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Comment by garbowza | Hacker News Reader

"One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general." http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html

Btw, your writer analogy is a poor one, since prior art exists for that story line and thus it would not be patentable. There are also industries that would collapse without patents (pharmaceuticals for one).

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I assume pg is referring to http://www.gamespot.com/news/6117964.html when he writes

The one example I've found is, embarrassingly enough, Yahoo, which filed a patent suit against a gaming startup called Xfire in 2005. Xfire doesn't seem to be a very big deal, and it's hard to say why Yahoo felt threatened. Xfire's VP of engineering had worked at Yahoo on similar stuff-- in fact, he was listed as an inventor on the patent Yahoo sued over-- so perhaps there was something personal about it. My guess is that someone at Yahoo goofed. At any rate they didn't pursue the suit very vigorously.

I can't help but wonder if pg thinks the same way about software patents now that there is a very real chance that his own patent could be used against him at the whim of someone at a company he's been publically bad-mouthing for some time.

What makes you think there's a very real chance of that? Microsoft already has patents on practically everything to do with software. What difference has it made?

Here are some more lawsuits, some of which involved injunctions.

Tivo v Dish - http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1201779834291

Forgent v Audiovox, ePlus v Ariba, Immersion v Sony/Microsoft, EMC v HP, USA Video v Movielink, BroadVision v Art Technology, Electronics for Imaging vs everbody .... http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=492018

Well... your own essay suggested that the motivation in Yahoo v Xfire was personal.

If someone comes to YC with an idea you like but is incumbered by a technology and/or business model that you know infringes on specific patents held by a company like Microsoft, do you just fund them anyways and tell them it doesn't matter?

Are you saying it would have made no difference to Yahoo if Microsoft somehow patented the continuation-server idea Viaweb depends on before you did?

Yes, we completely ignore patent questions in funding decisions. So do most software investors.

And yes, it would have made no difference to Yahoo. As far as I know, they didn't do any patent searches prior to acquiring us. In fact, I've never heard of patents torpedoing an acquisition. Acquirers (rightly) have a fatalistic attitude to patents.

Curiously enough, Yahoo did get sued by a patent troll over Viaweb. It was after my time, but it was something to do with shopping carts. A totally bogus claim, but I believe Yahoo settled, because they were able to pay them out of the money they'd held in escrow for us. (We were not that unhappy though, because the money held in escrow had increased something like 15x.)

I'm not against patents per se (they're a necessary evil, I believe that shortening their length and/or adding a forced licensing clause could improve them), but the problem is that software patents too often do the opposite than what they're intended - stifling innovation in a rapidly evolving market - and the patent system is currently too-often used on things that are likely to be reinvented and become popular independently rather than the actual purpose which is share knowledge with the world in exchange for a temporary monopoly on your invention.

Phamaceuticals wouldn't collapse; half of their current expenditures go into advertising, half into research. But that only accounts for half of the actual research costs: the rest mainly comes from the NSF. We could just have the NSF give them a 100% handout and cover all the research.

Get your stats right, do your research before you comment.

Pharmaceutical research in the US 2005 34.8B USD federal funds 41M USD. Thats less than 0.12%.

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf07335/

The NSF isn't the primary fund granting organization for medical research, the NIH is -- with a funding level (28.7B) that eclipses the NSF (5.9B). In 2003, NIH is estimated to have funded 28% of the overall medical investigation costs: http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/...

Pharmaceutical research in all likelyhood includes the cost of bringing drugs to market, currently around $800M per drug. Because of this high barrier, much of the Pharma energy goes into 'me too' drugs of a higher risk/reward ratio, again inflating the true spending on new research: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/what-dont-w...

Yes the NIH is a major source of funding for pharma, although not as big as you think, medical investigation includes a lot that is not pharmaceutical research

The me-too phenomena is a problem but only because of two factors, pressure by pharma reps and the fact that the US is the only country I ever heard of that allows advertising of non over-the-counter meds.

"Advertising" includes training doctors, not just "ask your doctor about erectinol" commercials.

Hiring doctors to travel the country, give lectures explaining how it works, renting conference centers, providing lunch, etc adds up. Learning how to use a new drug is not easy like learning software; trial and error doesn't work.

A drug is worthless if your doctor doesn't know what it does.

I know some pharmaceutical reps - they say without irony - that they push (in the drug dealer sense) whatever drug their company wants them to.

America is the one of the only countries that allows pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers. http://tinyurl.com/27y5df

Considering how arrogant doctors are, and how powerful the placebo effect is, it might make us healthier if we had more advertising directly to consumers and less to doctors.

So in other countries, they simply spend the same money trying to bribe doctors instead of consumers.

Because who would pay for RnD if you can't go exclusive at least for a dozen or so years! Well I hope that someone would, that the human social structure have evolved enough to create all what's necessary for it's survival and that the pharmaceuticals industry wouldn't collapse, it would just restructure and medicines will be cheaper!

The sad truth is, I really believe this would what would've happened!

"evolving human social structures" is just hand waving. What would the economics of your patent-less pharma world look like? Research dollars are a scarce resource - how will they be allocated and by who?

I hope that is what would happen as well. Unfortunately, humans are, as a group, most strongly motivated by money.

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