sure that they would be able to recover thoses costs by haveing the right to control how and by whom it is produced This is a fallacy. Revenue is not magically generated by having control over production, nor is control over production a guarantee of profit.
Explain to me how even the current patent system hurts the inventor.
In many ways, but mainly because the patent system has become a game for the Big Guys who can afford the law suits or defend themselves by using their own patents. Small inventors with one or two patents don't stand a chance. This article is but one example of this scenario. The way the multi-nationals use cross-licensing as a legal way of creating cartels is also pretty sickening (I recommend the excellent book Information Feudalism by Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite for more on that).
For a more general discussion around the patent system and some of it's problems, I direct you to a few references on the topic:
someone else can just skip the investment part and go right into making money off the finished work?
Yeah, since any and all line of businesses can support one player and one player only. Did you know that there's actually only one company making cars in the world? For real! It's in China and it OEMs all the cars you see on the roads today, because seriously, why would anyone make something that anyone else can make? That would be COMPETITION instead of a MONOPOLY and we all know competition is bad for profits and innovation.
This all is because not having patents in a field automatically creates a vortex where the company that's first-to-market suddenly gets sucked into this giant maelstrom and sent off to deep space somewhere halfway to Alpha Centauri and the second-to-market - you know, the one that DIDN'T have the advantage of being able to plan a product release, secure manufacturing, distribution and advertising resources in advance suddenly out-sell the first-mover (that would be the maelstrom again), totally negating all those advantages so the first-mover only sells one single unit, to the R&D lab of the second company. Oh, and did I mention the CEO of the second company gets a lot of blowjobs? Well, he does. Lots and lots of whirling maelstrom blowjobs.
Sure. That's real plausible. See it happen every day in all those fields where you can't patent an innovation. You know, like software was 10 years ago? No innovation whatsoever happening there. None, zip, nada, zilch. Xerox PARC? Must have dreamt it. Apple Mac? Never existed. One of Steve Jobs more blatant lies. Microsoft Windows? Well OK, you got a point there, but software patents didn't help any in that case either.
And perhaps pressuring the governments to better enforce IP and copyright law (that they have signed international treaties on).
Oh, they do. Some countries seem to still live under the illusion that they are sovereign states and not obliged to let the MPAA draft their IP legislation, but a little trade sanctions can work wonders in rectifying that minor error.
And you probably should read this book, it may revise your impression about that "signed treaties" thing.
Please someone give GW a BJ, so the Republican majority can discover a reason to impeach him.
It's been done several times, but the ones who saw Cheney on his knees all clawed their eyes out and ran away screaming. The latest one was last seen heading down I-66 towards Chantilly at a good clip when the choppers lost contact due to an incoming flight at Dulles.
If Coca-Cola accidentally created 100 million cans of faulty Coke, you know for sure the entire 100 million cans would be dropped in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, without a second thought and irrespective of what that did to the year's profits.
No, they re-label the cans "Cherry Coke" and double the advertising budget.
That's what they said about the EU Data Retention Directive as well - pedophiles and terrorists. Now, they're talking about using it to catch filesharers, even before the law's gone into effect.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
on
CRIA Falling Apart?
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· Score: 1
Which isn't to say that public medicine couldn't work, but it wouldn't be nearly as cheap as a lot of people think
The current system has a lot of hidden costs. Read this.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
on
CRIA Falling Apart?
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· Score: 1
You don't have the right to free copies in other formats
So which is it, do we buy the CD outright or do we buy a license to listen to it? If it's the CD, it's our physical property and I can do what the hell I want with it (including viewing any and all DRM measures as infringring on my property rights) but if it's a license, we actually DO have a right to free copies in other formats.
(How could they get jail terms anyway, I thought copyright infringement was a civil offense rather than a criminal one?)
In the EU, it's a criminal offense. Today's top limit is 2 years in prison, but lobbying groups like IFPI are pushing for 4 years, part of the reason being tha tthis pushes the crime into the "hard crime" bracket where it's allowed to use more covert surveillance and data-tracking. I guess they expect these hard-core criminals to keep buying records in prison, to kill time. Or something. I have no idea what appendage they're using to think with, if any.
The difference is that patents force publication, allowing people to build upon the knowledge before the expiration of the patent.
You should read more patents, it cures insomnia. Try this one and tell me what it's about:
"the longitudinally upstanding ribbs, upstanding from said platform with an
insulative surface and a conductance-avoiding property in that surface that
prohibits the crosstalk between the electrical surfaces for the conductance of
electrical information data"
Any ideas? I'll give you a hint, you're using one right now.
Still nothing? It's the patent for the plug that goes in your Ethernet connector. Or rather, one of the patents. Since they are so obscure, several different firms have patented the same thing, just using very different words. I swiped the example from Dr David Martin's speech to the FFII in 2004. You should read it, it's not long and both entertaining and educational.
discovers that Company A has been sitting on the patent, doing nothing.
Ah, but they DID do something. They assigned it to their R&D department who ran into regrettable difficulties with the implementation. You do realize that you are proposing MORE litigation and patent lawyers as a solution to the current patentably obvious problems with the system?
Since they have no R&D costs, they can price it lower and force the company who *did* the research out of the market.
This is oft repeated. And slightly true. But think it through. Think of all fields of human endeavour that are not patentable. That are not copyrighted. They do exist. For instance, not even in the current broken state of the patent system is it possible to patent a car. Or a mobile phone. Or a computer. And still, factories thrive off developing and manufacturing these very products. The reason is simple - it is very much more important to have a recognizable brand name than a patent. You can't market patents, but you CAN sell an image. When Ford put a billion dollars into developing the Focus, they did so knowing full well that they had no way of patenting the car. They had protection for several important design details for the look of the car and they had trade mark protection for the name. That's it. Legally, it would have been perfectly possible for any competitior to plagiarize the entire car, change the exterior a bit and re-name it and sell as their own. This does not happen for the simple reason that re-tooling factories, figuring out manufacturing methods, building spare part supply chains and analyzing every last damned nut and bolt would take as long and be as expensive as just buying the plans from Ford and make licensed copies. And the copy would still be late to market, during which time Ford would have had time to refine their original further, spurred by the competition. All possible, without patents.
And, if it's so damned easy to make copies - why is it that no one, after a hundred years, still haven't been able to copy Coca-Cola's recipe? It's a trade secret, not copyrighted nor patented. You're not allowed to take it from their vault, but if you can reverse-enginner it, it's yours. If it's that easy to copy drugs, why can't we copy a soft drink? The answer is that it is NOT easy.
One of the best ways to do this is to give the original creator of the idea a limited exclusive control over it
No, this is actually one of the worst ways ever devised. This system is, as we have seen, prone to abuse, sensitive to technological breakthroughs and it still leaves the bulk of artists dirt poor while walking all over consumer's rights. Distributors and patent lawyers benefit from it, greatly. Creators and customers do not.
In either case, I think the term of exclusivity on patents should be no longer than 5 years.
Unfortunately, that term would be too short to actually be of much use. The transactions costs of patents, whi
Who cares if you are the first to market with "Passion of the Christ 4" if everyone can get your movie at its marginal cost of production ($0).
And this would differ from today's situation, how exactly? We are already at this point. What we're looking at is different ways of funding production of Passion of the Christ 4 that do NOT rely on there being a technological barrier för copying it, because that barrier is long gone and it ain't coming back. Putting up laws to simulate that barrier was a stop-gap measure, at best. At worst, it has wrecked the morality of an entire generation. That needs to be fixed, fixed good and fixed now.
To do that, we need to find alternative ways of funding, ways that do not rely on selling the license to use a specific copy of a work. Maybe the solution is streaming and pay-for-view as Lessig suggested, but it seems to me that people still want to buy stuff, not rent it as they go along. That means we need to use the power of peer to peer to distribute stuff, and it means that Robert X. Cringely is right. And, it means that we need to find ways to make it real easy for people to pay for what they listen to, read or watch.
Our stop-gap measure is to allow a five-year commercial copyright.The exact number of years is of course arbitrary and up for debate, the point is that it needs to go down from current levels, drastically. What we'd love to see is a sustainable system where there is no need for copyrights anymore. Artists could get paid anyway. Lots of things are being made without copy protection and the creators get their salaries from other revenue streams (which incidentally aren't as sensitive to technical changes as the copyright model is) like selling t-shirts, signed prints/discs, going on tours and generally working for their money, like normal people do.
Doing one good thing and then sitting on your ass waiting for the royalties to roll in should not be a viable business model.
You may argue that things like cars and such don't operate on that schedule
I'd rather argue that you can not patent a car. It's simply not patentable. Same thing with mobile phones, computers... And still we see tremendous innovation in precisely these fields. Sure, it's possible to patent small parts of the car or manufacturing processes for making parts of the car, but that is demonstrably not what drives the industry forward.
You cannot seriously be likening laws against leeching music off P2P against the wishes of the artists to oppression.
When the lobbying groups ask for up to four year prison terms for copyright infringement and the use of covert surveillance and wiretaps to catch infringers, you bet your ass we're calling it oppression.
I'm not talking about anyone but Joe Inventor who develops a patentable product in his garage.
He is a myth. Again, look up the stats. Very few individuals have the money to first of all, hire a patent bureau to draft a patent application. Unfortunately, the USPTO accepts almost any crap applications these days so they won't be properly screened for prior art. Thus, what this inventor gets is not a patent but a time bomb. As soon as he tries to use his patent in any way, he will be slapped with so many infringing law suits his head will spin fast enough to create its own magnetic field, giving him cancer.
You eliminate any incentive for independent inventors to invest capital in their projects
Several large VCs claim to value patents very low compared to many other factors when deciding to invest in start-ups. Factors they value much higher include time-to-market and their ability to execute and ship product before the competition. Patents tend to slow that process down.
For companies who are working in a patent riddled space, I definitely do a mental calculation of the added risk of litigation and subtract that value from the valuation of the company or decide to not invest at all. Joe Ito, VC
You force creative minds into large companiess where they can develop new products in the relative security of a corporate environment
No, this is what PATENTS do, today. Since it's become impossible for lone inventors to create proper patent applications, they need the resources of very large patent bureaus to at least make the attempt to create non-infringing new patents. Again, this is a crap shoot, at best.
We have this really smart guy in Sweden named Håkan Lans. Maybe you heard of him? Look him up. He got a patent for a small invention that turned out to be really useful for color graphics. He got hold of a reputable patent bureau and started raking in the licensing fees until one day some large corps basically told him to fuck off and die. He tried to fight back, but the sneaky bastards bought off his patent lawyers so they made a rookie mistake in filing (yeah right), he lost on the technicality and he now owes the law firm somewhere around 10 million dollars (estimates vary upwards from that, I've seen speculation about a hundred mil). They say they'll back off if he gives them another one of his patents. He hasn't been able to work and invent since 1999 because he's been tied up in this crap that you claim would PROTECT him? Excuse me while I go out the back and laugh myself silly. The patent system is rigged against the small inventors. The big patent bureaus and corporations are selling pre-scratched lottery tickets through the USPTO. It's all a big myth.
Here's one where Henry Ford claims he did no such thing as invent the assembly line and the whole "lone inventor" notion is a myth: Bridging Small Worlds to Accelerate Innovation (PDF)
so the motivation for doing R&D on a new product that takes 10 years, but can be reverse engineered in 6 months is what exactly?
That in those six months you can profit enough to pay for those ten years, and then some. But in reality very, very few singly patentable processes or products take ten years to develop from patent file date to market. Only thing I can think of is actually drugs, and the reason those take so long is because of the clinical trials which copycats also need to go through, so they don't take six months to copy either.
hey don't spend it all on making new drugs, true--but without profits, a company will nonetheless not exist.
So exactly how much profit do they need to continue existing? Does several thousand percent sound about right to you? Because that's what many of the patented drugs cost above their marginal costs.
because each company has to spend money repeating research that was already done by another company.
Strangely enough, that's exactly what patents do. Since they are drafted to be vague enough to not actually divulge the exact nature of the invention and to maximise their impact on potential infringers, the competition receives hints about where to look and thus directs their R&D in that general area, but not exactly at it, so as not to infringe. Look at synthesize method patents in the pharma industry, they patent a specific method of manufacturing a drug, not the drug itself. Much research is therefore spent on re-researching different ways of achieving the same result. Oh, and no, we do not want to abolish trademark law. That one actually serves several important purposes, some of which you mention.
I would contend that technological innovation will slow if the companies begin using trade secrets instead of patents.
This is, indeed the greatest risk. However, there is ample study in this field which leads me to believe that lifting the risks associated with impending patent litigation would free enough resources to counter this effect. Furthermore, the current trend of directing research towards patentable fields would cease.
Without patent law, there is no money to be made of licensing.
Not at all. Trade secrets are wholly independent of patent protection. I can sign a NDA with you and pay for a specific license for the manufacture and sale of your most extraordinary invention the Weed Whopper(TM) which turns freshly cut grass into delicious burgers. If I break that contract, I can be held liable under contract law. No patents necessary.
I didn't say that patents guarantee income, I said that not having patents guarantees a lower income.
No, you said that it guaranteed "to not make a return on their investment" which is a different thing entirely from what you claim now to have said. A lower income than with patents could still make a good return on the investment. However, I have credible sources to claim that 1. there is ample evidence suggesting that the most important factor for profit is NOT patent protection and 2. there is ample evidence showing that in the past and in other markets where there have existed little or no patent protection, innovation has flourished. You may deride those sources 'til you turn blue, but I do note that you have not come up with any refuting sources. I eagerly await these, but I am not holding my breath.
since the advent of patents, the rate of technological innovation has increased dramatically.
Checken or the egg? Look at Watt's steam engine. His patent HELD BACK the industrial revolution which did not pick up steam until after the patent ran out. Meanwhile, he himself was too busy chasing infringers to actually invent anything new for several years. Several large corporations started out as patent infringers; Ericsson, Unilever and Novartis to name but a few. They would never have succeeded in getting off the ground, had it not been for the lack of patent protection at the time. As soon as they became big however, they turned around and clamored for more protection for their own inventions. So think again about what came first, the innovation or the protection?
I'd genuinely like to know the proportions of funding for pharma research that come from various sources
"The United States alone is projected to spend $210 billion this year on prescription drugs. (...) In fact, the $30 billion that the United States federal government pays each year to support bio-medical research at its National Institutes of Health (NIH) is approximately 20 percent larger than the $25 billion that its pharmaceutical industry claims to spend on research." Dean Baker.
You may also want to look up the numbers in the annual reports of Big Pharma. Generally, around 15% of their total costs are associated with R&D, the rest is marketing, distribution, bribes for getting shit certified and production.
The election-floor is 4%, which amounts to 14 seats (of 349) in the Riksdag. So it'd be impossible for them to have just one seat.
Almost, but not quite. We could also get 12% in a voting region (valkrets) and get a single seat that way. It's possible, but AFAIK it has never happened.
Slashdot Mirror
So, if it's so hard to reverse-engineer stuff, why be afraid that your ideas would be stolen without patents?
sure that they would be able to recover thoses costs by haveing the right to control how and by whom it is produced
3 69,665969,00.html7 25h o.phpn st.htmp erty_2004_09.htm
This is a fallacy. Revenue is not magically generated by having control over production, nor is control over production a guarantee of profit.
Explain to me how even the current patent system hurts the inventor.
In many ways, but mainly because the patent system has become a game for the Big Guys who can afford the law suits or defend themselves by using their own patents. Small inventors with one or two patents don't stand a chance. This article is but one example of this scenario. The way the multi-nationals use cross-licensing as a legal way of creating cartels is also pretty sickening (I recommend the excellent book Information Feudalism by Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite for more on that).
For a more general discussion around the patent system and some of it's problems, I direct you to a few references on the topic:
http://wiki.ffii.org/Martin041109En
http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000902-3.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,7
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020805/newman20020
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/21/business/w
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/agai
http://www.cepr.net/publications/intellectual_pro
That was LAST week's PRN. Keep up, willya?
Yeah, since any and all line of businesses can support one player and one player only. Did you know that there's actually only one company making cars in the world? For real! It's in China and it OEMs all the cars you see on the roads today, because seriously, why would anyone make something that anyone else can make? That would be COMPETITION instead of a MONOPOLY and we all know competition is bad for profits and innovation.
This all is because not having patents in a field automatically creates a vortex where the company that's first-to-market suddenly gets sucked into this giant maelstrom and sent off to deep space somewhere halfway to Alpha Centauri and the second-to-market - you know, the one that DIDN'T have the advantage of being able to plan a product release, secure manufacturing, distribution and advertising resources in advance suddenly out-sell the first-mover (that would be the maelstrom again), totally negating all those advantages so the first-mover only sells one single unit, to the R&D lab of the second company. Oh, and did I mention the CEO of the second company gets a lot of blowjobs? Well, he does. Lots and lots of whirling maelstrom blowjobs.
Sure. That's real plausible. See it happen every day in all those fields where you can't patent an innovation. You know, like software was 10 years ago? No innovation whatsoever happening there. None, zip, nada, zilch. Xerox PARC? Must have dreamt it. Apple Mac? Never existed. One of Steve Jobs more blatant lies. Microsoft Windows? Well OK, you got a point there, but software patents didn't help any in that case either.
Oh, they do. Some countries seem to still live under the illusion that they are sovereign states and not obliged to let the MPAA draft their IP legislation, but a little trade sanctions can work wonders in rectifying that minor error.
And you probably should read this book, it may revise your impression about that "signed treaties" thing.
When I was in the Army, they taught us to use those 9V batteries with a fistful of fine steel wool to make fire.
It's been done several times, but the ones who saw Cheney on his knees all clawed their eyes out and ran away screaming. The latest one was last seen heading down I-66 towards Chantilly at a good clip when the choppers lost contact due to an incoming flight at Dulles.
No, they re-label the cans "Cherry Coke" and double the advertising budget.
Exactly, and that's probably why the parent post was modded insightful.
That's what they said about the EU Data Retention Directive as well - pedophiles and terrorists. Now, they're talking about using it to catch filesharers, even before the law's gone into effect.
The current system has a lot of hidden costs. Read this.
So which is it, do we buy the CD outright or do we buy a license to listen to it? If it's the CD, it's our physical property and I can do what the hell I want with it (including viewing any and all DRM measures as infringring on my property rights) but if it's a license, we actually DO have a right to free copies in other formats.
In the EU, it's a criminal offense. Today's top limit is 2 years in prison, but lobbying groups like IFPI are pushing for 4 years, part of the reason being tha tthis pushes the crime into the "hard crime" bracket where it's allowed to use more covert surveillance and data-tracking. I guess they expect these hard-core criminals to keep buying records in prison, to kill time. Or something. I have no idea what appendage they're using to think with, if any.
You should read more patents, it cures insomnia. Try this one and tell me what it's about:
Any ideas? I'll give you a hint, you're using one right now.
Still nothing? It's the patent for the plug that goes in your Ethernet connector. Or rather, one of the patents. Since they are so obscure, several different firms have patented the same thing, just using very different words. I swiped the example from Dr David Martin's speech to the FFII in 2004. You should read it, it's not long and both entertaining and educational.
discovers that Company A has been sitting on the patent, doing nothing.
Ah, but they DID do something. They assigned it to their R&D department who ran into regrettable difficulties with the implementation. You do realize that you are proposing MORE litigation and patent lawyers as a solution to the current patentably obvious problems with the system?
Since they have no R&D costs, they can price it lower and force the company who *did* the research out of the market.
This is oft repeated. And slightly true. But think it through. Think of all fields of human endeavour that are not patentable. That are not copyrighted. They do exist. For instance, not even in the current broken state of the patent system is it possible to patent a car. Or a mobile phone. Or a computer. And still, factories thrive off developing and manufacturing these very products. The reason is simple - it is very much more important to have a recognizable brand name than a patent. You can't market patents, but you CAN sell an image. When Ford put a billion dollars into developing the Focus, they did so knowing full well that they had no way of patenting the car. They had protection for several important design details for the look of the car and they had trade mark protection for the name. That's it. Legally, it would have been perfectly possible for any competitior to plagiarize the entire car, change the exterior a bit and re-name it and sell as their own. This does not happen for the simple reason that re-tooling factories, figuring out manufacturing methods, building spare part supply chains and analyzing every last damned nut and bolt would take as long and be as expensive as just buying the plans from Ford and make licensed copies. And the copy would still be late to market, during which time Ford would have had time to refine their original further, spurred by the competition. All possible, without patents.
And, if it's so damned easy to make copies - why is it that no one, after a hundred years, still haven't been able to copy Coca-Cola's recipe? It's a trade secret, not copyrighted nor patented. You're not allowed to take it from their vault, but if you can reverse-enginner it, it's yours. If it's that easy to copy drugs, why can't we copy a soft drink? The answer is that it is NOT easy.
One of the best ways to do this is to give the original creator of the idea a limited exclusive control over it
No, this is actually one of the worst ways ever devised. This system is, as we have seen, prone to abuse, sensitive to technological breakthroughs and it still leaves the bulk of artists dirt poor while walking all over consumer's rights. Distributors and patent lawyers benefit from it, greatly. Creators and customers do not.
In either case, I think the term of exclusivity on patents should be no longer than 5 years.
Unfortunately, that term would be too short to actually be of much use. The transactions costs of patents, whi
Oh, it's much bigger than that. Read Dr David Martin's speech to FFII.
Exactly. And that's why the myth of the lone inventor is...a myth.
And this would differ from today's situation, how exactly? We are already at this point. What we're looking at is different ways of funding production of Passion of the Christ 4 that do NOT rely on there being a technological barrier för copying it, because that barrier is long gone and it ain't coming back. Putting up laws to simulate that barrier was a stop-gap measure, at best. At worst, it has wrecked the morality of an entire generation. That needs to be fixed, fixed good and fixed now.
To do that, we need to find alternative ways of funding, ways that do not rely on selling the license to use a specific copy of a work. Maybe the solution is streaming and pay-for-view as Lessig suggested, but it seems to me that people still want to buy stuff, not rent it as they go along. That means we need to use the power of peer to peer to distribute stuff, and it means that Robert X. Cringely is right. And, it means that we need to find ways to make it real easy for people to pay for what they listen to, read or watch.
Our stop-gap measure is to allow a five-year commercial copyright.The exact number of years is of course arbitrary and up for debate, the point is that it needs to go down from current levels, drastically. What we'd love to see is a sustainable system where there is no need for copyrights anymore. Artists could get paid anyway. Lots of things are being made without copy protection and the creators get their salaries from other revenue streams (which incidentally aren't as sensitive to technical changes as the copyright model is) like selling t-shirts, signed prints/discs, going on tours and generally working for their money, like normal people do.
Doing one good thing and then sitting on your ass waiting for the royalties to roll in should not be a viable business model.
I'd rather argue that you can not patent a car. It's simply not patentable. Same thing with mobile phones, computers... And still we see tremendous innovation in precisely these fields. Sure, it's possible to patent small parts of the car or manufacturing processes for making parts of the car, but that is demonstrably not what drives the industry forward.
When the lobbying groups ask for up to four year prison terms for copyright infringement and the use of covert surveillance and wiretaps to catch infringers, you bet your ass we're calling it oppression.
BTW, you may want to read this. It deconstructs the myth of the lone inventor fairly convincingly, and not just for the patently obvious reasons.
He is a myth. Again, look up the stats. Very few individuals have the money to first of all, hire a patent bureau to draft a patent application. Unfortunately, the USPTO accepts almost any crap applications these days so they won't be properly screened for prior art. Thus, what this inventor gets is not a patent but a time bomb. As soon as he tries to use his patent in any way, he will be slapped with so many infringing law suits his head will spin fast enough to create its own magnetic field, giving him cancer.
You eliminate any incentive for independent inventors to invest capital in their projects
Several large VCs claim to value patents very low compared to many other factors when deciding to invest in start-ups. Factors they value much higher include time-to-market and their ability to execute and ship product before the competition. Patents tend to slow that process down.
You force creative minds into large companiess where they can develop new products in the relative security of a corporate environmentNo, this is what PATENTS do, today. Since it's become impossible for lone inventors to create proper patent applications, they need the resources of very large patent bureaus to at least make the attempt to create non-infringing new patents. Again, this is a crap shoot, at best.
We have this really smart guy in Sweden named Håkan Lans. Maybe you heard of him? Look him up. He got a patent for a small invention that turned out to be really useful for color graphics. He got hold of a reputable patent bureau and started raking in the licensing fees until one day some large corps basically told him to fuck off and die. He tried to fight back, but the sneaky bastards bought off his patent lawyers so they made a rookie mistake in filing (yeah right), he lost on the technicality and he now owes the law firm somewhere around 10 million dollars (estimates vary upwards from that, I've seen speculation about a hundred mil). They say they'll back off if he gives them another one of his patents. He hasn't been able to work and invent since 1999 because he's been tied up in this crap that you claim would PROTECT him? Excuse me while I go out the back and laugh myself silly. The patent system is rigged against the small inventors. The big patent bureaus and corporations are selling pre-scratched lottery tickets through the USPTO. It's all a big myth.
Here's one where Henry Ford claims he did no such thing as invent the assembly line and the whole "lone inventor" notion is a myth:
Bridging Small Worlds to Accelerate Innovation (PDF)
That in those six months you can profit enough to pay for those ten years, and then some. But in reality very, very few singly patentable processes or products take ten years to develop from patent file date to market. Only thing I can think of is actually drugs, and the reason those take so long is because of the clinical trials which copycats also need to go through, so they don't take six months to copy either.
Do you have any specific examples?
So exactly how much profit do they need to continue existing? Does several thousand percent sound about right to you? Because that's what many of the patented drugs cost above their marginal costs.
because each company has to spend money repeating research that was already done by another company.
Strangely enough, that's exactly what patents do. Since they are drafted to be vague enough to not actually divulge the exact nature of the invention and to maximise their impact on potential infringers, the competition receives hints about where to look and thus directs their R&D in that general area, but not exactly at it, so as not to infringe. Look at synthesize method patents in the pharma industry, they patent a specific method of manufacturing a drug, not the drug itself. Much research is therefore spent on re-researching different ways of achieving the same result. Oh, and no, we do not want to abolish trademark law. That one actually serves several important purposes, some of which you mention.
I would contend that technological innovation will slow if the companies begin using trade secrets instead of patents.
This is, indeed the greatest risk. However, there is ample study in this field which leads me to believe that lifting the risks associated with impending patent litigation would free enough resources to counter this effect. Furthermore, the current trend of directing research towards patentable fields would cease.
Without patent law, there is no money to be made of licensing.
Not at all. Trade secrets are wholly independent of patent protection. I can sign a NDA with you and pay for a specific license for the manufacture and sale of your most extraordinary invention the Weed Whopper(TM) which turns freshly cut grass into delicious burgers. If I break that contract, I can be held liable under contract law. No patents necessary.
I didn't say that patents guarantee income, I said that not having patents guarantees a lower income.
No, you said that it guaranteed "to not make a return on their investment" which is a different thing entirely from what you claim now to have said. A lower income than with patents could still make a good return on the investment. However, I have credible sources to claim that 1. there is ample evidence suggesting that the most important factor for profit is NOT patent protection and 2. there is ample evidence showing that in the past and in other markets where there have existed little or no patent protection, innovation has flourished. You may deride those sources 'til you turn blue, but I do note that you have not come up with any refuting sources. I eagerly await these, but I am not holding my breath.
since the advent of patents, the rate of technological innovation has increased dramatically.
Checken or the egg? Look at Watt's steam engine. His patent HELD BACK the industrial revolution which did not pick up steam until after the patent ran out. Meanwhile, he himself was too busy chasing infringers to actually invent anything new for several years. Several large corporations started out as patent infringers; Ericsson, Unilever and Novartis to name but a few. They would never have succeeded in getting off the ground, had it not been for the lack of patent protection at the time. As soon as they became big however, they turned around and clamored for more protection for their own inventions. So think again about what came first, the innovation or the protection?
"The United States alone is projected to spend $210 billion this year on prescription drugs. (...) In fact, the $30 billion that the United States federal government pays each year to support bio-medical research at its National Institutes of Health (NIH) is approximately 20 percent larger than the $25 billion that its pharmaceutical industry claims to spend on research."
Dean Baker.
You may also want to look up the numbers in the annual reports of Big Pharma. Generally, around 15% of their total costs are associated with R&D, the rest is marketing, distribution, bribes for getting shit certified and production.
Almost, but not quite. We could also get 12% in a voting region (valkrets) and get a single seat that way. It's possible, but AFAIK it has never happened.