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Comment by venomsnake | Hacker News Reader

Patents are still valuable, but only for research that requires massive investments.

They also cause a lot of research not to happen, and a lot of products to not come to market. If you take a holistic view, as a society we would be better off without patents.

There is simply not enough empirical evidence to support your assertions. Every time I've asked for evidence to support similar assertions, I've gotten nothing but vague anecdotes or historical examples that have been debunked.

This is unfortunate, because there are plenty of empirical studies showing the benefits and costs of patents (search ssrn.com for "patents" and focus on the studies that use economic data). The upshot is, to date nobody has been able to say the one outweighs the other largely because they are not directly comparable.

Does the book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" not have any such examples?

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

This book gets cited a lot in such discussions, so I usually just respond by linking some of my previous comments that address it and related works :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7890441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8157206

Without patents the new pharmaceutical industry would collapse and complicated new drugs we might otherwise benefit from would be lost.

But computer software and tech startups would be much better off since patents are purely harmful to software innovation.

Which points to one obvious reform.

Again, there is not much overwhelming empirical evidence that software / tech are harmed by patents. Studies attempting to prove this have been sorely lacking. However, there was a recent study that showed that patents can be a slight drag on fields characterized by a large number of very small, incremental improvements, which can characterize a lot of software innovations. I cannot find it right now, but this was the first paper I found that actually tries to quantify the costs of patents to industries like ours.

On the other hand, there are multiple other studies showing how having a patent increases the chances of tech startups of a) receiving VC funding and b) making successful exits. I'd say it's still not clear that the software industry is being harmed more by patents than it is being benefited.

So only the rich will get patents?

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