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Economists Argue Patent System Should Be Abolished
nukem996 writes "Two economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve have published a paper arguing that the American patent system should be abolished. The paper recognizes the harm the current patent system has caused not only to the technology sector but the health sector as well."
For years, but ain;t gonna happen. The big corps will buy the senators and reps to make sure it NEVER happens.
They're careers will be systematically destroyed.
Not to mention what they say, even if perfect in its documentation and rationality, will just be ignored.
Economists that don't toe the corporate line of thinking get booted.
The patent system, for as much as it gets bad press, offers the little guy (independent inventor) a chance to get ahead. With no patents, anyone with money can make a clone of an existing product and do whatever they want with it, including selling their clone as the original item. Such a patent-less system undoubtedly favors the wealthy who have access to the means to do such things.
And when you accelerate the acquisition of power, you encourage oppression in the name of profit. This leads directly to fascism for the people.
I have my own ideas about patents, I think there should be categories, rather than all patents being valid for the same term.
Patent duration should be related to the amount of R&D needed to develop and turn into a meaningful product, so if we absolutely have to have software patents, then they should have a duration of 1 or maybe 2 years - but a pharmacutical patent with a long development process and high costs can have the full existing term.
This would maintain the purpose of patents to allow the "inventor" to control their product within a reasonable time, but it would not stifle innovation where other new developments are trapped by a massive maze of existing patents in a fast moving field.
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
The US Patent system is a deviation from the free market. It is really one a few things mentioned in the US Constitution that deal with the market. One of the others, and much bigger, is taxation.
So it is no surprise that some/many Economists would disagree with Patents. Those same people probably don't disagree with the copyright system. Patents are government enforced monopolies and copyrights are property...that can be replicated at no (very very little) cost.
I say get rid of Patents. If you have a great idea, obfuscate it as best you can and bring the product or service to market.
The big corps will buy the senators and reps to make sure it NEVER happens.
You have that exactly backwards. Large corporations would prefer to have no patent system at all. To a large corporation a patent is a barrier to profit. A patent prevents a large company from making a cheap clone of an existing product and selling it to unsuspecting consumers at a profit. The reason why companies are buying up each others' patents is only to protect themselves; they would just as soon see the patent system go away entirely. It has brought about an arms race between companies, where none of the participants actually want to partake in the race - however they can't afford to abandon it either unless they know everyone else will do the same. And the only way to know that is to have everyone forced to do it.
The patent system promotes innovation. Who is going to invest years of money and time to develope new technologies if they are going to be copied by everyone else without remuneration? I would not have spent thousands of dollars and hundreds if not thousands of hours (I stopped counting years ago) designing, testing, prototyping and promoting my invention. Obviously these intellectual morons sitting in their achademic ivory towers should get off their asses and do it themselves.
Wasn't this already posted on slashdot several months ago?
1. You have to create what you patent; You can't patent an obvious idea knowing it will be created in the future so you can patent troll.
2. You can't patent generalized ideas.
3. There needs to be better checks and balances on what gets approved, I feel people are getting paid off.
Didn't this get posted last fall? (Maybe last summer)?
They're careers will be systematically destroyed.
This was published in September of 2012 by the St. Louis Fed, when can I expect to see their careers systematically destroyed? Does that take longer than five months to walk someone out of such a highly visible position? Even Richard Stallman cited this when he responded to one of my questions.
Not to mention what they say, even if perfect in its documentation and rationality, will just be ignored.
After reading much of the report, I don't think it is "perfect in its documentation and rationality." While it brings up great examples of serious problems with the US Patent System (like software patents, the poster child for all that is wrong with patents), it does not examine examples where the patent system has worked. It seems to pretend like patents have never done anyone any good ever. Nor does it discuss how we would have to revert to trade secrets and lying awake at night wondering if one of our employees had just brought a bunch of documents over to our competitor for an undisclosed sum -- which employee would you charge with corporate espionage? All that fun stuff is completely ignored so I would consider the report lacking in thoroughness. They also spend a lot of time discrediting studies that claimed patents are beneficial which is all well and good. It doesn't follow that patents are completely bad, however.
Economists that don't toe the corporate line of thinking get booted.
I don't think that's true. I think it's true that economists who attack corporations for the sake of attacking corporations get booted ... but that's just because they let personal biases get in the way of research. It's odd, Blodrin and Levine actually cite a bunch of cases where the big corporations got bit in the ass (like the Motorola, Samsung, Apple, etc cell phone patent fiascos). So, you know, I think that patent reform (and maybe abolition) is actually starting to look beneficial for many corporations that want to expand even further.
My work here is dung.
The root of the patent system is to provide a *limited* term of protection in return for making the idea public and advancing the "art". I still hold that its a good idea; politician and big money have broken the implementation. The barrier for non-obviousness has been a joke for a while -- the vast majority of software patents are obvious to someone "practiced in the art".
While I agree that the current practice of IP landscaping does sometimes have the effect of stifling innovation I don't believe that the patent system should be completely abolished, just changed. The act of rewarding the first person to come up with something new encourages people to innovate, but patent applicants should be required to demonstrate how they would implement the idea described in the patent to prevent people from patenting concepts that they hadn't fleshed out. For example, GE shouldn't be able to patent the idea of building a wind turbine with a certain type of blade if they haven't already demonstrated a design that works.
Cows argue that McDonald's should be abolished.
We should probably listen to them, I don't think this has ever happened before.
Now do the same analysis on copyright and the public domain. Trillions dollars of our public wealth has been sequestered by the corporate oligarchy. And they paid fractional cents on the dollar in "campaign donations". I'm fine with it if we tax the hell out of anything that doesn't go into the public domain after 17 years. You want to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain? Sure, just pay $1,000,000 the first year, doubled every year after that, and adjust the starting and ongoing amounts for inflation. At least we, the people, get something in return.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Unfortunately, nothing is likely to change. The interests of those with money will outweight reform.
The system isn't impossible to fix, but it can't be fixed without annoying current patent holders.
- Make patents non-transferable. (no more patent trolls)
- Patents can only be owned by one (or more) people. (so that companies can't be used as containers)
- Patents have a maximum lifetime that cannot be extended. (You want to keep earning from your idea? Improve on it!)
- No frivolous patents (ie. slide-to-lock and their ilk, patenting a rounded rectangle as shape for a mobile device is just silly)
I'd add 'software patents' to it. But that would probably open another can of worms.
More than two economists argue the opposite.
I thought the idea of the tax and patent system was only an extra revenue for bankers, lawyers and accountants... who planned the system.... like the Government - Fed eternal debt... On the other hand, I think patents should be owned by people, non-transferable, and for a limit period of time (10 years?), not companies, simply because a person (or a team) developed the device/solution. And of course, the process to register it should be FREE. If you as a John Doe develop something new, it's obscene to pay $20.000 to protect it... And "ideas" shouldn't be allowed to be patented....maybe another method....but "system where the user ask for something through a device to get a result"..... Companies will not be able to avoid taxes using the "IP fee" to subsidiaries in fiscal paradises anymore....there is so much money involved, I don't think this abolition would prosper...
With no patent protection, the people who make the junk we are forced to buy will hold off on shipping until they have 'perfected' their product, giving them a leap of a year, if not more ahead of copycats.
So instead of shipping alpha quality crap, there would be fewer products, and those products would be better made.
That's in addition to all the other reasons to dump patents.
Somebody in the real (i.e., appointed) government has said something that large corporations will not like.
I give it three days before they're fired.
You think you can just get the rich to let go.
Fundamentally you always have to drag them kicking and screaming to the money.
They've been saying it for years. Here's a video of them saying it from 2009
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dMuGnFdQ0s
The original IBM PC and Apple computers.
IBM let anyone and everyone make computers using their architecture with few restrictions, but initially IBMs were The BEST so they thrived.
Those who could bought IBM PCs, those who couldn't afford it bought a cheaper clone and wished they had an IBM.
This is a very large part of why computers are so commonplace and such a huge part of modern life.
Apple used a different architecture and refused to allow others to use their architecture.
They WERE good, but much more limited in a short period of time due to relatively small market share within a few years.
Now this example is not a direct corelation, I admit but consider if IBM had done the same thing Apple did- computers would likely be a hugely expensive item that only a few people could afford.
Instead we had a market full of mostly compatible devices that could inter-operate pretty well.
And these devices improved RAPIDLY due to the number of companies trying to make their product better.
Patents are, for the most part, a way of preventing compatibility and ensuring high cost and bad value for end-users.
People WILL pay more for similar devices when one is appreciably better in some way-
A Ford Focus is a pretty good car at its price, yet many people still buy Mercedes that cost far more even though they DO example the same thing: fairly basic transportation.
And they are both automobiles with four rubber-tired wheels, a windshield and other similarities.
The modern US patent system would allow someone to patent an automobile with four rubber tires and so on preventing any OTHER company from selling one.
Big companies use patents in BOTH ways- they will try to copy someones else's successful device while preventing anyone from copying theirs.
Patents need a huge amount of reform and basically 99% of patents should be invalid.
Getting rid of patents entirely would do far less damage than keeping the system that is in place now does.
Well I for one welcome back the days of secret crafts passed down in guilds and enforced with thuggery. Forget patent reform; down with patents!
Apple is in full agreement with this except where they are concerned. So they are asking for exemptions which enable them to continue to leverage rounded rectangular patents and trade dress against everyone else.
I say this largely because Apple has said as much in its legal filings you can read over at Groklaw. It's rather ridiculous to read how they feel patents which represent actual R&D and inventions of original technology should not be eligible for protection while their software based stuff should be protected.
Like many people on this site, I feel that patents are granted far too easily for "inventions" that are hardly original or novel, but I feel that getting rid of the system entirely would be throwing the baby out with the bath water. However, if we are ever going to fix the patent system, we need to explore all extremes. Right now, we are living under a system of extremely heavy patent protection. This system has been so indoctrinated into most of the population that the suggestion to reduce patent protection usually gets reactions of horror as if you are perpetrating a plot to bring down the entire economy. Therefore, articles like this lend credence to the idea that our economy would be fine without patents and then we can attempt to find a balanced solution.
I'll admit that I have thought about the implications of removing the patent system completely and I believe it would certainly change the economy, but it wouldn't completely upend it. If patents didn't exist, people would rampantly copy each other's ideas. With so much copying going on, they would eventually be forced to differentiate their products from other copies. Therefore, they would create many small innovations to distinguish themselves from the other clones and innovation on the smaller scale would increase. Conversely, since inventions could be freely copied, there would be less incentive for people to put research into costly large-scale research projects. The goal to maximize incentive is to continue protecting the large-scale projects while providing minimal, if any, protection to minor inventions. I think we can all agree that the current system has reached the point of absurdity where even the most trivial concepts are protected and we need to start scaling back to find that sweet spot in the middle.
Incremental changes might be a better idea. Two such changes, for starters:
Loser Pays. In Europe, when a patentee files an infringement lawsuit and loses, they are liable for the defendant's court costs and attorney's fees. In the US, unless the suit was frivolous (and this is a high bar to meet), each party pays its own costs.
Compulsory Licensing. Consumers lose when a patentee uses patents to exclude other innovation from the marketplace. Rather than allowing a patentee to exclude others from producing an infringing product, allow infringers to continue paying a reasonable licensing fee. Essentially FRAND, but covering all patents.
I'd like to see all patents be FRAND by default. In addition I'd like to see that include binding arbitration on disputes which can cap the total royalty and duration. I just can't see why a software patent that came out of a 10 minute brainstorming session should have the same rights as something that took a team years of experimentation to discover.
There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics - Umberto Eco
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You are obviously not in the medical business.
No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents to give the inventors time to make their years of investment back by a period of exclusivity. Regulation by the government (mostly for safety & efficacy) is just another business expense, like fuel, that all players pay. The price to enter the game.
I have spent over $1m with my partner over 5 years to develop a product and get it FDA cleared for sale with 3 patents. We simply would not have started this project without knowing we could patent what we do, because otherwise J&J and P&G would both copy our product starting the day we released it publicly.
There would then be almost no way to make our investment back at that point, without patents.
P&G and J&J can compete with us, but they can't do it by just copying. They will have to invent something even better that gets the results a different way. That is progress. Mankind has progressed this way at the fastest rate in the history of man, and virtually all of it in the last 200 years. Patents drive innovation. Ordinary citizens benefit from the release from drudgery as a result. It only took about a century to relieve about 80% of the population involved in hard physical farm work down to 5% of the population in farm work, supported mostly by farm machinery inventions.
I am sick of the lack of knowledge (lack in the education system) of how mankind has advanced and how the business process aids new products when people can spend years of hard work and spending of large sums of money with no guarantee at all of success, but knowing that if they can get limited time protection for their work they can then have a chance to profit.
LOL.
Patent applications are abused right now. There's too many vague patents out there, and many have prior art. The time to invalidate a patent, and cost of litigation just makes patent law ridiculous.
Patent applications should be screened much more thoroughly, but of course, this just means that it would take longer and be more expensive. Something needs to be done, but abolishing patents is not the way to do it.
The current interpretation of a patent is one where a company leverages an innovation against their competition, either by blocking the competition from creating innovations that use or build off of, or are in some way competitive to, the said invention, or to extort obscene profits in royalties and licensing to competitors that have no choice but to use the innovation.
The reality is that patents are public disclosure of an idea which was intended to STIMULATE innovation by sharing ideas and having others build off the original idea.
Patents were explained to me once, but an actual lawyer, in this way:
Company A builds a chair with 3 legs. It works well but under some instances the chair could fall over. Sales of the chair are low because consumers find it lacking in overall functionality and safety.
Company B sees the original 3 leg chair patent and decide they can improve upon it by adding a 4th leg. Doing so improves the functionality of the original concept. Company B enters a cross licensing/royalty relationship where both companies can now sell chairs with 4 legs. The original Company A now has stronger sales (and higher profits) and Company B can now sell an improved concept from the expansion of the original idea. The idea is that by Company A originally disclosing the innovation of a chair with 3 legs allows the idea to be improved upon and the original inventor enjoying greater success off of the work another inventor did to improve the idea. Both companies benefit, consumers benefit, society is advanced.
In today's market, Apple would have invented a 2 leg chair, told consumers that any company that uses more then 2 legs on a chair are stupid, sued anybody that tried to make a better chair, and in the end Google creates a chair on top of a ball and Microsoft creates a table that could be used like a chair...or bed.
I don't agree that patents themselves are at fault here, only in how greedy self-interested corporations are using patents to shut out competition. Arrogant companies like Apple seem to feel they are the only innovators in an industry and thus do not want other companies to use or build on their ideas (even though Apple seems to consistently patent other peoples original ideas and claim it their own). Apple has created an aggressive market where competitors are hording patents and using them as weapons against each other. Apple is not going to cross license with Google, and vice versa, so both platforms evolve independent of each other and so, ultimately, to the detriment of consumers that can't get the best of all innovations in one package.
I do agree, however, that software patents should be abolished completely. It is trivial to create a software meme that can be easily reproduced by another independent entities. I have always felt that patents should only be awarded to non-trivial invention. If an invention involves significant investment in time and money or leaps in technical advancement to achieve then the patent should be awarded, and thus, disclosed so it can advance innovation and invention by allowing other companies to build off the idea without the initial huge investment in time and effort.
Rounding the corners on rectangles is a trivial non-invention, it should never even have been considered for patent application.
I think patent laws need to change, but patents themselves should not be abolished. Someone that invests time, money, and significant effort to invent something deserves some protection from unscrupulous others who will only copy the idea and profit off of it. But the current trend to patent "everything" including highly trivial junk should be discouraged.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I am sick of the lack of knowledge (lack in the education system) of how mankind has advanced and how the business process aids new products when people can spend years of hard work and spending of large sums of money with no guarantee at all of success, but knowing that if they can get limited time protection for their work they can then have a chance to profit.
You are sick because the education system does not promote your ideology?
Accordingly, the length of a pharmaceutical patent should be set not to a fixed term, but rather should expire once the inventor has recouped their R&D costs and some fixed amount of profit (maybe R&D costs + (R&D costs * 10%)).
Most compounds that begin investigation fail to be approved as drugs. Which failed compounds will a pharmaceutical company be able to charge against a given drug's R&D costs? When you start tying things to profit amounts, you'll see "Hollywood accounting" as companies perform various tricks to limit the paper profit.
Perhaps one of the factors in favor of software patentability should be that the claim of exclusive rights in an improvement is limited to a particular device or field of use, as opposed to a general-purpose "computer with memory" that the general public is buying for a completely different reason.
I am sick of the lack of knowledge (lack in the education system) of how mankind has advanced and how the business process aids new products when people can spend years of hard work and spending of large sums of money with no guarantee at all of success, but knowing that if they can get limited time protection for their work they can then have a chance to profit.
You are sick because the education system does not promote your ideology?
Perhaps one of his competitors makes a medical product that might help with that sickness?
> No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents
IMHO research should be done on tax payers money, using global co-operation. Once the research is done, private companies can manufacture products. This would have several advantages.
Perhaps the difference that Bigby sees is that copyrights come into force from the moment a work is fixed in a tangible medium, as opposed to patents that require a patent application.
I agree in that inventors like you in your field need to make sure they're properly compensated for your hard work and to make sure you're not immediately bankrupt by large corporations that have the resources to do it.
But, would you agree with me on:
1) other things like computer algorithms shouldn't be patented
2) you shouldn't have perpetual patents
If so, that's a good basis on having common sense limits on what a patent system can do. I don't know if you'd be as successful if you had to pay license fees for pouring liquid into a container. I personally feel the patent system should be different for each industry. For example, devices are different from algorithms, and some devices shouldn't have patents if they were already done before but not patented. Not to pick on everyone's punching bag but I'm pretty sure the iPad was at least invented by Star Trek and it was called the PADD so many of its patents should not have been granted.
The main problem of the USPTO is it went from a non-profit organization to a for-profit organization so it was in their best interest to allow as many patents as possible as opposed to allowing patents that were truly revolutionary.
Here's an idea. Any patent that comes from research that received government funding, whether through colleges and universities, tax credits, TIFF, or whatever form, has to be made available to the public proportionately to the cost funded by the public. So, if UCLA develops a new drug for Merck and Merck contributed $5M and federal and state funds (including infrastructure, support costs, etc) amount to $10M, then for every $3 Merck makes on the drug, The government gets $2 and Merck gets $1. That way, government supported research treats the government like any other venture capitalist who gets a return on their investment.
We all here, everyday, about how the entitlement systems need to be overhauled. Maybe we should start with the corporate ones, first. Reforming the patent system would be a good start on that.
The description of the invention (which precedes or follows the claims based on which patent database you're looking in) is supposed "to demonstrate how they would implement the idea described in the patent". How does that fail?
Will you still feel the same way when P&G and J&J decide they can compete with you by finding some of their 20 million patents that are possibly related to your product and then keeping you in litigation until your $1m dries up?
Create something worth copyrighting.
And get sued for accidentally having re-created something that someone else has copyrighted. Independent creation is difficult to prove, and such a legal defense may be cost-prohibitive anyway. What steps do you recommend taking to prevent another Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music?
Then bitch about it being too long under your legal protection.
On the one hand, you may have just described an impossibility because copyrights already last for decades after the author is dead. By definition, an author won't live long enough to complain. On the other hand, a time-delayed public domain dedication exists.
History does not warant a government-only solution. Indeed, it strongly suggests against it.
Typed from a smart phone that probably wouldn't exist even 75 years from now if left up to government.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I don't think patents should be abolished, but I think we should go back to the old system where ideas and business processes were not patentable. Patents should apply to inventions and other physical items. It would get rid of all these ridiculous law suits where people claim to have invented the hyperlink or the one-click button.
There would still be inequalities, but certainly less of them. You will still have the federal government extending patents on medicines because of cronyism and political contributions, but the endless cell phone lawsuits (Apple suing Smasung suing Motorola, etc.) are getting tiresome.
Make patents non-transferable
Which would just turn assignment by the inventors into a sublicensable exclusive license by the inventors. What practical effect would that have?
Patents have a maximum lifetime that cannot be extended
This is already the case: filing date plus 20 years plus an allowance for delays by a federal agency, such as undue delays by the USPTO or delays by federal regulators for drugs and other products needing federal marketing approval.
No frivolous patents
That sounds like what the current "obvious" standard was supposed to mean, but you'll need to define "frivolous" in a way that courts can apply rigorously.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress:
"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."
The fact that the Constitution explicitly carves out this Congressional power, implies that there is no inherent right to intellectual "property", equivalent to ownership of tangible property. The aim is to "promote progress..." for the nation as a whole. Any legislation should be calibrated to maximize this benefit to society. This is not the same as maximizing the benefits to the authors and inventors. So the definition of "limited times" should be optimized to this objective of maximum benefit to the nation. Too short, and there is insufficient incentive. Too long, and the benefit to society is lost. I believe current patent and copyright durations are much too long and some objective rigor is needed to find the optimum times. Note that one-size-fits-all is not appropriate, and that different durations may be appropriate for different technologies and industries.
Also, the definition of "writings and discoveries" should be much more narrowly defined. Round or square corners on a phone is no benefit to anyone. Reprinting Shakespeare does not entitle you to copyright.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Limited time protection should actually be limited.
- Patents last for 20 years.
- Copyright lasts for 95 years.
In the digital age such time frames are insane. You should have 5 years of protection at absolute maximum, because every year of protection you get is another year a person with cancer can't afford their medication, another year that the next great author must wait to retell stories their grandparents read about.
Every year of legal protection in a sense is theft from the public good.
Here is the problem with your argument. It is about me me me...
If your product can get cloned, then well guess what you can clone somebody else product. I am not talking about making a cheap knock off. I am talking about adding value and standing on the shoulders of giants.
Mankind has progressed the fastest this way? Really? Dude you are so out of touch that it ain't funny. The fact that many inventions were created in the last 200 years is not a sign that before that we did nothing. You see to be able to create inventions, and spur innovation we had to have a stable society that communicated with each other. Simply put you need a society with a certain level of government, judicial and other pieces. Once that is in place there is peace and things can be invented. Guess when society really has had peace? One guess, come on you know it, yes, 200 years ago things became stable.
Granted horrible things have happened in the 1900's, but before that it was all about royalty and one set of people waging war on another set of people. Those sorts of things do not make for stability. Also things like the great plague dampen innovation.
BTW please read the author's papers and realize that innovation happens when there are no patents. Sure the initial guy gets screwed if they have no business plan, but overall society is for the better.
The example I always argue is what if the airplane was patented. Can you imagine trying to develop around the airplane? Ain't gonna happen because the airplane is about as good as it is going to get for the current time.
My solution to the patent system is not to abolish it, but shorten the length to 5 years. That is just enough to give you a head start, but not long enough to hinder society.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
You, Sir, has clearly not RTFP!
Please at least read page 13 of the paper, and throw out your well preserved assumptions of how the world works.
- I'll give you a taste of page 13:
"There are four things that should be born in mind in thinking about the role
of patents in the pharmaceutical industry. First, patents are just one piece of a
set of complicated regulations that include requirements for clinical testing and
disclosure, along with grants of market exclusivity that function alongside patents.
Second, it is widely believed that in the absence of legal protections, generics would
hit the market side by side with the originals. This assumption is presumably based
on the observation that when patents expire, generics enter immediately. However,
this overlooks the fact that the generic manufacturers have had more than a decade
to reverse-engineer the product, study the market, and set up production lines.
Lanjouw’s (1998) study of India prior to the recent introduction of pharmaceutical
patents there indicates that it takes closer to four years to bring a product to market
after the original is introduced—in other words, the fifi rst-mover advantage in pharmaceuticals
is larger than is ordinarily imagined. Third, much development of
pharmaceutical products is done outside the private sector; in Boldrin and Levine
(2008b), we provide some details. Finally, the current system is not working well:
as Grootendorst, Hollis, Levine, Pogge, and Edwards (2011) point out, the most
notable current feature of pharmaceutical innovation is the huge “drought” in the
development of new products."
Interesting, I do hope you realize that what you are reading, and what you using as a medium to communicate did come from the government. Please check your facts... Thank-you and don't let the door hit you on the way out.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Did you actually read the paper? No? Then do that first. It provides very useful advice on policy changes that favor pharmacological innovation without patents. Since there is no evidence that patents foster innovation and indications of the contrary your point is moot. I think you should stop spouting such arrogant phrases as "lack of knowledge" and rather look into actual research instead of your gut feeling.
The numbers you give should rather be phrased "in spite of patents". Patents can delay further innovation, because incremental advance on the basic technique must be held back until the patent expires and the patent holder has little incentive to improve his invention right until the patent expires. Patents may make it possible to grow a business in pharmaceutics, but I am not sure if it is a net win.
The most recent issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives is focused on the patent issue.
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.27.1
All articles reach similar conclusions to the first (Boldrin and Levine). They have been saying the same thing about patents for over 10 years, so don't expect their careers to be destroyed or whatever other apocalyptic scenarios were discussed above. They are academic economists who have worked for a several strong research departments and feds over the years. They (and others) provide very strong evidence that the current patent system does not help consumers/citizens. That is the purpose of laws governing commerce, correct?
It is highly likely that a perfectly designed and operated patent system would be better than no patent system. Given the reality of humans running things, this is unattainable and no patents are probably better than the current system for consumers. When examining the evidence, this claim appears obviously true (to me at least, but I read the Boldrin/Levine book a decade ago). The NIH and NSF could pick up the slack in funding pharma research, and in other fields, first-mover advantage seems to provide plenty of monopoly profits for innovators.
> No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents
/post hoc ergo propter hoc/ - we had the patent system, then we had the inventions, therefore the patents caused the inventions. That's a classic logical fallacy.
Can you please name an equivalent-sized economy and market without patent laws which didn't also see the invention anti-cancer drugs? Your stance is one of
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
It's a different operating space ; pharma patents the molecule. Medicines only have a few components. Patents are narrow - a molecule is a molecule and can't be interpreted as anything else.
Software has a multiplicity of components, it's virtually impossible to write any new software without infringing existing patents, since the ones we have are ridiculously broad. The scenario you describe is easy to encounter in the software world.
The best way to avoid this issue, as far as I can tell, is base your company value on brand and service rather than patented technology. As you say - a big patent holder can almost certainly torpedo any new software project if they want to. But they can't torpedo your brand or reputation in the same way. Which is probably one of the reasons for the whole Software As A Service fad - if you hide it behind a firewall and don't show the innards off, you're less likely to get sued for patented tech in those innards.
Better still, stop granting software patents. What constitutes "obvious to an ordinary practitioner" changes with such rapidity that the 20 year lifespan is just mental.
Sorry about there not being any effective antibiotics against antibiotics-resistant bacteria, but no one will ever develop them without being able to recover the R&D costs.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Who would have thought that open source would have become as prevalent as it is now? For the same reasons, initially it did not seem to have a viable business case. Maybe this applies to other fields, perhaps not.
You live in a deluded fantasy that free market and zero regulation means honest brokers and business ventures. Grow up and get passed Friedman's fallacy along with Ayn Rand.
Actually you live in, we all live in this deluded fantasy of perverted and ridiculous fight over an idea that is inspired from another idea. You want credit for where it came from, fine, but dont lock it down to where someone else cant add to it. Even school systems want in on this IP crap, wanting to earn from the inspiration of a body of people. The real fantasy is where we all live in a free market, however with a system. It can happen with honest people and initiative, it is all a part of growing up. If you want profit, go get a patent, or hack the current tech and just support yourself. We got to go open source and support each other, we just need a system. Because theres so much open source out there, but not one platform we all can agree on, once we can agree on a platform and initiate a free market, then what are all the big corps going to do and the government for that matter? They Need Us You are only limited by what you expect of yourself.
The example I always argue is what if the airplane was patented. Can you imagine trying to develop around the airplane? Ain't gonna happen because the airplane is about as good as it is going to get for the current time.
In fact, the Wrights owned several patents covering aspects of their plane. Their first successful flight was in 1903, but it was based on control work they'd done up to 10 years prior, and derived from the Chanute-Herring glider (1896) and Matthew Boulton's wing (1868). The fundamental concept of fixed wing aircraft substantially predates the Wrights, and patents are granted for the advances and additions one actually makes.
Even if the Wrights had somehow managed to patent the whole class of powered, fixed-wing aircraft, patents (as opposed to copyrights) expire after 20 years. During those 20 years, anyone is free to develop new products, but they have to get (ie, buy) the Wrights' permission to sell those products. In fact, had the Wrights been better about seeking patent protection, and not spent so much time working in secret and refusing to demonstrate their plane, commercial aviation might have started even sooner.
For physical devices, for medical products, the time between actual invention and sellable product is often longer than 5 years. A five year patent may be long enough to cover the current generation of iPads, but it it not long enough for many industries.
"No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents"
Indeed, there is no person or organization in the world who would just give away money for research in order to, say, fight for a cure to cancer. I honestly can't think of even one charitable organization that provides funds for medical research of any kind.
Verily, I am certain that Alexander Flemming's first thoughts on penicillin were "This discovery is amazing! Now to make sure that I am the only person in the world who has a right to use it."
And look at all the harm caused by the Salk Vaccine not being patented. It breaks my heart to see all the dying and paralyzed children around today because, in the absence of a patent, no one had any reason whatsoever to produce the vaccine.
And it's not just the medical field, why look at Volvo and the huge sums of cash that they made from patenting the seatbelt. Thank god for the patent system that allowed Volvo to cash in on a device that has saved tens, maybe even hundreds of millions of lives since its inception. I mean, if they hadn't been able to exclusively control the production seatbelts then why would they have bothered inventing them, right?
The real problem is people who abuse it. All they need to do is make it less attractive to filing baseless suits. As soon as you to take away the feeling someone has of making some "easy money" off it the system will revert to what its intended. Its kind of like how people complain there needs to be laws to stop telemarketing when infact if you just simply remove the ability to make money off it they would all be gone overnight with no needs for a rewrite or tons of new laws.
If you put this one, single action into effect patent law problems will dry up quickly: Say I want to sue someone for patent infringement and I lose the case then I have to pay the person/company I am suing 50% of what I was suing them for, plus court costs, plus their attorney fees.
You do that and frivilious patent suits would dissapear in a few months and the system would be perfectly fine. Its not that the patent system is flawed, its simply just a cash register for some people to try and ring. If you make someone responsible for a failed suit then people trying to take advantage of it would go away real quick because you can rest assured they wont file suit unless they have real evidence and its a real case to be made.
But "internet people" always over react and all act like they are certified patent attorneys. When patent shows up on slashdot everyone comes out in droves to get out their insight pez dispenser and act like they are somehow qualified to speak all about patents when in reality they dont know jack and just say stuff "that sounds good to them". And lately patent talk is the nerd hot button and gets the most attention and heated debates by people who have no idea what they are talking about. But its just a fad and in 3 months you guys will all be on some bandwagon of some other type lining up to say its wrong or broken, but again with no idea what youre just saying because all you know is its what other people are saying. Youre all contrarions and just want to be on the opposite side of whatever a government or person of power says.
Make the patent last for only 5 or less years for software patents (if we MUST have them -- I'd prefer to abolish that type of patent). 10 years for everything else.
It takes too long to get approved, so that by the time you've got the patent there's little value left in that exclusive period? Too bad. This aught to lower the number of applications in the first place, which will help clear the backlog on assessing the ones that do go into the system, and it will allow more careful scrutiny (e.g., of prior art).
I don't think axing the whole thing is the right solution (except for software patents).
And you, sir, did not pay attention to his post. He's not developing a pharmaceutical.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Two economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve published a paper arguing to abolish the American patent system, saying there's "no evidence" patents improve productivity and that they have a "negative" effect on "innovation."
The fact that there is "no evidence" does not mean that there is no effect. The only valid way of finding such evidence is to compare innovation in a country with strong patent laws with innovation in a country with no patent laws. That is not going to happen because most countries have strong patent laws. Any other test would not show a true picture of the issue. In effect the writers are speculating.
In recent years, however, several innovators in high-tech sectors have complained that the large volume of vague patents has become a major barrier to innovation.
To paraphrase, there is nothing wrong with patents but there is an issue with " the large volume of vague patents". How about we deal with the issue instead of throwing away the whole system? How about creating a better patent system where vague patents are not awarded so often. The first step to that is to create a resource of experts in the various sectors and have them vet patents before they are awarded. These experts would probably best come from academia so as to hopefully not create bias toward industry.
The main thing patents protect is investment. It can take millions of dollars to invent things today. Do you really think someone would decide to invest $10M into something when $100k can be used to reverse engineer it? Do you think that $10M will ever be recouped? Would you make the $10M investment?
Here are a few ideas.
1. Instead of having a strict year limit one has a profit limit as well. The profit limit would be the greater of $5M or 3 time R&D costs. The limit on a patent would be 12 years or the profit limit which ever comes first. This may be difficult to administer but it may work.
2. Make ideas non patentable. If the object has not been created then it can not be patented.
3. Make it difficult to extend patents. Changing a couple of words to encompass new technology is not sufficiently innovative to be patentable. IE adding "over a network" or "on a mobile device" does not create a new patent.
4. Make licensing mandatory. Have a formula to force companies to license patents based on the value of the R&D going into the patent and the value of the patent within the end product. Force companies to sell licenses based on this formula. This way patents still make money but cease to be monopolies.
IMHO research should be done on tax payers money, using global co-operation. Once the research is done, private companies can manufacture products. This would have several advantages.
While Pharmas have certainly made plenty of poor drug development decisions, having biologically illiterate congressmen pushing their own agendas wouldn't help. If we let them choose which drug targets and phase 0 - phase II drug candidates to throw billions of dollars at (and it would be those congresscritters pulling the strings no matter what august body they nominally put in charge) we would end up following their whims, resulting in the lost decade of magic beans autism cures followed by the lost decade of Andy "Pharmacology is like computer chips!" Grove wrong turns and the complete end of research into reproductive medicine, because abortion.
I think the NIH should provide more grants and facilities for drug target validation (the stage after discovering biological widget X is related to condition Y, where you try to verify that biological widget X is a druggable target for condition Y). I'm hoping that's where the NIH translational medicine programs end up putting the bulk of their efforts.
Except an innovation that brings back life to dead or imminent death (or something similar) no innovation today is worth more than innovations resulting in running hot water and clean toilet. So please get a real and fuck the patent system away.
Anyone who thinks they are worth, please tell me which one of the innovations you would like to trade with clean toilet? One click? Rounded corners?
All patents essentially say the same "Method and system for doing some fuck in some fucking way on some fucking device that nobody would want to trade with a clean toilet".
So much for fucking innovation.
Headline and summary convey two very different things. Less sensation, please.
That's just a case of inventor hubris. No, your idea alone will not produce a great product. No, your idea is not so great that everybody will want to steal it. In fact, until you prove that your idea is great by reaping a lot of profit from selling your innovative product, you'll have to shove your idea down people's throat to get venture capital, shelf space, loans, etc. The truth is that nobody wants your idea. Yes, they will steal it eventually after you prove that it's good, but proving may take a long time. Perhaps even 20 years.
All corporations engaged in R&D invariably sink money into projects that don't turn into viable products and it hits them in their profit/loss statements.
Yes, but they cover the losses from the nonviable projects with the profits from the profitable ones. Limiting the profit of each individual product would ensure that one failed product would bankrupt a company.
This is one area where I would gladly trade affordability for rate of innovation if it means more people can access the product.
Would you prefer a rate of innovation of zero, with all innovation shifting to other countries? Legislators seeking to draw tax-paying companies to their countries wouldn't.
Not to pick on everyone's punching bag but I'm pretty sure the iPad was at least invented by Star Trek and it was called the PADD so many of its patents should not have been granted.
The main problem of the USPTO is it went from a non-profit organization to a for-profit organization so it was in their best interest to allow as many patents as possible as opposed to allowing patents that were truly revolutionary.
I think we can agree that describing a fictional invention doesn't generate the same IP as describing the actual functioning invention.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You are obviously not in the medical business.
No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents to give the inventors time to make their years of investment back by a period of exclusivity.
Dont forget aqueduct, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, health! Would never happen without patents.
Oh, did I mention Shakespeare would not write anything without Strong Copyrights?
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Patents drive innovation. Ordinary citizens benefit from the release from drudgery as a result. It only took about a century to relieve about 80% of the population involved in hard physical farm work down to 5% of the population in farm work, supported mostly by farm machinery inventions.
Now you're saying that it was Patents, not Cheap Energy, that drove the mayor changes we've had the last 200 years. Truth is that with No Patents and Cheap Energy the result would be pretty much the same, with Patents and No Cheap Energy we'd still have 80% in hard physical farm work.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
It's a different operating space ; pharma patents the molecule. Medicines only have a few components. Patents are narrow - a molecule is a molecule and can't be interpreted as anything else.
You'd be surprised. A medicine may have only a few components, but the patent for an active pharmaceutical ingredient will cover all of the combinatoric possibilities for related analogues and formulations, combinations with other drugs, different possible uses, etc. And then there are the manufacturing patents: Sure, you invented an awesome new biological drug. Now you have to pay licensing fees to the company that has patents that cover the best ways to get wee beasties to express it, and then more fees to the company that has patents on the best ways to purify it, another when you go to package it to the guy who patented not leaving any air or gas in the vial (no joke!).
Also, This was probably a medical device or diagnostic agent, but the figure still seems very low. Two guys, a budget of $1M, and a combined 10 man years of effort might cover the bottled water deliveries for a New Drug Application.
And you, sir, might be right! ... and he's not developing a pharmaceutical?
So.... in the medical business... mentioning cancer drugs and getting cleared by FDA
I'm not a native English speaker, but I did assume that developing drugs and medicine could be said to be in the medical business. But no? Is medical business only machinery? Or what is the difference? Or is it something else I'm missing?
There is evidence. The EU has an economy similar in size to that of the US. The US patent system is widely considered to be stronger and allows much cheaper access to individuals. The US also leads the EU in innovation. There may be other reasons, but to omit the effect of the patent system is unfair.
The patent system is not perfect. The main beefs with the US patent system stem from the cost and time involved in litigation. This is a problem specific to the legal system in the US and not really seen in other countries, at least not need to nearly the same magnitude.
The fundamental misunderstanding with patents, particularly from people in software, comes from the inability to place yourself in the shoes of the inventor 5 or 10 years ago. Everything is obvious in hindsight. But if it was so obvious, why didn't you do it?
And no drugs that cure AIDS for example will ever be discovered in the current system, because it is much more lucrative to treat it as a chronic disease. Private research based on patents has its advantages and had a reason in the past, but it is time to move forward. We have means to do it differently now.
You should have 5 years of protection at absolute maximum, because every year of protection you get is another year a person with cancer can't afford their medication,
Unfortunately it now takes about 12 years to go from patent to approved drug. Eight years of protection doesn't seem out of line for 12 years of sunk costs.
And a design patent isn't describing a functioning invention.
Nor are patents nowadays describing the FUNCTIONING invention. Merely describing that the problem gets fixed "somehow".
Aw, sweet!
Someone published a paper. Watch the patent system disappear tomorrow!
Is there a DABDA clause in socio-economic data and research? /snark
Five years isn't enough time to start making money if you're a small business or individual author. I have books that I started writing more than five years ago that aren't even finished yet. But five years is an eternity if you're a corporate author or inventor. The problem is that there is no one time frame that makes sense for both, because the resources involved are vastly unequal.
A better solution, at least for patents, is to ban the practice of transferring patents to corporations, period, and to ban the transfer to individuals except in your will after you die, and to ban contracts that mandate who inherits those rights after you die (to prevent certain abuses that could otherwise occur with such a system).
Small companies wouldn't have a problem with that. They would continue to pay patent licensing fees to the original inventors. The larger the company got, the more infeasible such a scheme would become, and at some size, they would likely resort to not encouraging employees to obtain patents on their inventions in the first place, at which point patents would be solving the problem that they were originally intended to solve—protecting inventors from companies who steal their inventions—.without having all of the side effects that our current system has.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
1. Let there be patent exchange where patents can be bought/sold
2. Patent holder declares price of each license, number of the licenses they wish to sell in next 20 years, pay 2% of that total revenue they are going to generate from that and exchange adds that many licenses in the market. This money can be used to fund R&D, feed starving kids, something useful.
3. Interested parties can buy the license from the exchange and once all license are sold, the patent goes to public domain.
Innovators still have 1 to 50 upside while patent trolls will go bankrupt. Fair to Mr Little Guy and fair to Mr Big Corp.
Of course the numbers need tweaking but over all I think it solves the problems.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You are obviously not in the medical business.
No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents to give the inventors time to make their years of investment back by a period of exclusivity. Regulation by the government (mostly for safety & efficacy) is just another business expense, like fuel, that all players pay. The price to enter the game.
I call B.S., and provide the following link to the National Institute of Health's Invention Reporting Requirements for Grants and Funding page.
Fun fact: Most medical device and pharmaceutical research is actually done by the NIH, on the taxpayer dime, only to be subsequently patented and locked down by greedy-ass, for-profit corporations.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
p>No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents to give the inventors time to make their years of investment back by a period of exclusivity.
Really? Most fundamental medical advances are created in academia, mostly with public money. Many companies just take the relatively small step to a commercial product. William H. Oldendorf would have done his pioneering work on the CAT scan, whether there was a patent system or not. Indeed, looking at his wikipedia biography, he worked in public institutions for most of his life.
You are wrong. Anyone can copy your patented work and market it if they have a larger legal budget than you do.
I (and my business partner at the time) came up with a unique way to solve a problem. We patented it, and began selling product. We sold several thousand instances of said product and a big US company (we were a Canadian company) came along and duplicated our product, and began selling their copy for less than our parts cost. We had our lawyer send a nastygram, including our patent for reference. We received a reply from their legal department that said "We acknowledge receipt of your letter dated "... Our lawyer said that was lawyer speak for "come and get us, if you dare.". The best we could do was prevent them from exporting their product into Canada but since 95% of our customers were US based, we were screwed and eventually went out of business. It was estimated that it would take 5-10 years to fight and probably on the order of $1M.
so now what they need to do is explain
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You're assuming that the alternative to patents is no kind of financing at all. This assumption is ridiculous. There's a 20x spread in the distribution of academic estimates of average drug development costs; the US government is already paying a fair bit more in medicare/medicaid drug reimbursement than the total cost of developing drugs using the highest estimates (and ridiculously more if we use the lower or median estimates).
So - the money is already being spent by the government to cover all of the research. It is being wasted by the extremely high marketing costs (according to Wikipedia) and extreme profits (17% of revenue, top industry in the US). Marketing costs seems to be somewhere between 2x the cost of research ( "The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States") to 19x research (Wikipedia claiming 1.3% vs 25% of revenue).
There are high production costs as well - quoting the above study paraphrasing a Candian study (in French):
For example, in an accounting study based on the annual reports of ten of the largest global pharmaceutical firms, Lauzon and Hasbani showed that between 1996 and 2005, these firms globally spent a total of US$739 billion on “marketing and administration.” In comparison, these same firms spent US$699 billion in manufacturing costs, US$288 billion in R&D, and had a net investment in property and equipment of US$43 billion, while receiving US$558 billion in profits [9].
This gives the following division:
739 31% Marketing and administration
699 30% Manufacturing costs
288 12% Research and Development
43 1% Net investment in property and equipment
558 23% Profits
The relevant production costs are likely also include excessive profits for other layers in the chain of patent holders and sub-manufacturers, so the net result is at least a 3x-5x blowup of price compared to an efficient system.
But wait, there's more.
There's also a societal loss in that the research goes into researching the wrong drugs (me-too drugs, and minimal improvements to existing drugs because there is a winner-takes-most situation), and that people end up being ill that could have used drugs for treatment, because the drugs are expensive because the incentive structure is wrong.
I'll use the case of a road to illustrate, and connect back: When you're evaluating whether to build a public road, you want to evaluate the net value of the road, compared to doing other things with the money that it costs to build the road - more formally, that the net present value of the total utility value of people using the road is higher than the net present value of the investment needed to build it plus the maintenance costs. This means that, on average, the utility value for the person using the road in the future has to be higher than their fraction of investment + interest + maintenance costs.
However, when you *have* built the public road, the equation changes. At this point, you want to make sure that each individual use the road as long as the utility of their using it is higher than the additional maintenance costs and loss utility for other users imposed by their use. This can include a lot of users who have a relatively low utility from the road; certainly less than the cost of building + interest + general maintenance + use-specific maintenance. However, their utility still counts towards the total sum of utility provided by the road.
If you instead develop the road privately, and charge per use, each individual use of the road has to provide high enough utility that it covers it's fraction of building + interest + general maintenance + use-specific maintenance + transaction costs - and because you cut off anything that's lower utility than that, the number of uses you can divide this between bets much lower. This means that there are lo
There is a difference between medical devices and pharmaceuticals. MRI and CT would likely have developed in the way they did without patents because the capital requirements for practical system design and manufacture are so large. FONAR, the first MRI system, died in spite of its patents. GE, Siemens, Phillips had the capital to make it practical and cost effective. For MRI, the key advance is the pulse sequence discovered at Univ. of Aberdeen by Bill Edelstein and others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_A._Edelstein/ When I was in the business in the mid-80s, pulse sequences weren't patented and the capabilities of MRI systems were increased enormously year to year. CT scanners also require large capital. I believe there are sufficient barriers to entry for medical imaging to eliminate patents.
Surgical procedures weren't patented until recently. Medical devices which one or a few people could invent fall in a grey area in my mind, because the barrier to entry is small as the poster wrote. OTOH, Kearns and the intermittent wiper showed that patents aren't a barrier to abuse of the small inventor.
For pharmaceuticals, requiring generic firms to conduct their own safety checks within a decade of introduction of a new drug would likely suffice as a barrier to entry for the discovers.
You get a natural monopoly just by being the first to do something. The good thing about the natural monopoly is it automatically takes into account how big of an advance you made. If it's just a small step and if the market approves it will be quickly adopted. If it is a huge breakthrough it may take months or years for competitors to figure out how to do it and by then you can move on. Unlike the artificial monopoly of patents where you have a gatekeeper decide if it is a big enough step to deserve monopoly protection. And then they only have a few choices of how long that protection lasts.
If you get rid of patents the result will be smaller more frequent advances as companies concentrate on bringing them to market and not in front of a patent examiner. Overall progress will be much faster. Also all of the overhead will be eliminated which will free up people for more productive work.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Thats a fault with the litigation system. If they made the punishment for trolling something like 10x the costs involved then they would think carefully, or even better if they made the costs the putting into the public domain the patents involved they would think VERY seriously how they were used.
Every piece of tech in you life probably has half a dozen or more patents attached to it or more with no issues, hell even a single IC can have that these days, however the majority, ie 99% of these simply just work and you never hear about them.
The point he was making is this: Who would bring an MRI device to market, at the cost of millions in R&D, only to have it knocked off shortly thereafter? The answer is nobody because it would be a race to the bottom. The only way to do it would be to obfuscate the code and HW, if at all possible, so that it couldn't be kocked off. But this is what the guilds used to do.
The neckbeards hate patents because they want the return of the guilds. It's the same reason UNIX has cryptic CLE commands. Exclusion and guild-mentality. The neckbeads want guilds and secret knowledge. This is where we would be without letters patent, which literally means "open letters", in contract to closed and secretive.
Start the clock when the item is available. That was easy.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
"Even if the Wrights had somehow managed to patent the whole class of powered, fixed-wing aircraft,"
The way their longitudinal control patent was interpreted, that's exactly what they had. Look at the Wrights vs. Glenn Curtiss. Curtiss used a completely different mechanism for roll control, with a different control layout (both of which are basically the industry standard today), but he was not allowed to sell his products because they infringed on the Wrights' patents related to their (inferior) wing-warping roll control mechanism.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You mean the internet. Well, the argument isn't that government can never invent anything useful. It's that for the most part, they wouldn't invest in the right thing. Back when the internet was invented, no one except for government wanted (or needed) a fault resistant network, so government had to create one on its own. And fair dues, they invented something useful.
But would they have invested a smartphone? Unlikely
If something like a MRI can't be invented without patent protection I'm sure the LHC can't possibly have been built.
But, would you agree with me on:
1) other things like computer algorithms shouldn't be patented
2) you shouldn't have perpetual patents
Look kid, twenty years may be infinity for someone like you who's only 13 years old, but believe me -- it isn't forever (although I do think 20 years is too long for quickly obsoleted tech)
I think we'd all be living like Gene Rodenberry hoped we would right now dealing with space like a boss. Instead we get slightly better improvements on the same thing. If this actually happened it would revolutionise every aspect of life across the globe in an unprecedented way. The patent system and religion have kept us living in the dark ages.
In space no-one can hear your vuvuzela.
It's a different operating space ; pharma patents the molecule. Medicines only have a few components. Patents are narrow - a molecule is a molecule and can't be interpreted as anything else.
Interesting that you take it as a given that you patent the molecule rather than a specific treatment based on the molecule, which is supposed to be the only thing you can legally patent. It's theoretically not supposed to be the case that you can just sift through the biochemistry of living things, pluck out a likely looking molecule and claim it as your own. The slippery slope on this one is, however, very slippery.
X years protection to bring a product to market, Y years protection post market would be great, but not easy. The big problem: define available. You invent a product. A "completely independent" company copies it and puts it on the market first. You sue them; a long and tedious process with both sides dragging things out for years. After 5 years you settle and take the bulk of their profits. Then you licence the product to them and again receive the bulk of the profits for another 5 years. Mission "double my patent life" complete. Comparable collusions between generic and original pharma developers complete with ritualized lawsuits have been going on for a few decades, leaving congress to play whack-a-mole with the loopholes.
You sir have financial incentive to protect your investment. I think about the greater good for humankind which trumps your wallet. Global crowd sourcing beats any small entity at anything. The current patent system is failing, globally. I'd rather have many different private enterprises competing. In the end, the world benefits much more than some profit driven whore.
The purpose of the Patent is to allow the inventor make a profit without competition.
Absolutely wrong. The purpose of patents is to convince inventors to share their discoveries by offerring a temporary monopoly of such technology. Before patents, there were only trade secrets, and there were a lot of them. . .
Unfortunately, I hear too often about patent documents that fail to provide enough information for a typically skilled practitioner of the art to duplicate the result. Yeah, I know, [citation needed]; I don't have specific examples to give. What, though, is the difference between a patent document written in deliberately opaque language and a trade secret?
If patent applicants are actively working against the "share their discoveries" purpose of patents, then this benefit is also lost. Between the societal cost of patent litigation and the cost of distributed reverse-engineering of products sold, I'd prefer the reverse-engineering. Make reverse engineering explicitly legal, do away with patents, and I think we'd be much better off. It might encourage companies to retain their knowledgeable employees as a side benefit, too =P
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
- Why would today's much leaner, meaner, and savvier generic manufacturers (compared to mid 90's India) wait until approval to begin the process of developing their copy? Phase III results come in 2 or 3 years before the FDA signs off. For a drug that looked like a slam dunk a generic manufacturer would have two years of work in by the time the FDA approved the original. They'd turn in their paperwork for their copy to the FDA the same day the FDA approved the original. I'm also really dubious about the "prize" system that a lot of economists (including these two) tout as being more efficient. Quite often it is the second or third drug in a class that ends up helping the most people, e.g., lipitor vs mevacor. Those "me too" drugs started development at roughly the same time as the first-in-class drug. Will the prize for them be as big?
I'm a little late to the game, but there is a Whitehouse petition I signed after learning about how X-Plane, a really great flight produced by an independent team, is being threatened legally by a patent troll.
History does not warant a government-only solution. Indeed, it strongly suggests against it.
Of course, the AC didn't suggest a government-only solution. My take on it though is that you DO need a mix of research, especially for medical stuff.
In the USA, with the patent system, we work on sort of a prize system - be the first to give me X and I'll pay you Y. When X isn't guaranteed, and there are others attempting to provide it, the risk is such that you have to increase Y make it worth to pursue developing X. On the upside - the people who DO choose to develop X will be highly motivated.
This works for the USA. I'd like to see Europe leverage some of it's healthcare cost savings and attempt a different policy - "We'll pay you Y to attempt to develop X". Now Y can be small and you can pursue developments that might not make sense under the prize system - alternative uses for generic drugs, for example.
Of course, this amounts to competition in development funding methods as well as development. Not a bad idea, I think.
I don't read AC A human right
Personally, I've proposed stuff along the following idea:
1. Unpublished works, IE works not deliberately released to the public, have indefinite copyright.
2. The clock starts when you publish - IE try to make money off the work.
3. My personal thought is 10-20 years for copyright by default.
4. All published works need to be registered to receive copyright protection.
5. Part of receiving copyright is storing an unencrypted, highest quality copy with the Library of Congress*, This is free, other than the cost of the media(maybe).
6. The LoC will also maintain your contact information so people can contact you to obtain license to use it. If you can't be contacted, they may escrow standard license fees with the LoC and use it anyways. 'Due Faith attempt' would have to be defined further.
6. Copyright would be renewable for a 'modest' fee - basically, renewals pay for all the archiving efforts of the LoC. I'd use a sliding scale - submission is free, 1st renewal pays for the costs of maintaining secure storage for that period; 2nd+ renewals help pay for the free initial storage. The money goes towards making sure all the archived materials remain accessible, including transferring the digital data to new mediums as prudent/required. If Disney wants to subsidize pretty much everybody else keeping copyright on Steamboat Mickey and the rest of their archive active, it's their choice.
7. Maintenance of media that has fallen out of copyright at the LoC is paid for through a combination of user fees(subscription/retrieval/etc...), congressional funding, and even (tax deductible) donations.
*I figure that the rules for this would end up being a book - acceptable formats, media, transfer requirements, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
Fun fact: Most medical device and pharmaceutical research is actually done by the NIH, on the taxpayer dime, only to be subsequently patented and locked down by greedy-ass, for-profit corporations.
Eh, no. First of all, ever since the Bayh-Dole Act universities have been patenting their research like crazy. They have IP attorneys, technology transfer departments, and big holes in their budgets to fill. If there's money to be made from their research, they are getting it or suing the bejeezus out of someone until they do. Second of all: Universities generally do basic research, the kind that identifies drug targets, not drugs themselves. The majority of the research to invent and develop new drugs is done privately. Yes I know, Marcia Angell, etc. If you actually look at approved drugs about 25% start out in academia vs 75% starting out in industry.
So where is my part or at least the public part of the patent from the money people give to cancer research?
The universities that invent cancer treatments license them out to companies that develop them, just like their other inventions. If you want patents to cover basic science and laws of nature (what a lot of cancer research is actually about), the Supreme Court has a bone to pick with you.
Individuals need patents and money for motivation, governments need the threat of war and instability...unless the government is run with the (collective) will of an individual(s).
Oh, did I mention Shakespeare would not write anything without Strong Copyrights?
Ironic, considering that he is credited or at least strongly rumored to have copied/stolen credit for others' works.
No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents to give the inventors time to make their years of investment back by a period of exclusivity. Regulation by the government (mostly for safety & efficacy) is just another business expense, like fuel, that all players pay. The price to enter the game.
I have spent over $1m with my partner over 5 years to develop a product and get it FDA cleared for sale with 3 patents. We simply would not have started this project without knowing we could patent what we do, because otherwise J&J and P&G would both copy our product starting the day we released it publicly.
That's simply not true. in the absence of patent and copyright protections, demands for new and innovative products and solutions will still be met.
Take the Automotive industry for example. They're not allowed to patent their designs, yet every year all car lines have new designs. By your logic would not all cars look the same? The fashion industry is also not allowed copyright or design patents for clothing, and it is the most diverse and innovative market with some of the lowest barriers to entry. Fabric, sewing-machine, and Ideas can actually get you rich, even though designs are frequently borrowed across the entire industry. Every day a new fashion designer enjoys their 15 fame filled minutes without any patents or copyright protections. Brand Trademarks are allowed to protect consumers from knock-offs, so they know who their money is going towards funding, and that's really all that is needed.
I'm a scientist. You don't seem to be a scientist, not to me. You've taken a Hypothetical stance that Patents are Required for Progress and Beneficial to Society and are standing buy it religiously even in the face of contrary evidence. I say to you, that if you truly ARE a Scientist then why are you so afraid of testing your hypothesis? I propose we settle this once (but not for all, for times change). We are now in the Age of Information. It is time to do the damn experiment and abolish patents to see if they are truly beneficial or not. You have ZERO evidence to support your claims that patents are required. I have historical and current day evidence that suggests otherwise. If you are not just a greedy profiteer, but a Scientist with the good of society in mind, then the ONLY logical conclusion must be that we eliminate patents. It's not like we can't re-instate whatever crap laws we want later. You disrespect your trade, sir, by only applying the Scientific Method where it seems beneficial to you. You are a rapists of nature.
The FDA regulates everything used in medicine. From bandages to drugs to MRI's. He mentions CAT scans and MRIs in the same sentence, so why didn't you think it was one of those?
What you cited has absolutely no relevance to his business. The first clue to his post was the amount of money he mentioned. If he's only spending $1 million, it's an absolute guarantee he is not developing any type of pharmaceutical.
He also mentions clearance, not approval. Drugs and PMA devices get approval. 510(k) products get clearance. I work in the medical device industry and have developed several products. $1 million is cheap. For that kind of money, it is probably a class I or class II device. Those usually don't even require clinical trials. A competitor would just have to file a 510(k) to get clearance (less than 90 days).
Furthermore, the economics you cite don't translate to small companies entering the market.
Creating a marketing and distribution network can cost millions to create even a small one. It is slow and can take years to build up enough sales to become profitable. A J&J or P&G has an existing sales and distribution network. They can roll out a new product in days to a sales force 10 times as large. Economies of scale mean they can crush a little company.
Alternately, they could try to sell the idea to a large medical company, say, Covidien. But is Covidien going to give them any money when they or anyone can knock off the idea? Nope.
Small companies can barely compete against the big guys as it is. Sorry to say, but patents are critical to their survival. Unless you prefer only large companies be able to develop and sell products.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
it is Economists.
No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents to give the inventors time to make their years of investment back by a period of exclusivity.
I call bullshit. I helped work on MRI in the early 1980's in a university lab that was government funded. Likewise, I met someone at my university who was working on CAT scans in the 1970's (I asked about his very large stack of punch cards at the computer center). He was also government funded. For both of these innovations, the early work was done with public funding.
Clearly both CAT scans and MRI were invented long before they were patented. The early years of research to bring these inventions to fruition were mainly funded by the taxpayers. Why should one corporation get a monopoly on the fruits of this publicly funded research long after the inventions were actually invented?
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
2.Marketing increases the profit per dose, but not the price. I won't fight you on drugs being marketed/prescribed inappropriately and the overall cost to society that entails, but if an advertising campaign wasn't bringing in more dollars than it cost they would shut it down. The price is set pretty simply: the highest value for the equation (price) x ( number of doses we can sell to this customer at this price). Justification of the price is an afterthought, and cutting down waste in various layers of the system would certainly make it more efficient, but that would just concentrate the dollars in fewer hands, not lower the price. Prices (in our system) gets lowered by competition.
3. "Me too" drugs and minimal improvements. Most of the time that "me too" drug was already deep into clinical trials by the time the first-in-class was approved. Sometimes it was patented before the first in class was. The drugs that do follow up are (usually) only approved if they are more effective, have fewer side effects, or address patient populations that couldn't take the first generation drugs. Lovastatin was the first statin, but it's not the best. The societal cost due to researching the wrong drugs is hard to quantify, since it's hard to know where the money would have gone if it hadn't been to the "wrong" drug. Absent some new incentive, it probably wouldn't have gone to the "right" drug instead.
So lets see if your claims of progress are born out by the facts in the paper:
"Simply eyeballing the big trends shows that patenting has exploded over the
last decades. In 1983 in the United States, 59,715 patents were issued; by 2003,
189,597 patents were issued; and in 2010, 244,341 new patents were approved. In
less than 30 years, the flow of patents more than quadrupled. By contrast, neither
innovation nor research and development expenditure nor factor productivity
have exhibited any particular upward trend. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, annual growth in total factor productivity in the decade 1970 –1979 was
about 1.2 percent, while in the decades 1990 –1999 and 2000 –2009 it has been a bit
below 1 percent. Meanwhile, US research and development expenditure has been
oscillating for more than three decades in a narrow band around 2.5 percent of
GDP. The recent explosion of patents, in other words, has not brought about any
additional surge in useful innovations and aggregate productivity. In new industries
such as biotechnology and software —where innovation was already thriving in their
absence —patents have been introduced without any positive impact on the rate
of innovation. The software industry is an important case in point. In a dramatic
example of judge-made law, software patents became possible for the first time in
the early 1990s. Bessen and Meurer, in a large body of empirical work culminating
in Patent Failure (2008), have studied the consequences of this experiment and have
concluded that it damaged social welfare."
That is from page 4 in the report. So for *30 years*, R&D as a percentage of GDP has stagnated despite a quadrupling of patents issued. is that progress? The authors state that there is *NO* empirical evidence to suggest that patent actually increase innovation or productivity. None. I agree with the author and you're free to disagree. But the facts even from the introduction seem pretty plain to me.
If you didn't make your invention by now, someone else would have done it just for the first mover advantage.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Those damn open standards keep getting in the way.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Bessen and Meurer are in agreement. They found that patents tend to substitute for R&D. I think they tend to substitute for customer service, too.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
History favors open information & sharing. Patents originally helped this by reducing Trade Secrets, but now encourage hidden processes.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Yeah, talk about [citation needed]. Still looking for quotes from the inventors of "CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs" stating that they would have just given up if they weren't going to make enough $$. What a depressing view of humanity.
In that case, can't you just sell your patent to another big company and have them handle fighting the infringer?
If the other countries outside of the US keep patent law, wouldn't that be enough of a profit potential to still continue R&D? Why should we pay a high price for drugs when we can simply take a free ride off of the enforcement of patents filed in Europe and Canada?
Maybe you spent the money, but you didn't invent it. You hired people to do the work, and then claimed a monopoly on the results based on the fact that you funded it. They make the same arguments about Henry Ford re: cars, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs with their operating systems, etc., and always conveniently leave out the fact that the people funding and profiting off this stuff are almost never the ones who actually invented it. And in t he meantime, the monopolies are just getting better and better at blocking those of us who don't have a few million just to try out an idea.
We might need a way to help creative innovators get organized, but this idea that all human progress will stop if we decide that everyone is allowed to participate in, and take advantage of, human progress, is only truly believed by rent seekers and the completely uncreative. Funnily enough, those are the two groups least likely to contribute anything meaningful, and in the meantime if J&J and P&G would have done a better job getting units out the door, more power to them. That's the entire point.
When you're a startup, you're always on finite time/funding. We were focused on product development in order to stay competitive. Redirecting our efforts to litigation or IP sale was the choice we didn't make. Ultimately we ran out of money before we could get the next rev of our product out.. Our business died down much sooner than anticipated.
I have two patents both of which had active startups behind them. Neither of them worked out. Am I saying I didn't make mistakes? No; I made plenty of mistakes. But I'm simply saying that a patent really isn't a useful thing, in my experience..
Thanks for taking the time to clear things up for me.
Now I see I got caught a little by the flames, that usually burn around online discussions - pre-tty stupid.
While I agree, that patents seems like the only viable solution for the little guy to enter the market, it only holds true under the conditions currently existing in the market.
What the paper is trying to say, is that you could change things. I actually think that if we tried the solutions suggested in the paper, everybody would be better of, patents would be as good as gone, and everybody, big or little, would have a chance to innovate and enter the market.
You should read it if you haven't, it's quite interesting. It gives you some idea of, that we don't have to keep an outdated monopolitic system that mostly works in the favor of the big guys - even though it gives a little room for the small guy as well - because we can make alternative systems that are better.
Cutting the Gordian knot by abolition is probably the only way to fix it. But reform is possible. The problem is, we would have to admit mistakes.
The US Patent Office is a very small, but critical component of the US economy. It's purpose is "..to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.." (US Constitution Article One, Section 8(8).) But, once the USPTO became cost recovery, the primary goal became overshadowed by the more pressing goal of securing funding via patent fees. The primary effect of cost recovery is to guarantee continued regulatory capture by the patent industry.
The patent industry want's patents. Lots of them. They don't care about quality. In fact, most of the patent industry prefers to have vague, sweeping patents. Currently, patent filings are up. Patent quality is down. Lawsuits are up. This is a desired outcome for the patent industry. But, what is good for the patent industry is not good for the rest of the country.
Reform is painful, but simple. Admit cost recovery is a failed experiment. Revert the funding model to the model used 30 years ago. The USPTO must be centrally funded by the US government. Any collected fees should be returned to the US Government.
Currently most of the revenue of the US Patent Office comes from GRANTING patents. See the USPTO FY 2013 President's Budget page 37: www.uspto.gov/about/stratplan/budget/fy13pbr.pdf "..More than half of all patent fee collections are from issue and maintenance fees, which essentially subsidize examination activities."
Also, if you examine the fee structure in Public Law 112 - 29 - Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, you see that patent application fees are 1/3 or less that the Issue fee. See: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-112publ29/content-detail.html
This means that, regardless of merit, about 1/3 of all patent applications must be granted in order to fund the US Patent Office. This economy creates unavoidable pressure to grant many patents that should not otherwise be considered. It also creates economic pressure that greatly decreases the time that can be devoted to examination.
Reform could come in many forms, but the simplest and most reliable would be to eliminate and unify the Patent office fees into a single filing fee. This fee would provide no guarantee of receiving a patent, only a guarantee that your patent would be considered. This would free the Patent Office to be able to deny poor patents.
Currently, we expand the number of patent examiners based on demand. See the USPTO FY 2013 President's Budget, page 60, Gap Assessment: "Meeting this commitment assumes efficiency improvements brought about by reengineering many USPTO management and operational processes (e.g., the patent examination process) and systems, and hiring about 3,000 patent examiners in the two-year period FY 2012 and FY 2013 (including examiners for Three-Track Examination)."
Again, the assumption is, more patents are better, even if it means decreasing examination, and increasing the number of untrained examiners. Poor quality is an inevitable result of this patent process.
The resulting flood of patents creates patent thickets. These thickets eliminate competition and stagnate markets.
Reform would require somehow limiting the number of granted patents in a field. This could be accomplished several ways. The easiest would be to restrict the number of Patent examiners. If you eliminate the idea of cost recovery, then the natural process of limited congressional funding would probably suffice to limit the examination staff. Patent quotas would also work, but an PTO quota would be subject to regula
Coming up later, other economists argue patent system should not be abolished.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Nice to hear more people saying this. Time to eliminate the patent system completely. It's too broken to be fixed.
So... the problem is the FDA (another government institution), NOT the inherent cost of medical research. You need patents (intellectual monopoly) to overcome the finacial burden created by the (anti-innovation) FDA.
Government solutions to governement problems. The whole systems is made up of this.
IMHO research should be done on tax payers money, using global co-operation.
In other words, by just about the least effective way possible.
I remain a bit puzzled why patents are blamed in the paper for the system not working instead of the approval processes. For new drugs, it can take tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per potential use of a potential drug in order to pass government hurdles in the developed world. And there's a lot of risk that the drug won't work as expected. That's a lot of disincentive to research new pharmaceuticals or other medical technology.
It is the method patents that are doing this. The fact is, that hardware patents belong here. They have always been useful. However, we should strengthen some laws to prevent retailers, such as walmart and target from KNOWINGLY importing and selling goods that are breaking US patents.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Except 1 million dollars is the easiest thing in the world to piss into a law firm defending yourself from someone with a billion dollars and a vested interest in taking your ideas.
The patents they have don't even need to apply to you; for them to try to use them against you, costing you a bucketload. All you have to do is sell out to them to make the lawsuits go away. Worst case scenario they slowed you down while their own inferior but related technology is developed and tested with the FDA and competing whilst holding you up and stealing your first-to-market advantage.
That is of course if your chosen market has anything they consider worthy of taking. If the cost to take it was zero; you are right they'd do it the moment you released. But if there was a billion dollars to be made; and all they'd have to do is spend 10 million burning YOUR 1 million... you bet your ass they'd have a crack.
How many of you think that inventors should not be allowed to patent their inventions?
How many of you are willing to work for free?
I thought as much.
Who? Perhaps non-profit publicly-funded research organisations, who wouldn't have to worry about manufacturers making cheap copies because that'd be the whole damn point?
And I'm sorry, but _neckbeards_? The _neckbeards_ want the return of the guilds? Are you sure you know what that term means? And letters patent?! The old guilds often _relied_ on letters patent to maintain their monopolies (that and the occasional kneecapping / horse's head). The original letters patent were NOT about publicly describing inventions so that anyone could license it, but about publicly declaring that the local ruler had granted someone (e.g. a guild) exclusive control over the manufacture and trade of a particular item or items, and anybody who argued risked ending up on the wrong end of a sword.
FFS. You should be ashamed of yourself. Unless you were trolling, in which case, damn, you're too subtle for your own good.
This is the fundamental issue with patents. Why should it have to go to a legal team and court for this? Why should the patent system not have the regulatory power to decide which patent supersedes which? after all, they are the ones granting them. Maybe they should be held liable for allowing patents to infringe... That would shake the patent system up to no end if the patent office is liable for not getting its facts correct and hopefully will define better strategies to prevent the kind of BS NBLENDER has had to go through which is absolutely how the system is letting everyone down. Why should Joe Citizen have to defend against Big Corpulent Killer in an unfairly weighted system such as that exists today? So many 1st world problems...
One by one the 20th century systems will be proven ineffective and undone. The future has been a long time coming. I hope they don't delay it much further.
Isn't this a dup from september 2013?
What two economists? Which economists? The corporations and lawyers who shill for them (and likewise the politicians), will find these 'economists' and have them removed from their positions. If they can't do that, then they will hire the Chicago branch of La Cosa Nostra to find these 'economists' and make them an offer they can't refuse. After Tony (aka) "Knuckles" and Sylvester (aka) "Screwdriver Sammy" discuss the situation with these 'economists', they will suggest patents go on forever, oh and copyright too. There is too much money. Patents mean that stuff belongs to you forever. This is what the corporations want. It means lawyers can make a living on something that was 'created' and is 'owned' by the corporation hundreds of years before. Something for nothing is not a thing they will give up. Again, they will make an offer not to be refused.
p>No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents to give the inventors time to make their years of investment back by a period of exclusivity.
Really? Most fundamental medical advances are created in academia, mostly with public money. Many companies just take the relatively small step to a commercial product. William H. Oldendorf would have done his pioneering work on the CAT scan, whether there was a patent system or not. Indeed, looking at his wikipedia biography, he worked in public institutions for most of his life.
Most of the companies are LLC partnerships developed by the faculties at the Universities who then hire business staff to help run their inventions. It's a synergy of public/private cooperation. Get it? The OP talking about MRI can however thank Particle Physics and Particle Accelerators for the reason MRI, CAT Scans, and the like along with thousands of other advances needed as building blocks to solve a big science idea, for their existence.
“Intellectual Property” is about monopolisation and exploitation; in Real Life® it has zippo to do with improving the lot of an inventor, even less to do with the greater good of mankind or anything majestic like that.
[citation needed]
Seriously. Because on a global (or even national) market scale, nobody has yet been able to prove that patents have any benefit to society. And that includes patents on pharmaceuticals. The only case where a statistically significant result is available is software -- and in that case it's highly negative (-13 or something, if I remember correctly), so it's proven that software patents actually DO stifle innovation. But a correlation of something like "-0.36" (as in pharmaceuticals and mechanics) proves nothing, it just suggests that the patent system is probably useless.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Really? What does "research should be done on tax payers money" mean in your dialect of English?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I see no added value in copying something that already exists. Great, two hammers. That's much better than a hammer and a screwdriver, isn't it?
Standing on the shoulders of giants? More like standing behind them kicking them in the arse.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
When your primary motive is profit, many corporations (people) will choose to do whatever will maximize their profits. We are born as egocentric creatures with little regard for others beyond their use as means to our own ends. Appropriate parenting is what 'civilizes' such creatures. Do it properly and you get Mother Teresa. Do it wrong and you get Donald Trump.
What part of 'solution' implies that it's only research?
Research doesn't really do anything unless you implement it.
I don't read AC A human right