If we could kill patents altogether that would be a much nicer step. Patents are an invention from another Era and make absolutely no sense nowadays, and we see them constantly abused to make our lives worse in the end.
Moreover, how much theoretical economic payoff justifies surrendering a basic right? Should government be given sweeping power to dictate how we use our minds?
It's easy to miss the dog that didn't bark, or the improvement that couldn't be sold.
It seems like an innovation supporting tax would be less restrictive, while still rewarding useful innovations that the market somehow fails to reward.
The key, then, would be to distinguish and reward such primary innovation. Maybe it's obvious when you see it. Or maybe do some Bates thing with panels of experts.
This would encourage people to take their innovations to market, instead of sitting on them and bunkrupting anyone else who tries to.
These are all things which normally would be solved by competition in the marketplace, but you don’t have competition, since a patent is a monopoly. So you have to solve all these problems some other way.
They can also inhibit innovation. Something to consider...
In general, the first implementation of a good idea was a bad one, of limited use, not a well refined concept. And then the patent-holder sat on the patent until it expired, and then - finally - the whatever-it-was became a vital and widely used commodity as creativity started to be applied.
So all it did was slow the pace of change.
The English crown had the big problem that its treasury was dictated by parliament during the 16th century, so it sold royal decrees (writ patents) granting exclusive rights. Parliament passed after an outburst of patenting by the monarch the then new Statute of Monopolies, which said that only Parliament might grant monopolies in statutory form and that only for new inventions.
The British North American settlers later recognized that their society benefited by disclosure and that disclosure supplemented the very weak technical literature of the world in which they lived. They had plentiful of free natural resources but a very small skilled workforce, so they wanted to encourage the immigration of skilled people on a deal which required the disclosure of their inventions in a publicly consult-able reference form.
Which effect is stronger? It is very plausible that overall, the decrease is far stronger than the increase, as the vast majority of inventions are derivative.
And don't even get me started on all the "obvious" patents out there, or the one that clearly are no invention because prior art actually exists - but then they take years to be invalidated, if ever. It is just an enormous debt on Society as a whole.
> many people would be unemployed
This isn't an argument at all. It's better for people to be unemployed than to be employed in an enterprise that makes everyone else worse off.
> and there would thus be no incentive to even develop new drugs
Of course there would. We had drug development before we had patents.
Are you hinting at a specific company? I don't think the people that got cured from metastatic cancer would agree that they would be better of without Merck and their PD-L1 antibodies.
To be clear I'm responding to ekianjo's > If we could kill patents altogether that would be a much nicer step. I'm also not in favor of patenting natural products, gene sequences and traditional cures.
I am in favor of establishing a system where a companies would have a solid return on investment while still having the drug available to everybody without damaging the incentive to invest billions to come up with only a handful of drugs. The problem is, the drug market is not a free market, an individual has no reasonable way of saying "I don't agree to your price and I will thus not use your product." ... as consumers have with normal products.
>Of course there would. We had drug development before we had patents. Perhaps I should say: There would be no efficient, lean very driven companies looking for drugs. Off course there may have been people who found drugs out of hobby of while being paid for by the state.
Of course they wouldn't; its the relatives of all those who could not afford the drug and died who would be all-in for this!
And you seem to believe that the Free Hand of Market does magically fix every problem. Not so. It is just a Hand after all, with no eyes and no brain.
Big companies have their own share of inefficiencies. Maybe is not as bad as in the public sector, but they are far from working at full capacity. And whatever advantage private sector has you have to offset against the potential for corporate malfeasance. With corrupt public officials at least you know they limit themselves to trying to get rich and providing good paying jobs for their friends. In the private sector you give executives the chance to do the same thing legally, and then they go on to weaponize the patent system and actively block any progress (in house AND from external competitors) that is perceived to threaten a revenue stream.
Ultimately the people that count, the intellectual powerhouses that carry the weight of everybody else, are the same ones that you've dismissed as hobbyist. They are the only ones that care about the drugs themselves, and they care enough to do it even if nobody pays them, as long as they are not busy trying not to starve to dead. They usually don't care where their paycheck comes from (grants, profits, venture capital, etc), and as long as all their needs and reasonable wants are provided for they continue to perform their magic.
We don't have that problem in the Netherlands so maybe that is what requires fixing. Here, if a drug is too expensive, nobody has access to it (only the ultra rich perhaps) and that creates an incentive to keep drugs affordable to certain extent.
Again I'm not saying the current system is optimal but cancelling the right to monetize your inventions at least until your investment has been earned back seems nothing but reasonable to me.
How is that? We've had patents for centuries; we've had drug development for maybe one century.
Really? Can you provide an example?
From what I understand patents started in the US shortly after formation of the country. The first drugs discovered didn't happen until the late 1800's.
In fact, the names of many of these drugs were "Dr. Smith's patented flu medication".
> Later in his life [before 200 BC], Qin Shi Huang feared death and desperately sought the fabled elixir of life, which would supposedly allow him to live forever. He was obsessed with acquiring immortality and fell prey to many who offered him supposed elixirs.
> The ostensible goals of alchemy are often given as the transmutation of common metals into gold (known as chrysopoeia), the creation of a panacea, and the discovery of a universal solvent.
(emphasis mine)
> Plant extracts, including willow bark and spiraea, of which salicylic acid was the active ingredient, had been known to help alleviate headaches, pains, and fevers since antiquity. The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates (circa 460 – 377 BC), left historical records describing the use of powder made from the bark and leaves of the willow tree to help these symptoms.
All of that is drug development. In the case of willow bark extract, it was successful drug development. But I'm not going to blame the people of 200 BC for being technically less adept than the people of today. If they'd had the knowledge and tools we have, they would have done their development from that base.
Snake oil was named "Dr. Smith's Patented Flu Medication" to give the impression that the government officially vouched for its effectiveness, not in gratitude to the patent system.
And moreover, there are other ways to protect your invention without using patents - such as trade secrets, manufacturing expertise, exclusive supplier agreements, and of course, ONGOING innovation (instead of inventing one thing and getting a rent out of it for 20 years).
Again: I understand the need for keeping medicines cheap but the removal of patents seems like an overkill with adverse effects.
> If they have no patent, they are forced to keep the price low enough so no one wants to compete. ... And no one feels like inventing a new drug that will immediately be copied and sold at a price near that of the raw materials (the only overhead is the factory) making it impossible to pay all the scientists who are working on the next drug.
Some people are allergic to the new inhalers (sulfates can irritate the airways), which led to the creation of a black market for the old ones, but that supply is bound to run out eventually.
With insurance, I pay about $40 for one of the new inhalers (If you're poor and don't have insurance, you get to die, I guess). Generally they make my breathing more constricted for a minute or two until the albuterol kicks in, so I try to avoid taking a hit from my inhaler unless I'm really having trouble. Nice. Fortunately, since I moved to a beach town on the coast of Florida last year, I haven't needed my inhaler very often. Unfortunately, I'm no longer willing to relocate for work (dirty, city air is the worst), now that I've found a place where the air isn't trying to kill me. :)
http://www.drugs.com/generic-approvals.html
I know people who have fought not to have generic or bio-similar drugs.
Anyway, can you provide references to validate your claim? Just because someone says something on the Internet doesn't make it true.
We should encourage independent inventors and small / mid-size businesses to risk capital on R&D, and reward them with a bit of protection so they can do some marketing while bringing a new thing to market, without having to worry about a big company duplicating their work and selling over them.
The internet doesn't fix the economies of scale afforded by a big cash pile, for either marketing or distribution.
Consumers win when innovators compete with each other. Patents replace market competition with a foot race.
there is a lot of emotional and assertive speculation around this issue but all of the hard facts that are available very strongly suggest patents work despite occasional (if highly publicized) conflict. how does your theory accommodate that fact?
If everything that could have been patented was patented, we'd all be poorer for it. Except the lawyers, of course.
What patents were set up to prevent, IIRC, was trade secrets - they were a way to bribe creators to publish their ideas rather than sit on them.
IMO, they were a sledgehammer to swat a fly. Trade secrets would be reinvented. Locking an idea out of the commons for a whole patent term (and longer if they can attach new patents off the side) is a worse outcome.
Consider the case of nuclear weapons. The first big leap is that the energy of fission can be made to be explosively released. Once you know that this is the case, most people in the field might be able to come up with something along the lines of a gun-type warhead.
On the other hand, implosion devices, even if you know they are possible, still require a huge amount of work and design studies to make work reliably. Knowing that they are possible isn't the hard part--making it work is.
This is what I learned too. I can't for the life of me understand why the US has trade secret laws in addition to the patent laws. From some light reading on wikipedia, the answer seems to be "why do we need a reason?"
The issue that might arise is that techniques that are invented might never be openly published (since there wouldn't be protection for it).
For stuff that is obvious, it wouldn't matter because it is obvious. The non-obvious stuff--the stuff that actually does deserve a patent--might be lost on occasion.
I'm not a big fan of patents in general though given my experience with them (and certainly not patents on genes, etc).