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Comment by std_throwaway | Hacker News Reader

For groundbreaking technology, 20 years is shorter than you think.

It could take 5 years at university to get it working at all, 5 years as a startup to get the first product to market, 5 years to scale up the marked from zero. Then you only have 5 years left where you actually have a chance to make money.

Shortening the patent life to even 10 years would make it unattractive to patent groundbreaking technology.

If you immediately make it to market, the story is different. In the software-sector everything is moving much much faster than in the physical world. The negative effects of patents become much more obvious then.

One way to go about that is to limit the license fees the patent holder can get. This would change the game in major ways (mostly for the better I think).

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Could is the most important word in your entire store, it could take that much time. But the story at hand really underlines that 20 years is longer than necessary.

Furthermore, the alternative (AAC) is open source. So there obviously exist incentives that are not patents. So 0 years of protectionism was enough for some people to innovate.

It is very common for people to act like patents are somehow necessary for innovation, but this is a story where patents were harmful.

> But the story at hand really underlines that 20 years is longer than necessary.

And the scenario outline underlines that it may not be.

But one is a real story, the other is a hypothetical...

'Could' applies to patents being too long too. 20 years could be longer than necessary. All scenarios in this argument have already happened in large numbers, companies have both failed and succeeded to realize financial protection and gain from their patents, in both too long and too short timeframes.

Shortening patent life will hurt big businesses somewhat. It might completely kill the use of patents for small startups and research groups, and completely eliminate whatever protections they have left, if any. Patent protections already heavily favor big businesses. Big businesses will be fine either way. Shortening patents will have little effect on whether they survive. What I wonder is what we can do to make the patent system useful to small businesses, like it is so often claimed to be, or what alternatives there are to incentivize and protect small business innovation.

Remember to consider both sides in your analysis.

It is absolutely true that longer patents would help some small businesses. But it is ALSO true that longer patents would HARM some small businesses. After all, large businesses own most of the patents. So long as their product only requires one patent, the small business is at no real risk from existing patents and is free to use their own patent to establish a foothold in the market. But do most products require only one patent? (Do any in this day and age?)

If a small business requires several patents to conduct their business and these are largely owned by existing, established firms, then patents may actually harm small businesses more than they help. I would be interested to see actual statistics on the size of each effect: I would be unsurprised if it turned out that patents do more harm than good to small businesses, even if the small business holds a patent.

Agreed, and this is a good point. I also wouldn't be surprised to hear that patents are a net negative for small businesses.

You are right, shortening patents could allow more small businesses to compete with tech that expires, it could be a positive for small businesses.

But, that doesn't directly encourage any innovation, or protect the development efforts of any individual small businesses. And once patents expire, everyone can compete. There's normally a lot of dis-incentive for a small business to even consider jumping into that fray after someone's got a head start on the market, especially if the patent holder was a big business.

I'm most interested in how to encourage and protect the technical innovations of small businesses without making it a tool big businesses use to crush small ones and monopolize markets for obvious and non-innovative progress. Shortening patents could have a positive or negative effect on the health of small business, but I worry that it wouldn't address the stated goals of the patent system for small businesses.

It is already unattractive to patent groundbreaking technology.

You are an inventor, and you want to create a new company. Your adversaries are big companies with lots of other patents and lawyers. If there is a conflict (they steal your idea), you don't have any real practical recourse.

As in the case of Robert Kearns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns) whose story was the inspiration for the film Flash of Genius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_of_Genius_(film))

It took this man the majority of his adult life to win out in opposition to the Ford Motor Company's "acquisition" of his design for the intermittent windshield wiper.

> It could take 5 years at university to get it working at all, 5 years as a startup to get the first product to market, 5 years to scale up the marked from zero. Then you only have 5 years left where you actually have a chance to make money.

In practice the first 15 years would (and commonly are) simply stretched with continuation patents...

> limit the license fees the patent holder can get

So your solution to some of the issues caused by government-granted monopolies is to impose price controls!?

And don't think that an across-the-board royalty cap would last longer than a year or two. Price controls would only empower a new horde of bureaucrats and rules that would adjust royalty caps based on industry and company.

In this future, a patent means something different to each entity and in each sector.

Government wants to stimulate growth in a certain sector? Bump up the patent royalty cap.

Big business with lots of lobbyists and jobs? Bump up their caps (or reduce the competition's), for the sake of the jobs, you know.

>In the software-sector everything is moving much much faster than in the physical world. The negative effects of patents become much more obvious then.

So tune the law for software patents ? Software industry is large enough to get specific treatment.

And large enough to have lobbying budget to prevent exactly that...

5 years after product comes out the patent is expired. Also to have a clause that you only have 7 years to get your product to market or else the patent expires with a grand total of 12 years at the most.

> Shortening the patent life to even 10 years would make it unattractive to patent groundbreaking technology.

Which probably would not be a bad thing.

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