Personally I don’t think patents do what people believe they do (encourage innovation). It’s a bigger discussion but briefly, the only literal function of a patent is to discourage innovation by legally barring anyone from using a patented idea as part of a new innovation. The idea we have is that the secondary effects of this will be increased profits for inventors and therefore more innovation. But actually there’s loads of secondary effects and often many of them outweigh the effect of increased profit. For every one inventor that gets a patent there might be 100 prevented from using that idea in a different and innovative way.
A classic example is 3D printers. Stratasys spent 15 years selling printers that cost tens of thousands of dollars. It wasn’t until the patent expired that people figured out how to make them for $250. Those cheaper printers are enabling mechanical engineers and designers to accelerate their process and make other new innovations faster. Stratasys had such a powerful patent they never bothered innovating down in price, instead rested on their laurels selling $25k printers to big customers.
So how many inventions were delayed or shelved because the inventors couldn’t afford a $25,000 3D printer, and $250 printers didn’t exist yet? Both Stratasys and IBM held patents related to 3D printing and they had to cross license to go in to production, so how many others would have come up with 3D printing in the 1990’s if they had not been patented? Would first mover advantage in a free market have been enough to stimulate development of 3D printers? Could we have had $2000 3D printers in the early 2000’s (Stratasys sold theirs for $30k) instead of ten years later? How many engineers would have invented new gadgets faster if they had a 3D printer ten years earlier?
Another possible example is the x86 and x86-64 ISAs locked between AMD and Intel. I don’t think Intel would have become complacent had there been more competitors…
… or the whole “oracle vs google” over the java API.
A classic example is 3D printers. Stratasys spent 15 years selling printers that cost tens of thousands of dollars. It wasn’t until the patent expired that people figured out how to make them for $250. Those cheaper printers are enabling mechanical engineers and designers to accelerate their process and make other new innovations faster. Stratasys had such a powerful patent they never bothered innovating down in price, instead rested on their laurels selling $25k printers to big customers.
So how many inventions were delayed or shelved because the inventors couldn’t afford a $25,000 3D printer, and $250 printers didn’t exist yet? Both Stratasys and IBM held patents related to 3D printing and they had to cross license to go in to production, so how many others would have come up with 3D printing in the 1990’s if they had not been patented? Would first mover advantage in a free market have been enough to stimulate development of 3D printers? Could we have had $2000 3D printers in the early 2000’s (Stratasys sold theirs for $30k) instead of ten years later? How many engineers would have invented new gadgets faster if they had a 3D printer ten years earlier?