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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered why anyone not creating products behind their patents should be allowed to profit off of them. If I make a new concept and patent it and publish my idea into the market I should have my patented protection on my product. If I buy a patent for something I don't produce, heck, if I don't even produce anything in my company, I shouldn't be allowed to keep said patent. I'm not a patent expert or a law expert, but some things just bug me out.

Edit: typos and such

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You could view patent collector to have roughly the same role as debt collector: it's a specialization of enforcement for certain type of social contracts in our system. In programming term, they would be an abstraction black box the free others (creator) from doing mundane unnecessary jobs.

Now, of course the current implementation of IP is pretty shitty. And there are argument to be made that the assumption of "no patent/ idea protection === no incentive for people to create thing" is flawed to start with.

Imagine how awful it would be if a debt collector set their own prices. And debts were racked up with extremely-vague terms from people you never met.

You can't afford to make your innovation, try and sell it and someone you showed it to just steals it because you don't make it.

You call it stealing but really you mean copying which is different. Would it be better if the idea never became a reality because to do so would hurt the creator's feelings? Ideas are cheap and execution is hard.

If you're allowed to "hurt the creator's feelings" then which creator would ever create?

Jokes aside, your statement is only true under the assumption that the original idea is cheap and trivial, which is not true for a large number of patents. For hardware patents such as the ones filed by Tesla that helped significantly advance modern technology, they are often non-trivial, yet he was never wealthy enough to produce his inventions at scale and relied heavily on corporate partners to do so. If he was not able to own his patents without actually produce the products himself, this arrangement would never have worked.

> If you're allowed to "hurt the creator's feelings" then which creator would ever create?

Most of them; creative people aren't creative because of money or incentives, they're just creative people.

Without patents, what would a small hw start-up do to protect itself while raising funding? Product development can take decades for nonsoftware projects.

A start up does not have to tell it's trade secrets. Patents are only useful for startups to acquire VC funding.

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