It has amazed me how much innovation there has been in FDM 3D printers since the patents expired in the mid 2000's. In 2012 Stratasys published an article congratulating themselves for the ten year anniversary of the release of their "low cost" $30,000 3D printer. [1] Meanwhile I'd been playing with my first open source 3D printer which was $1900. The designs did not come from one monolithic corporation but a distributed group of hackers and 3d printing enthusiasts from around the world. Interested parties from all over the world improved on open source 3D printer designs and released their findings for free to be taken up by the community.
8 years later and you can buy a beginner's 3D printer for $250, a very reliable open source machine for $1000, and a super high end machine for $15,000.
To say that patents always stimulate innovation is obviously false to me. Patents may stimulate innovation at times but they also clearly stifle it. I was thinking today how the Prusa 3D printer is no more technologically complex than a pen plotter from the 1980's. If it had not been for patents, many companies could have competed for the high end 3D printer market in the 1990's, prices would have been perhaps a few thousand dollars for a printer in the year 2000, and the spread of personal computers would have led to the same hacking and innovation to lower costs we've seen but perhaps ten years earlier.
And the second order effects of this are I think dramatic. 3D printers accelerate innovation by dramatically reducing the cycle time for iterative development of mechanical parts. In the 1990's if you designed a mechanical part you had to wait weeks for it to come back from a machine shop if you could not hire a 3D printer. With a 3D printer in your office you can get a mechanical sample of your design the next day, and go through 5 design iterations in a week.
Instead of allowing for cheap and ubiquitous 3D printing, we chose to give a legal monopoly to stratasys who got to profit greatly for it. And I think society suffered economically because of it.
It is a source of great frustration to me that people dogmatically believe patents cause innovation. It is quite obvious to me that there are benefits to innovation even without intellectual property protection. Prusa Research still makes all of their products open source and they appear to be a healthy, growing, multi-milion dollar a year business. Chinese clones flood the market and are great for broke students, but those who want more reliability still source from Prusa. It seems there is room in the market both for the OEM and clones as they serve different groups.
The only reason business people love patents is that in a world where patents exist, you have an incentive to collect them. But I think the second order negative effects of this dramatically slow innovation and harm society economically. If Prusa can exist without patents in a market where competitors still use them, we can obviously make functional an entire economy with less intellectual property restrictions.
Unfortunately this is seen as arcane or obscure and nobody cares. Its a HUGE issue that I think affects our ability to innovate broadly but I fear the business community would be against the change we need.
My only hope is that competent and respected economists could examine this issue. People who know China well already know how much innovation can flourish in an open business community [2] but we need to convince the American business community to buy in to IP reform.
>The only reason business people love patents is that in a world where patents exist, you have an incentive to collect them. But I think the second order negative effects of this dramatically slow innovation and harm society economically. If Prusa can exist without patents in a market where competitors still use them, we can obviously make functional an entire economy with less intellectual property restrictions.
You make some interesting points, however generalizing one example from 3d printers and concluding "patents are clearly bad" is really oversimplifying the issue by a lot.
There are plenty of examples of patents stifling innovation (oftentimes purposefully, where a company buys a patent just so nobody else can use it). There are much more complicated examples though, such as the pharmaceutical industry. At least in the US, which funds most of the world's drug research, the entire business incentive for developing new drugs would evaporate without patents. Now there are lots of problems with the pharmaceutical industry, however developing new innovative drugs (with the intent of profiting from them, often viciously) is not one of them.
Everybody agrees the patent system is broken. The problem is nobody can propose a better alternative.
I've never heard of this before. How much support does this idea have from economists? A quick google search just brought up a hodge podge of articles on why patents are too expensive.
> 2) Abolish patents, except for pharmaceutical industry.
So what are the boundaries we'd place? Only companies whose primary income source is parmaceuticals are allowed to own patents? Are all the non-pharma companies still required to avoid patent infringement?
Or is it that patents can only exist if they're relevant to pharmaceuticals? If so, where do you draw the border? If a pharmaceutical company comes up with a new process for synthesizing some compound Z which they use for their drug, is that patentable? What if it turns out that compound Z is also useful for weather-treating surfaces, and gains widespread use in construction? Now, what if we switch to an alternate timeline where compound Z was invented by a construction company first, and then pharma started to use it? What's the patent situation look like?
#2 seems rather arbitrary to me, even moreso than existing patent law. I'm not convinced it's any better than the status quo, though also it's not clear to me exactly what you mean with it.
The point is that the patent system is so deeply messed up an unjust that almost any move towards lessening the applicability of patents is a positive one. In these conversations, someone inevitably comes up with the "but what about the drug research" response.
To avoid any worries that the drug research will cease if drugs are no longer patentable, the practical solution is to leave patents in place for drugs. Drugs are regulated in million of ways already. Patent system already has special provisions applicable only to drugs. Just craft the new intellectual property category that will cover 95% of ways patents are now used for pharmaceutical research and call it a day.
It doesn't have to be justified from first principles or fully cover all the edge cases because: 1) patent system is already justified on purely consequentialist grounds (at least in the US) 2) existing patent system already fails basic sanity checks, let alone perfectly handling all the edge cases.
> To say that patents always stimulate innovation is obviously false to me.
Yeah, the historical record says it doesn't work. The same for copyrights. In the 1800s Germany had no copyright laws and their economy and innovation boomed. US industry was founded on ignoring British patents.
Today, look at innovation in open source software - without patents and copyrights, it proceeds at a breakneck pace.
Open source software depends on copyright to work.
Ignoring IP laws is a great way to catch up to stronger economies that are growing on innovation. Once you catch up, though, the only way to keep growing is to develop your own innovations... at which point you start caring more about IP laws. The U.S. went through this transition and China will too, pretty soon I think.
Your comment seems to ignore my assertion that there was more innovation in 3D printing after the patents expired, with much of that innovation being open source. That was not an example of catching up with someone else by copying them, it was an example of novel development done in the public interest.
That's like saying "antibiotics don't work without bacteria".
In my opinion, open source is so successful because the current copyright laws have overreached. My feeling is saner copyright duration would probably make open source all but disappear.
8 years later and you can buy a beginner's 3D printer for $250, a very reliable open source machine for $1000, and a super high end machine for $15,000.
To say that patents always stimulate innovation is obviously false to me. Patents may stimulate innovation at times but they also clearly stifle it. I was thinking today how the Prusa 3D printer is no more technologically complex than a pen plotter from the 1980's. If it had not been for patents, many companies could have competed for the high end 3D printer market in the 1990's, prices would have been perhaps a few thousand dollars for a printer in the year 2000, and the spread of personal computers would have led to the same hacking and innovation to lower costs we've seen but perhaps ten years earlier.
And the second order effects of this are I think dramatic. 3D printers accelerate innovation by dramatically reducing the cycle time for iterative development of mechanical parts. In the 1990's if you designed a mechanical part you had to wait weeks for it to come back from a machine shop if you could not hire a 3D printer. With a 3D printer in your office you can get a mechanical sample of your design the next day, and go through 5 design iterations in a week.
Instead of allowing for cheap and ubiquitous 3D printing, we chose to give a legal monopoly to stratasys who got to profit greatly for it. And I think society suffered economically because of it.
It is a source of great frustration to me that people dogmatically believe patents cause innovation. It is quite obvious to me that there are benefits to innovation even without intellectual property protection. Prusa Research still makes all of their products open source and they appear to be a healthy, growing, multi-milion dollar a year business. Chinese clones flood the market and are great for broke students, but those who want more reliability still source from Prusa. It seems there is room in the market both for the OEM and clones as they serve different groups.
The only reason business people love patents is that in a world where patents exist, you have an incentive to collect them. But I think the second order negative effects of this dramatically slow innovation and harm society economically. If Prusa can exist without patents in a market where competitors still use them, we can obviously make functional an entire economy with less intellectual property restrictions.
Unfortunately this is seen as arcane or obscure and nobody cares. Its a HUGE issue that I think affects our ability to innovate broadly but I fear the business community would be against the change we need.
My only hope is that competent and respected economists could examine this issue. People who know China well already know how much innovation can flourish in an open business community [2] but we need to convince the American business community to buy in to IP reform.
[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120217005877/en/Str...
[2] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284