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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."
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.
yes. It is extremely expensive to create new forms of anti-depressants, and treatments for erectile dysfunction... meanwhile tropical diseases don't have a business case. If that's all patents cand fund, it would be more straightforward to fund merit-based research into worthwhile causes directly with taxes (NIH), rather than have the market invent more profitable problems to address and completely avoid the ones that would do the world the most good. ...
http://canadasworld.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/orphan-drugs-for-orphan-diseases-the-non-profit-pharmaceutical-model/
Copyleft is primarily a hack to counter copyright. There would be some potential issues with copyleft licenses being unenforceable, but it would remove countless roadblocks. People can still voluntarily cooperate, and that makes up the lion's share of FOSS development.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Aside from just abolishing patents, IP should be abolished in all forms for anything produced with public funds. Get rid of the contractor bug.
Trade secrets lead to a closed, uncooperative system where "the wheel" so to speak is constantly reinvented and the pace of techological innovation is significantly slowed.
When was the last time you looked up a patent rather than reinventing the wheel? Certainly whith software I am reinventing wheels on a daily basis, but it is easier and quicker for me to do this than find an appropriate patent and adapt it to my situation.
Most software patents document the obvious. Those things that weren't obvious when they were filed will be considered obvious by the time they are granted. Modern patents are also so badly obfuscated by the patent writers that they probably can't be used as a basis of implementation anyway.
There are some (non-software) patents that cover large portions of a whole product that I think may be beneficial uses of the patent system, but patents that cover only small components within a device are really not beneficial to society because no one is going to spend the time looking for a patent that covers what they want to do, and those who infringe almost always do so by independently inventing something without realising it was already patented.
I support the idea of having to pay an inventor in situations where their invention has saved you from the R&D expense of developing it yourself, but I don't support the notion that you should have to pay them just because you inadvertently invented the same thing as them (and haence already had the R&D expense yourself.)
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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