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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.
Yes, and I'd agree with them.
Economics is a value-free science: just because it identifies winners and losers, it doesn't mean there is any sort of value judgement on if the respective parties deserve the winnings and losings.
e.g. you can argue that maybe drug prohibition or minimum wage is a good thing, but don't try and deny that prohibition creates black markets, and that minimum creates unemployment among unskilled workers.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Why just patents? Copyright must go too.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I would agree that the patent system in the US is severely handicapped. But abolishing it entirely would severely handicap drug development.
Are new drugs actually better for you...or better for making money for big pharma. Discuss.
This. If drug development were offloaded to socialized nonprofit organizations, they would have less incentive to falsify results or push drugs with minimal improvements as "the next big thing". Plus, maybe we would have less of this ridiculous "Talk to your doctor about Xyanoflexanol. May cause blindness, nuclear holocaust and explosive diarrhea" advertising.
That would be true if they were spending their own money on the research. They aren't though. They are spending public funds from the NIH then patenting the results and making obscene profits on it. Want to fix it? Simple. Make NIH funding contingent on royalty free results. After all, it is our money making these companies rich.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Except the idea of a patent system is fundamentally flawed. Legal monopolies are rarely an effective legal tool, and information is not one of the exceptions.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
It isn't against the Constitution to get rid of patents altogether. The constitutional amendment isn't because the constitution forces us to have patents, its because the only way to abolish patents is to take away congresses authority to create them. Congress will never willingly dismantle the patent system. Too many private parties are paying them not to.
It varies; they aren't all identical. The newer asthma preventative I started taking several years ago made me free of attacks & frequent bronchitis/pneumonia for the first time; the anti-depressant I'm on is thus far the one kind that increases energy rather than worsening lethargy (which is vital given my other health issues), and the pain patch I'm on lets me have continuous relief instead of the horrible roller-coaster ride that oral painkillers gave.
The problem is when the pharmaceutical companies knowingly misrepresent the safety, efficacy, and potential uses of a drug. The existence of new medications, if they're sufficiently different from what came before, can give new options to patients that didn't respond well or had a bad reaction to the existing drugs.
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