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Patents That Kill
wabrandsma (2551008) writes From The Economist: "The patent system, which was developed independently in 15th century Venice and then in 17th century England, gave entrepreneurs a monopoly to sell their inventions for a number of years. Yet by the 1860s the patent system came under attack, including from The Economist. Patents, critics argued, stifled future creativity by allowing inventors to rest on their laurels. Recent economic research backs this up."
We don't live in a rational society, we live in a thinly-veiled jungle.
Post!
Why was this modded down? This is probably his single accomplishment in life. Let the man have this one thing!
And this is the same for copyrights.
leather-dog muksihs
Blog: @muksihs
Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
- Thomas Jefferson
The Ec onomist was around in 1860? The more you know!
"The patent system encourages pharmaceuticals to pump out drugs aimed at those who have almost no chance of surviving the cancer anyway. This patent distortion costs the U.S. economy around $89 billion a year in lost lives." When I read this, I felt that the Economist article lost all credibilty. It is very hard to know anything about the actual monetary effects of patents in the economy. Then add the uncertainty of drug research, and the uncertainty of lives that are saved even with known drugs (not imagined drugs stimulated by an hypothetical patent system). And then, placing a dollar value on the saved lives. Really? $89 billion. Not $93 billion? Not $400 million? Not 800 billion? Are you sure lives are not actually saved under the current regime, compared to most alternative non-distorted patent systems? Given the uncertainties, getting the right order of magnitude would be a challenge, and two significant digits is absurd.
Join the IParty!
The title is extremely misleading
I was very disappointed in the actual topic
Because its a tired old meme that rotted into dust years ago. It is deserving of being modded down..
Personally, I cant wait for that pathetic shark laser head frickin meme to follow suit. But there are still a large enough number of pathetic people who continue to mod it as funny to this day.*
* go ahead, mod me down. But ill become more powerful than you could ever imagine. Do it.
I wish I could find the link, but no luck so far. There was a speech given to the house of lords in England in the 1700s where an attorney argues that copyrights are only beneficial to the copyright owner, which tends to not be the artist where the copyright is intended. Print shops would demand copyright to print a book, but of course they would pay the artist a few pennies for their troubles. The speech covers a well known English auhor's family woes after his death. Even though he was a well known author and sold enough books that he should have been wealthy, after he died his family was left destitute. The reason was because a publisher owned all of his copyrights and his family never received a penny in royalties.
Of course the copyright holder (publisher) was suing the house to extend copyrights, because it's so beneficial to the economy.
A bit off topic I realize, since TFA is about patents. The thing is though, the arguments stay the same. It is not like John the inventor gets to hold his patent and benefit, it's more like John the inventor's patent was 90% owned by the company he worked for because they sued him for the rights.
Some things never change. This has a lot to do with why they try and make backroom laws like TPP, CISPA/SOPA type laws, etc.. Rational people would point out the flaws, so in the US we just make the discussions a matter of national security so people don't know. Thank goodness a few companies got on the bandwagon with CISPA/SOPA, but the next versions are not being discussed publicly and are works in progress in the Senate and House.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The patent on killing should have expired ages ago. That undead bastard Caine has been resting on his laurels ever since.
go ahead, mod me down. But ill become more powerful than you could ever imagine. Do it.
It's a trap!
It's a word-for-word copy of an entire post made by someone else. The copyright for it will expire in 2150, give or take, unless more copyright extensions are added before then. Until then said post is infringing on copyright and must be taken down.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Dear Arm-Chair Economists and Young Professional Economists:
In case you didn't know, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis is awesome! They have a ton of talent working there, both economists and IT geeks. The paper cited in the summary was written by researchers there. And they're the ones who built FRED, the world's most amazing portal to economic data. http://research.stlouisfed.org/
Everybody loves to complain how modern economics suffers from too much modeling and ideology, and not enough solid empirical research. Well, they do empirical work in St. Louis like none other. That place just blows my mind, especially when you consider all the junk "research" performed by other organizations, including, sadly, many universities.
He's off topic, so no. :p
Oh wait, I don't have any mod points.
The main problem is, what do we replace the patent system with? Can we rely on only government-funded research (which may become a crony system or refuse to fund politically incorrect things)? Can we rely on people inventing things as a hobby?
I'm not against patents per se, but the approval rate of illegitimate patents is astronomical and the period is too long (would have to be different lengths based on different things).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The idea of patents going in to play was to enable an inventor to benefit from his work. Now we are seeing some information that patent protections stifle economies and progress. Both views are probably correct when applied to specific patents. A patent can work for or against progress. Here is the catch. We can't stand still and debate nonsense philosophies while the world moves on. Socialism or capitalism become the dance that all players get in set with. The reality is that technology is taking us to a world where ideas like socialism and capitalism simply have no validity at all. Human workers are vanishing. Pensions and retirement plans are also usually nothing to count on or value. With companies going off shore and merging and the like the notion of stock in a corporation is not likely to be valid either, We need to urgently start to get rid of these concepts for good. They no longer are valid. Many bright people can not confront this issue at all. But it is real and it is happening right now. So we need to be done with all that nonsense otherwise people will repeat useless behaviors. For example when a suburbanite has an issue they call a congressman. But congress is no longer a living entity. They are way too busy fussing over who is the most savage capitalist and being bribed to stay in their jobs. Soldiers can not count on the VA when disabled. Our wealth is murdered by inflation and endless outcries from the public make it next to impossible to use land that one owns. If you think your company will honor its pensions then you are foolish. Social Security will pay out as it should but the value of the money will make those checks a joke. We need to eliminate the house and the Senate completely. And we need to burn our law books and rewrite the entire body of law that applies everywhere, to everyone, every time. How can we have law when our leaders who approved of torture have not been tried for war crimes? Even Richard Nixon was guilty of felonies yet there was no jail for Nixon. His vice president Spiro Agnew was convicted of receiving bribes. Make note that Agnew did not go to prison. Yet we put people in prison for cashing a bad check or shoplifting some junk items. Just like the Arab nations our legal heritage is in the crazy ward or junk yard.
you're an idiot
Lazy and ignorant patent judges are the problem.
They allow people to patent stupid things that shouldn't be patentable THAT is the problem. Not patents themselves.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Am I the only one who thought that was the title at first?
Overall, I agree that patents don't help much with innovation. However, I think pharmaceutical patents, unlike most other patents, do, in fact, encourage innovation. The fact that they encourage the wrong kind of innovation (minor variations on existing drugs) is not a problem with patents per se, it's a problem with the costs and risks of FDA approval: it's much safer to develop a small variant of an existing drug than to develop a completely novel drug for untreatable diseases.
Sorry, guys, you can't have it all: lots of innovation, safety, and low cost. Pick any two.
Not a single death was reported. Hey, here's an idea: don't make your headlines misleading. Patents might not be my favorite thing in the world, but unless they are literally killing people, then this headline is horseshit. The Economist just got added to my blacklist for that. Good job, jackasses!
http://tintuc.oho.vn/news/c180...
He's not just an idiot, he's crazy! Yeah, trade secret, we put cocaine back in Coca Cola. Because that's what would happen if the FDA went away. Really nasty things would get marketed toward us as "trade secrets".
https://plus.google.com/101541...
Everything will become trade secrets making it impossible or extremely difficult for others to build on previous discoveries.
The best example believe it or not of patents working is the computer industry. Every single component in your computer is full of dozens if not hundred of patents belonging to dozens or more different companies. Yet computers in real terms just get more powerful and cheaper. Moores law has been holding up well for 50 years, if patents had been an impediment surely mores law would suffer from patent restrictions rather than the laws of physics.
People have the right to decide for themselves what to buy and consume. USA cannot even have sunscreen that wasn't designed before 1998, and while the rest of the world is enjoying uva and uvb protection that lasts the entire day, Americans have skin cancer epidemic all while FDA is expecting sun screen manufacturers "to prove efficacy". Talk about crazy idiots and their online sympathisers.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
WTF is this? an empty google plus page. Why is it modded up?
At first I thought it must have been taken down; but now I'm trying to imagine why someone would want you to click on their page.
Slashcode should auto insert a first post post. Then the meme will become "second post!".
Oh ya fuck beta since there is no captcha required to post anonymously on mobile.
No No NO! You are obviously not earning enough money from patents to appreciate the money that is being earned and therefore you must be wrong! We must fight this attack on patents!
One way to avoid the patent cliff (and perhaps foster innovation) is to use double declining balance deprecation in accounting. As in, if a patent-holding company sues another company for patent infringement, then the final damages will be reduced by the fraction of the residual value. So patent-holding companies will be compelled to innovate, since at some point less than lifetime of the patent, another company may decide to violate it anyway since it's economic to do so.
Of course, I have no idea how this would apply to embargos.
Moore's law doesn't suffer under the current regime, because Moore's law was written within the current regime. There's no telling what would happen, or what would have happened, in the microelectronics industry without the current patent rules. Perhaps Moore's law would have been "...doubles every 6 months", instead of 18 or 24 months?
What products covered by "dozens if not hundreds of patents belonging to dozens or more different companies" do is encourage collusion and anti-competitive practices, and even in the absence of abuse massively raise the bar for new entrants to the market (aka competition).
And how do you make an informed decision if everything is a trade secret and there is no FDA to make people tell you what is win their crap? Here rub this egg all over you, you will not get cancer, I promise.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Whenever I read an article on here about extending copyright or patent durations, I'm reminded of the short story Melancholy Elephants. Full text available at http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm. Well worth a few minutes' time.
" ... developed independently in 15th century Venice and then in 17th century England".
It seems to me that 200 years is time enough for an idea to make its way from Italy to England, isn't it?
Maybe Venetians just forgot to patent their patent system...
Reality: in EU copiright on Elvis Presley's work was about to expire. (original term was 50 years)
Viola, it's 95 years now.Justifications:
1) Not a guaranteed lifetime income (yikes): "McCreevy said that, with longer life expectancy, 50 years of copyright protection did not give artists a guaranteed lifetime income."
2) Poor european performers would suffer: "'If nothing is done, thousands of European performers who recorded in the late 1950s and 1960s will lose all of their airplay royalties over the next 10 years', McCreevy said. "
3) Why are composers better than performers: "'I have not seen or heard a convincing reason why a composer of music should benefit from a term of copyright that extends to the composer's life and 70 years beyond, while the performer should enjoy 50 years, often not even covering his lifetime', McCreevy said."
And last, but not least: "The proposals (to increase copiright from 50 to 95 years) were widely welcomed by the music industry."
From: http://www.elvis.com.au/presle...
My point is: NONE of the arguments are in line with the original intent.
None of the big players wants the system to drastically change either. Unless serious part of electorate starts to care, things are not going to change.
Without patents, most people wouldn't have the drive to develop their product. Money drives people, unfortunately. A larger company with more money could come in, take an idea and run with it, leaving the patent-less inventor empty handed. I agree the patent system is flawed and needs correcting, but, entrepreneurs absolutely need to protect their ideas.
Most people seem to think you have a great idea, patent it and develop it and make money. HA. First of all, patents generally cost $10-50k each by the time they're approved. Second, only 0.01% or so of all patents are actually useful and make the inventor money. Third, an inventor has to continually improve on their product, and write new patents to protect themselves. Another company can come along and submit a patent as an improvement on the original patent, thereby skirting the original patent or forcing the original company to license it.
Finally, even if you have a great idea, a great team and good financing, an idea still has a good probability of failing. Writing a patent is pretty easy. Developing the patent into a product, including manufacturing, marketing, etc. is damn hard. If it was easy, everyone would be rich ;).
There's a medicine for these things: Fuckit'all!
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html
The article seems to dwell on the "woes" of the pharmacological industry. Patents just don't last long enough to make a profit is what I get out of it. Yet that industry seems to make about as much in profit as any industry. Check out some of their profit reports. They have very big friends in the regulatory arm of government. To make patents last especially long for their industry seems to be what is suggested.
Sorry. I just can't justify in my mind giving them an even longer monopoly on their wares so they can make an even higher profit margin. Apparently, even after a patent is over, they seem to make plenty on the drugs they sell. A free market system in that industry would do a lot to bring down the cost of healthcare nowadays.
Patents/copyrights aren't necessarily the problem, a properly restricted patent/copyright system can encourage innovation especially in discoveries that require a lot of work (R&D, writing, etc). The problem is keeping those who hold the patents/copyrights from infecting the system and turning it into their own personal money printing press. The constitution (at least here in the US) tried to specifically deal with this, stating that patents were for the benefit of society for a limited time. Unfortunately our corrupt court system simply reinterpreted "limited time" to mean eternity -1 and glazed over the part about benefiting society. It points to a more fundamental issue in our government, the ability to ignore the law where it is convenient/profitable.
Everything will become trade secrets making it impossible or extremely difficult for others to build on previous discoveries.
Do you have rigorous scientific evidence to back that up? You shouldn't be able to pass such laws without having at least that.
Though, even if you did (you don't), copyrights and patents infringe upon free speech (copyright enforcement utilizes censorship to enforce copyrights) and/or private property rights (can't pass around data using your own equipment or make something using your own resources), and are therefore 100% intolerable.
Also, your logic of, "X seems successful. Therefore, it's because of the current system, and not in spite of it!" is not scientific at all. Do you honestly think that such mindless speculation would be applauded in real science?
The current pace of innovation is astounding. We have witnessed dorm-room businesses grow to among the largest companies in the world. At the same time, we have witnessed massive corporations--with expansive patent portfolios--fall to the wayside. Complex new products are introduced and become household items with unprecedented efficiency. Companies that fail to continually innovate, fail.
All of this has happened with the patent system in place, with some minor modifications along the way.
We can change the system all we want. But beware the law of unintended consequences.
That depends on the jurisdiction. Here in the United States, Dastar v. Fox states that trademarks can't be used to extend the effective term of a copyright.
The principles behind patents and copyright are sound, the current implementations are, on the other hand, absurd. If someone could steal your ideas and/or work and beat you to the market, what incentive would you have to create it in the first place? That is the situation that patents and copyright were meant to overcome.
The old saying was "Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door", and to a large extent, this was true. In the current day (thinking software) however, the first guy is being allowed to not only patent his mouse trap, but the very idea of the mouse trap. His patent effectively blocks everyone from building a mouse trap, regardless of implementation (unless they can work out a license deal $$$). The allowance of overly broad patent terms is what is stifling innovation.
The current implementation of copyright similarly stifles innovation. (IMHO, software should not be patentable, but copyrighted.) In terms of copyright reform, this is a great place to start: http://www.scribd.com/doc/1136...
You patent something, everyone can make it but they have to pay you royalties (FRAND?). Put it into patent law so that automatically happens and everyone benefits.
30 years tops for patents and copyrights two 15 year periods. Make that retroactive to get people off their butts again.
If some inventors will "rest," then it's the promise of money that made them invent and patent in the first place. If you take away the patent, and therefore the promise of money, you won't even get the first invention out of the money-motivated. Especially if the patent-free economy is dominated with idea-stealing industrialists. Those motivated by other-than-money will keep inventing, patents or not.
The central problem in our system is that because we treat IP as real estate, most of it ends up in the hands of middlemen who had no part in creating the work. Instead, I would eliminate the fungibility of intellectual property and recast it as a personal right of the creator. Any company exploiting a patent would have to maintain a contractual relationship with the creator for the life of the patent. This would mean no more buying up an artist's copyright for nothing and then cashing in on it with no participation when the artist achieved fame. On the technical side, no longer would an inventor get paid off and be replaced with an H-1B as soon as his patent proved profitable.
What happens when there is no individual "creator" of an invention/art? Many modern inventions/creative works are collaborations between dozens/hundreds/thousands of people. It takes thousands to make a modern theatrical film, most technical innovations require a team with varied skills (programmers, electrical engineers, ergonomic designers, interface specialists, etc). I agree that the ability of IP to bought/sold/traded should be curtailed significantly but its going to be harder to define than I think your anticipating.
who cares if that was independent or not - UK, US and others have to pay royalties on this great invention of patents to if I understand correctly - an italian city of Venice.
I have the perfect solution for solving the copyright and intellectual property problems of our days, but cannot share it: it is copyrighted
If the goal of patents is to encourage innovation, then the patent system is no longer necessary except for targeted fields where technological progress is slow. For example I'd welcome patents for a better rocket engine, a space elevator or a room temperature superconducting microchip. But for most information technologies, patents should be abolished altogether.
Think of it this way, patent protection makes sense in a world where there are only a hundred or so inventors, but not where there are tens of millions of inventors or makers, who are basically "inventors" without Edison's pretension of building something from scratch. Where there are millions of inventors, patents can only get in the way of further innovation.
If you could reliably keep something secret indefinitely while practicing it, you'd be a fool to seek a patent on it. I wish people would quit repeating the ridiculous myth that patents somehow reduce trade secrets in any beneficial way.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
" stifled future creativity by allowing inventors to rest on their laurels."
What? Inventors are supposed to be slaves to society? Forced to continually pump out creativity and not benefit from it?
Bushwha.
Why can't I just get some news here and then form my own view?
In fact even today trade secrets are perhaps a better way of doing business than patents. All you need is a clan that sticks together and protects the collective knowledge, or business methodology, which may entail things practiced to their highest finesse even though they are public domain and expired as far as patents go. Of course with affirmative action you cannot sustain your business clan because here comes a big black cock through your front door, or back door, asking for a job, and if you don't hire him the government shuts you down. I wish there were such a law for businesses that are predominately off-white (i.e. black afro american, hispanic beige, or asian yellow) that'd protect white people, in an affirmative action stance too. But there might just be such a thing, because I had the opportunity to work with cotton, and kept calling off sick every time I had eruptions like cold sore put on my face while I slept, but even with all that calling off sick, they did let me stick around like 6 months. The job was supposed to be guaranteed temp to hire after 90 days, which is not possible when you are late all the time because the downstairs neighbors block the driveway with their cars instead of parking in the garage, and every time you have to wake them up in the morning they take 5 minutes or 7 minutes, or exactly just as long as it takes to make you 1 minute late, it's like they are looking at their clocks. But still, it's my job not to get sick, even if infected and xrayed (and this includes getting xrayed on the job while you are sitting in one place or standing in one place to the point where your body shivers and feels like collapsing), and not to be late. So they did OK. And there were a few other white guys working there too, and the boss was a white dude with a hispanic wife. But inside the business there was constant tension between the black subfactions and the hispanic subfaction, as far as it concerned maintenance people, who were predominantly hispanic, taking too long to answer a maintenance call on a down machine, and ruining the production score of the people running the machine. I say forced mingling and affirmative action hurts American competitiveness compared to having pure hispanic, pure black and pure white clans owning the company from top to bottom, protecting their trade secrets or methods of doing business, and busting ass at work as if it were a family business, not a competition ground against other clans trying to invade it. Fuck affirmative action.
A system that allows people to monopolize their inventions. Invented twice. I love it.
I wonder if either of those systems had a clause saying that doing/making/selling something that was already patented constituted infringement, even without knowledge of the patent.
Example list:
https://www.google.com/patents... (very current, and chinese)
https://www.google.com/patents...
https://www.google.com/patents... ("only" animals)
https://www.google.com/patents...
Came expecting an idiot article and an idiot thread of comments, was not disappointed.
Please allow my patents to expire before spreading this around.
Always know your source before spouting off about them -- especially if the source agrees with your position. From the Wikipedia entry (usual caveats apply):
Using survey data from professors in the 1970s, sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset concluded, "Many of the most influential younger scholars in [economics] are supporters of varying forms of antistatist free-market doctrines”.[15] More recent 21st century surveys show very different results and demonstrate that free-market economists constitute a small portion of all economists. A survey of a sample of AEA members identified their views on 18 specific forms of government activism, finding that about 8% of AEA members can be considered supporters of free-market principles and that less than 3% may be called strong supporters. Even the average Republican AEA member is 'middle-of-the-road,' not free market.[16]
William McEachern, an economist at the University of Connecticut, analysed the 2004 campaign contributions of AEA members, committee members, officers, editors, referees, authors, and acknowledgees. He found that 2004 contributions heavily favored the Democratic Party, especially among leadership positions. He argues that this contradicts AEA's claim of non-partisanship, that it harms the economics profession by favoring certain opinions over others, and that it cripples the spirit of discussion that AEA seeks to promote and may lead to intellectual complacency.[17]
Critics[who?] of McEachern's stance argue that investigation of AEA economists' campaign contributions is inappropriate. They favor investigation of research, rather than the researcher whose views and ideologies are irrelevant to the data published. Moreover, membership in the Association is open to anyone, regardless of their political views, and thus the political affiliation of members reflects only the decisions of various individuals to join the Association.