize that there is a lot of savings to be reaped from just ending the marketing war. What if the U.S. waited until there were several, competing medications for an ailment (allergies, blood pressure, etc.) and then announced that they were going to purchase the patent for one of those medications and then never enforce the patent (and, possibly, make that medication the only one covered by Medicare for that ailment)?
For starters, that medication would get really cheap, hopefully resulting in less total cost to the taxpayers/consumers (ie, the money spent on the patent + the total money spent on all of the "generic" doses would be less than the total money spent on what would be all of the patented doses). Because the competing companies whose patent doesn't get bought will, potentially, be left with very little value in their patent, there'd be strong price competition among the companies in the running to sell their patent, so the gov't might actually get a good price on the patent. Also, we'd probably see a big drop-off in pharmaceutical ads (ok, so TV and print media would hate this idea), so even the pharma company selling its patent might make out better (than they currently do) since they'd avoid having to spend such a huge amount on marketing.
Before patents, tech was often lost when the originators died or lost a war. It has been said that the present technology "explosion" is mostly due to the patent systems getting tech documented in multiple places, so it is less likely to be lost.
Before you advocate destroying something that works, consider all the things before it that were disasters. If you make a new one, it is much more likely to be one of those than something better.
On the other hand, giving patents on obvious things is criminal. And, in any case, they are supposed to be Limited not perminant.
The Atlantic Ocean Crustacean Society has issued another call for the abolition of the food chain.