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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.
Why just patents? Copyright must go too.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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/
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.
The ideal system of government is a benevolent dictator. One person acting with consistent policy and absolute power putting the interests of the majority above special interests and himself. While it is possible to find such a person once every few centuries, it is impossible to maintain this system of government because a bad dictator will inevitably rise and send everything to hell. Every society in the world has gone through the motions of trying to "fix" their monarchy, and suffered revolution after revolution "fixing" their system trying to find a better single ruler. But now, we have realized it was always a losing battle and abandoned the monarchy altogether. Representative governments may be inefficient and suboptimal, but they are stable for the long term and do not require violent "fixes" periodically.
The argument presented by this article is that patent systems behave in the same way. While a "fixed" patent system would be ideal, its corruption inevitably recurs no matter how many times we actually manage to "fix" it because of how it inherently distributes money and influence among the concerned parties. The only solution, therefore, is to abolish the system entirely and use a completely different paradigm to produce suboptimal but stable results. In many industries that may in fact be laissez-faire, while in others we may need different, more targeted approaches.
Wow, someone should patent that idea!
Aside from just abolishing patents, IP should be abolished in all forms for anything produced with public funds. Get rid of the contractor bug.
You can't. It's still under copyright.
rewriting history since 2109
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
Boldrine and Levine have show rather conclusively that drug development tends to go where the patents are not in their book, Against Intellectual Monopoly (http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm). They also effectively demonstrate that the introduction of new drugs actually slowed with the introduction of patent protection in any country where patent protection is introduced.
For some reason, the assumption that patents foster innovation is taken as a fact without looking at the evidence amassed so far. I think it's grand that Boldrine and Levine lend a voice to skepticism of the "patents foster innovation" mantra, but I wonder, just how did they get on the board in a district of the Federal Reserve?
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