Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Who is going to invest years of money and time to develop new technologies when, as soon as they try and sell them, they're hit with a dozen crippling expensive lawsuits from patent trolls and large monopolies who have gamed the system to secure shedloads of vague, over-broad patents?
The patent system is a nice idea that just plain doesn't work - see debacles like the Apple/Samsung war (...and lets not take sides - that is a debacle from every direction with stupid over-broad patents on both sides and a floundering jury asked to make an impossible decision). It relies on a distinction between "obvious" and "non-obvious" that can't be satisfactorily defined and is such a specialised area of law that only megacorps can afford decent representation. Anybody with the necessary polymath genius credentials to be a patent officer is going to be so bored by the job that they just end up sitting and daydreaming about riding beams of light...
If patents are taken away then maybe something is needed to replace them. As far as software is concerned that already exists - it's called 'copyright'. In the case of medicine, all civilised countries have a system of regulation and approval for new treatments, which could easily incorporate a limited period of exclusivity.
As for patents and innovation - do you like using the Internet? That was built on open source and open protocols. Do you think that would exist in anything like its current form if all the protocols had been patented by big monopolies back in the 1980s? Enjoy using your AT&T(r) Compuserve(r) Email(tm) 2013(tm) system. Not Microsoft or Apple, note, they wouldn't have existed if Bill and the Steves had been nuked by IBM patent lawyers as soon as they tried to distribute computer software.
Funny that, all those big software companies that didn't need patents when they were exploding out of their parents garages but, now they're huge multinationals with skyscrapers and dominant market positions, suddenly see them as essential to 'innovation'.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
> 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?
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.
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
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"
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.
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.
The guilds are now corporations and the thugs are lawyers. Other than that, I don't see that much has really changed.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.