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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
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.
I think a middle ground is the more prudent course of action. I actually wonder if this suggestion was put out there as a starting point to begin negotiations. I'd certainly love to see us do away with software (since that's copyright IMHO), and business practice patents. But, I'm willing to bet that there are still plenty of justifiable reasons to keep patents for new inventions. I'm also sure we can reasonably debate how long these patents should be good for, and also address the processes of attaining one.
I don't think the *only* reason companies are buying up other patents are for protection. I think we all know some cases where they're being bought up for the purpose of going on the offensive. There are also many patents out there that are even serving their original intent too, I'm sure.
I'll take some of whatever you're smoking. Patent law is overwhelmingly used for offensive strategies, as opposed to defensive strategies (as you claim). And the vast majority of invocations of patent law are performed by mega-corporations, rather than the little guy (as you claim).
It is almost too ironic that you told the guy above you that he "has it backwards".
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
In the software world - maybe. My world is pharmaceuticals and patents are needed, and should maybe even be extended in some cases. It isn't like the software world where companies buy patents for the purposes of some weird legal warfare. For pharma, patents represent a way for them to recoup the R&D costs made on a drug. Patents need to exist for pharma since there is such strict testing before it can be used on the general public. All this information has to be handed over to the government, where it doesn't remain a secret. No patents would kill new drug development in a heartbeat.
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"
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.
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.
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.