Most people support patents because they have this romanticized notion of some little guy in his garage inventing the next light bulb. That’s not representative of the mass offensive and defensive patterns of use by modern corporations.
Patents are still being used to protect smaller companies from much larger corporations. Allowing these large corporations to legally ignore patents will only make things worse for the rest of us.
If we need to reform patents, maybe it should be based on revenue generated. Once a company has been successfully "incentivized" for their "innovation" the patent expires sooner.
In practice, the big companies usually have a ton of vague questionable defensive patents that cover a huge space of "inventions", so even if the smaller companies try to sue, they will get avalanched by an array of patent suits that could potentially bankrupt the company.
I'm all for reforming patents, but this seems like it's more a part of a larger set of problems with how civil suits are really only a tool for the big guys, namely:
1. With inadequate penalties for filing frivolous lawsuits, filing frivolous lawsuits becomes a strategy. I've unfortunately had a close friend be a victim of this strategy. I won't name my friend, but I will name that Jared Kushner's companies were the (repeated) plaintiff. If we close the loopholes around patents (and we should) it will only make the filing of frivolous lawsuits slightly less efficient, because the lawsuits will get thrown out quicker. Note that even if the lawsuits get thrown out, they still cost the defendants money to get them thrown out, so patent reform wouldn't even necessarily mean they can't file patent lawsuits, it just means the lawsuits might get thrown out slightly faster.
2. Justice isn't possible in civil suits where the plaintiff and defendant have disparate resources to pay for counsel.
Exactly. Companies file and retain patents that aren't defensible or questionable for defensive purposes. Perhaps the patents won't hold up in court but given enough of them you can bankrupt someone before they can prove them all invalid.
Not a bad line of thought. We also have to solve the problem where you have e.g. China and corporations in China blatantly flouting any IP laws. If we did have a just IP regime (we don't) it would continue to be severely undercut by this problem. Somehow, if it's even possible, we need buy-in/treaties etc. from the major economies.
Wait that actually makes a ton of sense, at least in theory. Never thought about it this way. Though there’s probably a want to amortize risk of failed research projects, failed as in “didn’t contribute to a product”?
The pitfall there is that there is no guarantee of revenue. You also invite the possibility of predatorily delaying revenue generation. Potential revenue generated would be more on the nose.
In another sense, sustaining a patent until it generates sufficient revenue can be seen as oxymoronic to the idea that patents incent products that serve the public interest - since, if the patent is not creating value, how can it be in the public interest?
Patent lifespans are already sort of considered based on potential revenue generated, and use number of years as a proxy for that
You wouldn't need to get rid of the current limits, just expire the patent sooner. If a company generates $10 Billion dollars in the first 5 years of their 20 year patent the reminding 15 years isn't necessary to incentivize innovation.
Rewarding innovation has been archived, just skip ahead to the part where the public at large benefits.
The https://openinventionnetwork.com/ exists now too, to make defensive patents for those who want to open source their patents but keep a big corp from attacking after stealing an idea/patent.
We really want examples of large companies licensing patents or buying smaller companies for their patents. Both are examples of patents helping smaller companies against those much larger. If patents no longer existed those smaller companies would get nothing.
>Patents are still being used to protect smaller companies from much larger corporations. Allowing these large corporations to legally ignore patents will only make things worse for the rest of us.
why? why does it have to be only larger companies? if its a free for all, i copy your product, you copy mine. how is that not free market? people will choose so let them.
you could decide to not publicly release a product but you risk your competitor "inventing" the same thing in their own way so you can only either release it first or make the biggest noise.
I could see a scenario if this were the case where some company works out a way to sit on a patent adjacent to something they sell so that they keep competitors from using the idea, while not actually using the idea itself (or using it in a way engineered not to make a profit). That way they can maintain their entrenched position longer by squashing innovation.
Large companies have patent warchests, and can engage in long-term litigation to ensure small companies cannot compete. Patents do nothing to protect small companies from that. "Ignoring patents" as you say would help level the playing field for every company, and ensure companies cannot do things like patent XOR and destroy all of their competition.
>Patents are still being used to protect smaller companies from much larger corporations. Allowing these large corporations to legally ignore patents will only make things worse for the rest of us.
Truly small operations don't have the bandwidth or resources to even file for a patent. So it's pretty much only medium sized companies or those with the backing of powerful groups who take advantage of the patent system.
The data are readily available.[0] It seems that small businesses actually can file patents. Even small teams and individuals can file patents, and do. I fact, patents per employee seemingly decreases as company size increases.
I successfully patented a product and licensed that patent to a small company that does quite well selling a product based on that patent. It did cost about $15k, but that's business risk. If a megacorp ever infringed the patent, we could sue them. Sure, they could try and work around it with other designs, but their product wouldn't work as well.
"Of course, salad is no software, and the work of plant breeders has to be protected. Otherwise they might fare like plant breeder Jim Baggett in Oregon, who in 1966 started breeding broccoli with an extra-long stem so it could be harvested more easily. He shared his novel broccoli with researchers and other breeders — until Monsanto-offspring Seminis patented a broccoli with exactly that trait in 2011. Baggett could trace more than a third of the plant material to his work. "
> The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity. There is strong evidence, instead, that patents have many negative consequences.
The problem with ending patents is the alternative is medieval guilds that jealously guard their knowledge, sometimes using lethal force. The great thing about patents is that they force people to publish the knowledge so it won't be lost to the sands of time when they close up shop.
That said, our current patent system is problematic for sure. The bar for getting a patent has become far too low as systems have become too complex for independent patent examiners to really understand them, which has allowed many companies to amass a huge portfolio of techniques that are obvious to people in the field even if they appear novel to an external observer.
At least patents expire in a reasonable amount of time. Copyright is in a far worse place.
> The great thing about patents is that they force people to publish the knowledge so it won't be lost to the sands of time when they close up shop.
That works when the patents is some simple thing anyone can understand. Nothing is like that anymore. Every interesting line of research requires a specialist to understand it, and every specialist represents a high opportunity cost. In practice only a few people could hope to benefit from the publication.
Throw into that the fact that it's actually lawyers who write patents, and thus they are written in legalese.
> The problem with ending patents is the alternative is medieval guilds that jealously guard their knowledge, sometimes using lethal force. The great thing about patents is that they force people to publish the knowledge so it won't be lost to the sands of time when they close up shop.
The government & large corporations use force via the justice system & jealously guard top secrets, to the point of violence as well. Property can be seized. I'd rather have a distribution of power than consolidation, which seems to attract people who are motivated by controlling other people, thereby undermining the supposed benefits.
> The bar for getting a patent has become far too low
The process is also expensive & serves as a barrier to innovation via market monopolies. The problem with monopolies is that they don't serve the marketplace or consumers. Monopoly is pure rent for the entities that control the monopoly. It is common for a dominant company to buy the rights to a patent only to quash the technology, all to serve the dominant company's stranglehold over a market.
The great thing about patents is that they force people to publish the knowledge so it won't be lost to the sands of time when they close up shop.
That's a benefit that depends on the difficulty of reverse engineering the knowledge from working samples. As analytical instruments and procedures have improved, the relative disclosure benefit of patents has diminished. Worse, patents are increasingly written to hide the key insight in a hay stack of obfuscatory language and irrelevant examples. I can learn a lot from reading a typical 1970s-vintage chemistry patent. I can't say the same about present chemistry patents.
My father worked for Pilkingtons when they patented the float-glass process.
Lots of companies tried to copy the process (without licensing the patent). They couldn't, because the patent didn't describe all the know-how needed to make the process work. Companies that licensed the patent got the benefit of an on-site engineer that would help them get their process working. So most "plate" glass was thereafter float glass, made by paying licensees.
That is: the invention was really protected not by patents, but by trade secrets. And unlike with the mediaeval guilds, nobody had to be assassinated.
So it seems to me that in addition to being harmful, patents really are unnecessary; as long as there is also know-how. If there is no know-how, then I don't think the patent should be issued. Therefore, there is no need for patents.
I'm not sure that it's so clear cut. I think we should be more strict with accepting new patents however wrt prior work and extending them. Companies should be able to ignore patents as soon as they find prior work. Then it should become the responsibility of the patent holder to prove that there really isn't prior work. And there really shouldn't be a way to extend patents easily if at all. Patents are also benneficial in that they serve as a database of sorts of new discoveries (with pictures!). I can point to the exact US patent of the field effect transistor,[0] for example.
I personally know several people who were able to start successful careers solely based on their inventions and the protections afforded to them via patents. This seems extremely short sighted. In fact, the bigger issue to me is that patents don't matter for companies located in countries where they are not recognized (e.g. China). The biggest issue with "some little guy in his garage" inventing stuff these days is that within weeks of selling it on amazon, it'll be copied, cost reduced to a essentially non-functional version, and sold for 1/3 the price all while pushing him down in the search results via borderline illegal SEO strategies.
The patent system needs to be fixed, not done away with.
A bigger issue with for the little guy is his garage is that if his actually innovation contains some trivial subcomponent that's part of a patent troll or large competitors portfolio, they can can sued into the ground, either to leech of their success or to prevent competition. patents favor big companies and trolls, and as a legal instrument it's basically impossible to change that because the costs and complexity always favor large incumbents. I agree it's time to drop them
Exactly, you have so little leverage as an individual or small group. The pack of wolves that are patent trolls relentlessly look for small targets who can’t afford to defend themselves, and larger companies courting a deal or a buyout can implicitly threaten a similar situation.
It’s also a slightly depressing reason why I refuse to publish source for a commercial game I built, despite wanting to. The likelihood of being sued is very tiny, but why risk it when you’ve had enough success to be noticeable.
Would it be better to make patents have shorter lifespans before entering the public domain from companies of a certain size? Maybe that would level out the playing field and allow small players to be more competitive against behemoth corporations and patent trolls.
Heavily penalize patent trolling with patents that never should have been granted, prevent mafia-esque lawsuits from districts like east Texas, and drastically reduce the cost for someone to defend themselves through some form of pre-trial mediation where independent experts review the validity of a claim.
Show me where this has happened? You present a theoretical against an actual. I know more people who have been enabled via patents than have been squashed (I know of zero squashed who were actually doing something new/novel).
Patented seeds have funded GMO research which has saved literally hundreds of millions if not billions of lives through famine reduction. Yes it sucks for farmers, but I can't see how it has been anything other than absolute boon for humanity.
Apologies for the excess of links below. I find posts that spam links annoying, but if somebody believes GM products have saved millions/billions of lives, then they won't (and shouldn't) believe rando internet guy, and all the points are pretty distinct.
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GMOs were first made available in 1994 [1]. You can find data on famine deaths over time here [2]. Global famine deaths were near zero per 100k before GMOs had been developed. As an aside on this, the reason for historic famines was often not a lack of food or crops, or even weather - but war, which disrupts supply lines and may damage production.
GMO products are also primarily only grown in the USA and Brazil. [3] Of the two largest countries in the world, India has a complete ban on GM products except cotton, and China previously had a complete ban but lately has been in a state of flux, in no small part because of trade concessions - the US really wants to sell GM soybeans to them.
The vast majority of GMOs are used to feed Americans, Brazilians, livestock, and cars. If you don't understand that last one - US/Brazilian corn is often turned into heavily subsidized ethanol fuel. Which absolutely sucks as a fuel in every possible way [4], but has found a place in the market thanks to governmental regulation.
We don't use that much corn to make ethanol here in Brazil. The share of corn in our ethanol production is only 13% of the total[1], the rest is from sugar cane. According to the research institute Embrapa, most of our corn is for human or animal consumption.
As for your affirmation that it sucks for fuel, the growth of corn as a competitor for sugar cane in the production of ethanol here in Brazil is not "thanks to government regulation". In our country, sugar cane farmers have a lot more pull with the government than corn farmers. If government meddling was an issue, it would make the use of corn as a source of ethanol more difficult, not easier.
If ethanol producers here are turning to corn, is because it has economical benefits.
There has not been a single famine since the beginning of the 20th century that was not man-made (i.e. due to either people in power preventing aid reaching those who needed it or by people in power stripping people of their food).
GMO crops have nothing to do with famine reduction.
I doubt we would call any famine post-20th century apolitical due to how recent they are but many of them likely would not have occurred if food had been easier to grow, political dysfunction aside.
Absolute boon for “humanity” is a such abstract notion. The reality is that farmers are robbed and food we eat are way less nutrient dense, etc etc. boon…for whom?
Norman Bourlag is the guy mostly responsible for the huge increases in agricultural productivity in the 20th century and he gave most of his stuff away.
> Patented seeds have funded GMO research which has saved literally hundreds of millions if not billions of lives through famine reduction.
Sources? References? Sounds like PR bullshit from Syngenta, frankly. For a start, half the world population is living off subsistence agriculture, i.e. not patented nor GMO seeds.
It's unclear in the technological sector whether the patents or the exclusive licensing of those patents are the real issue. In academic research at universities, patented research is not the problem - it's more the exclusive licensing of those patents (taxpayer-financed, as well) to private interests. A better option would be to allow any interest to use academic patents for something like a flat fee / percentage of profits arrangement.
In general though, I agree - intellectual property gives too much power to the financial sector and the lifetime of patents and copyrights should be cut in half.
When the little person in their garage invents the next light bulb, and goes to industry players to try to license it, they just steal their idea and legally stonewall them for the remainder of their lifespan.
To me, a better approach would be to limit the patent time. 5 years of protection should be plenty of time for a company that intends to develop a technology based on its invention to get a commanding lead.
Absolutist solutions can backfire in unexpected ways. We should take an iterative approach unless a single jump is the only option. My 2c.
I think the elephant in the room is that China will readily ignore any patents and produce competing products anyway. it's really tough to make money off of hardware when you are immediately undercut by the people you contract out to manufacture your product.
The other elephant in the room is that almost every other country has done the same. Examples : Germany, US and now China. Great powers are built on imitation, then innovation.
The main problem is that most patents last 20 years. To fix the problem, durations should be dramatically reduced (60% reduction would be a good start) and there should be provisions to protect against patent trolls, i.e. that your lawsuit if frivolous UNLESS you are either the original inventor or can prove an active attempt to commercialize the technology.
There is some good to intellectual property -- it's more of a tuning problem that is currently tuned for the slow moving 1800's.
"Most people support patents because they have this romanticized notion of some little guy in his garage inventing the next light bulb. That’s not representative of the mass offensive and defensive patterns of use by modern corporations."
I often think that the bigger a company or wealthier a person is they should get less things like tax deductions, patent protection, subsidies and a lot of others.
I think in total these big organizations and super wealthy people destroy innovation. They produce some cool things but at the expense of suppressing a lot of things smaller players would produce.
Do they? Any adult I've ever talked to sees patents as anything ranging from "a necessary evil" to "literally the worst thing". No one thinks it somehow helps the little guy stick it to the big players. The little guy isn't interested in sticking it to the big players, they're interested in selling to the big players.
The real use and value of a patent (or any IP mechanism) is during litigation. It's easy to say "just end patents" until two parties are in court and have nothing to form arguments around.
Easier said then done. Who's "we" here? The handful of idealists that actually understand the legal issues? Or think they do?
The main issue with patents is not that they exist but that the system for filing and enforcing them has been eroded to the point where it has become a highly effective tool for big corporations to enforce patents they arguably should not have received against smaller competitors. That's technically illegal but since it is super hard to argue that in a court, companies get away with anti competitive behavior. And of course they are actively supported in this by bought and payed for politicians. In the US that's called lobbying, in much of the rest of the world we'd label that corruption, nepotism, and graft. Not a good thing. But as old as power and politics is.
The issue is not patents but the corruption around it.
The system in the US is flooded with bull shit patents that would not be acceptable else where. A lot of those have issues with their claims being overly broad, prior art, or a complete and utter lack of novelty. This does not matter. Getting patents rubber stamped is a numbers game. You just send more patents in and eventually a few will get approved. Of course, it costs a money to register and keep patents but once you have them the system is rigged in your favor. Challenging a patent is super expensive relative to filing one. And since patent offices are under staffed, they bias in favor of approving. And also they don't like admitting they were wrong to approve.
None of this happened by accident. The system was lobbied into the shape it is in today by the largest patent holders in the US (i.e. every big mega corporation you can name). They use patents as a tool to keep competitors out of the market. And they do so very successfully. To the extent that this is becoming a problem.
The solution is fixing the system, not getting rid of it. A big motivation for this could simply be that patents are not globally enforceable. So, you might convince companies in the US to not compete but e.g. Chinese companies will happily take your patented thing and run with it. Good luck complaining about that in a Chinese court of law. And they seem to have bootstrapped a pretty nice high tech industry in recent decades there. Bad patents actually erode the competitive position of US based corporations. While they are tied up in courts being sued by patent trolls, their foreign competitors are free to compete without concern for such things. Great argument for getting politicians off their ass. The problem exists to a lesser extent in other jurisdictions of course. But the US is the most paralyzed by this.
I don't think we should end patents, as I think that someone that develops an idea has the right to profit from that idea, if she chooses so (and the same holdsfor companies doing R&D). What I think should be done, is reflecting on patents/copyright duration, as in some cases it seems too long for me, to the point that in some cases we have that the profits end up in the hands of companies that have nothing to do with the original inventor/author.
Most people support farmers because they have a romantic idea of "Old Macdonald" instead of modern agri-corps. There is no real reason for someone to care either way in this case. Not that what the average person thinks about a niche, complex, uncertain, issue should matter...
or end the offensive/defensive patterns used by modern corporations?
someone invents a thing, someone else uses thing for evil. what to do? we ban the thing!!! yes, of course, that's the solution. don't punish the one that did the evil. <hangsheadinshameatthenotion>
the federal reserve doesn't think there's empirical evidence that patents have positive societal benefits and they think there are very empirical and measurable harms.
this isn't "generally good thing that some people abuse", this is the entire patent system is fundamentally not producing any explicable benefits and significant measurable harm, there is no reason to keep it around.
the scenario about the inventor who comes up with the better lightbulb in his garage doesn't happen. if it does, somebody else copies his idea (it's gotta be fairly trivial for someone to make it in a garage) or opens up their own patent portfolios and finds an overbroad patent that describes some trivial component or practice that is widely used, and drags him into litigation that bankrupts him for the rest of his life.
in software the example would be that you get dragged by someone who has patented "e-commerce on a website" or "software updates over the internet" and the money to have lawyers fight it while you empty your warchest.
no "I would simply..." or "but a law firm would do that pro-bono" is necessary here, either, those are both real-world examples, someone tried to shake down Newegg in 2015 with the e-commerce patent for example. And it worked for a lot of previous victims, none of whom felt like Newegg that it was worth fighting on principle or for direct economic benefit alone.
Patents literally kill companies, and they don't actually produce the intended innovations. And that's the federal reserve saying it. There were debates on ending it in the 50s, and they made the wrong decision.
> If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one. But since we have had a patent system for a long time, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to
recommend abolishing it.
The harms have now clearly exceeded the benefits of keeping it. It may not have been worth the trouble of abolishing it in 1958, it is now.
We should just end patents, period.