Sad the US doesn't do anything against patents or at least software patents. I don't think patents do any good in respect to the development of mankind.
I once spent several months reading a certain set of patents. This was sanctioned by the lawyers of the company I was working for then. A few comments:
- Patents are supposed to "teach" things. Yet in every place I've worked, employees are prohibited or at least actively discouraged from reading patents, because of liability concerns. So they fail at teaching because knowledge of what's in a patent is actually dangerous.
- The first month or so of reading those patents was basically about learning a whole new language. The terminology, twisted descriptions and deliberate obfuscation again makes the "teaching" aspect of patents utterly useless. No one in their right mind says, "I'm going to go learn some new stuff, so I'm off to read a bunch of patents." Nobody does that.
Patents don't teach, they're a land grab, and are about as hostile to the actual "Progress of Science and useful Arts" as a sucking chest wound.
I had a patent issued last year as sole inventor (software, but a legit invention), and I actually just found a patent doc at a company I'm working with earlier today (they have the patent number in their web app's footer). I was planning to scan through the diagrams.
To me patent text is strange compiled pseudo-legalese, but I have found some learning in the diagrams.
Infringe a patent, and the holder of the patent can be awarded damages. We're familiar with that.
Knowingly infringing a patent can bring triple damages.
You can bet that the USPTO granted someone a patent on the linked list, or a common variant of a hash table (don't get me started on how the USPTO determines prior art -- they don't use common literature, they seem to just search the patent database). So if you accidentally read a patent on said linked list / hash table and use it in a product and you're sued for infringement, damages go up quite a bit. That's one reason companies discourage engineers from reading patents.
Back in the 1980s someone had a patent on "Network standard byte order". Didn't matter the order you chose (big or little endian, or inside-out like the PDP-11, or whatever). As long as it was a stable and common byte order used on the network, you infringed. The "inventor" was a friend of a friend, and reportedly he said, when the patent was granted, "I can't believe they gave that to me."
I hear this a lot, but a standard step in filing a patent is a patent search. You deliberately check to see if there is prior art.
Similarly, if you have a patent pending, you are required to advise the examiner as soon as you come across something that appears relevant. When I had one under examination by the USPTO I sent in a patent that I saw here on HN (which the examiner decided was irrelevant).
The point is that you have intent. Reading something and not recognising it as prior art is very different from reading something, recognising it as prior art and not disclosing it.
The rules you see about "don't read any patents" come from the professional paranoia which is universal to lawyers. It is a much tighter defence to say "it's impossible that we had knowledge and chose not to disclose, because we did not have knowledge, because we have an ironclad policy of avoiding reading patents" than it is to enter into detailed argument about who read or understood which patents on which dates.
The distinction is important. A corporate policy of "don't read patents" is not the same as the law. It is a pre-emptive defence tactic intended to deny a hostile litigant from using an expensive line of argument.
Again, I am not a lawyer, this is by no means advice. I just hope to convey that the law is generally far more comprehensive, sensible and subtle than telephone games give it credit for.
I'm not strictly opposed to software patents, I do think that the threshold for what deserves a patent is far too low in the USA though.
Regardless, patents in general are a net good for mankind. It incentivises innovation, as the inventor gets a monopoly for a limited time on new inventions.
What's the point in inventing anything if some other company (likely with more resources than you) can just come along and steal your ideas?
> I do think that the threshold for what deserves a patent is far too low in the USA though.
A first big step forward would be to increase the threshold. The current situation is ridiculous, - I think everyone agrees on that.
> Regardless, patents in general are a net good for mankind. It incentivises innovation, as the inventor gets a monopoly for a limited time on new inventions.
I cannot entirely disagree on that, - at least from today's perspective. However, what did people think about open source software 30 years ago? They would have said something similar as you did, - which is that companies would not have the motivation to invest time and money. What do people think today?
Open source is not necessarily a profitable endeavour. Their are some exceptions, but presumably there would be a lot more open source options out there if it were more profitable.
I own a small company, Foo & Sons. I invent a new form of widget, that's 10% more efficient than other widgets. I can patent my new widget, and now I have exclusive right to manufacture these widgets in my factory for $1 a piece, selling them for $2 a piece.
Now, a big company, Widgets'R'Us, is capable of manufacturing these widgets for $0.50 each, as they have economies of scale. Without patent protection, they could make my widgets, and sell them for $1.50 each, putting me out of business. However, because of the patent, they'd have to pay me a fee if they wanted to make my widgets. I can now decide whether or not these royalties are more valuable tham making and selling widgets from my factory.
I guess I might have been overly broad in my comment. I guess I just wanted to point out cases where a patent feels ridiculous because the process is sufficiently difficult to replicate (e.g. cooking a recipe or doing a stand-up routine). Furthermore, the process in question needs to have sufficient demand such that an economy of scale actually has incentive to produce this product at large volumes.
I think there is a stronger case for patents for processes that can be easily replicated, reverse engineered, and made profitably at scale (this is a key factor IMO), like lightbulbs or batteries or something. Even then though, I think there are cases to be made that patents still may not provide benefit. For example, why do people still buy Advil or Tylenol over a generic brand, is it perhaps trust in the brand and confidence in the purity and safety of the product?
5 minutes of googling suggests that Penicillin was not patented and the mass production was later patented by the USDA (not some private pharma company). The entire modern funding ecosystem being patent based just means it's the most profitable business model, not that it's the only way to produce pharmaceuticals.
Some drugs likely would be discovered through non profit efforts. But it seems reasonable to believe that we would be quite a bit farther behind overall without the profit motive.
Of course it’s not the only way to produce pharmaceuticals, as pharmaceuticals are thousands of years old. But without patents the number of new drugs pharmaceuticals over the last 50 years would be probably 1-5% of it actually was.
The way the system is set up now, there would be little incentive to make pharmaceuticals without patents. The R&D cost is insane, so to be profitable, pharmaceutical companies need exclusive rights to their drugs.
Bearing that in mind, I have no reason to believe a fully state-funded pharmaceutical system would be impossible, tied into healthcare. However, to make people complacent with that, it would have to be unbelievably transparent. Many people fear the idea of the state designing and providing them with drugs.
If you think that you are extremely uninformed about the many useful pharmaceuticals out there and are probably thinking of a few Longreads articles about fentanyl abuse and ADD overmedication.
I'm well aware that we'd have lost millions of lives if drug inventors were not able to patent medicines like Penicillin... er wait. Other stuff...
I'm also aware that there are all sorts of great medicines that have been invented and created and help people.
And, the economic incentives and distortions created seem detrimental.
Your allusion to the opiode crisis is actually a pretty non-trivial example. The opioid crisis is deeply connected to companies trying to push drugs into the market, get people addicted, and profit off of patents. Opioides are probably killing more people now than many other drugs combined are saving.
I could do without the entire profession of psychiatry for the most part, and the actually useful drugs - psychedelics - are being brought to market by a non-profit and are non-patentable by design. HTTP://Maps.org
I'm all for curious, creative and skilled scientists making drugs to help people - I don't like the side effects of the way the current economic system behind medicine works.
Those are both really broad statements. Developing innovative software costs money as does developing an innovative product or technology. The point of patents isn't to incentivize implementation it's to incentivize innovation.
Whether OP peanut it or not, patents “incentivize” innovation with a terribly simplistic model of what that involves. The difference between “innovation” and “implementation” is like the difference between a business and it’s business plan. The motivation to regulate it is obvious but the results remain difficult to defend in light of the associated problems introduced.
I don't agree. I think that while it can be difficult to defend every instance of a patent or a particular implementation of patent law, this doesn't mean that every patent is bad or that the concept of patents is bad and needs to be outright abandoned which is what the OP was discussing.
America's patent system may not be perfect but this doesn't mean it's outright unproductive. This holds especially true when evaluated based on raw innovation. America's tech sector speaks for itself but is far from unique, America's pharmaceutical industry also comes to mind. Although widely criticized, and rightly so, the American industry produces nearly a third of the world's new molecular entities.
Patents are far from the only factor affecting innovation, yet you seem to conclude that patents are good based on level of innovation in the US.
A logically similar argument (“fallacy of the single cause”) would be: Hawaii has a relatively low rate of gun violence yet their gun ownership is high, ergo gun ownership must be fine.
Of course some patents are good, but as market concentration increases in the US, IP has become abused by entrenched oligopolistic corporations. Most recent reputable studies find that the US patent system has probably been a net negative on innovation of late [1].
