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Comment by saimiam | Hacker News Reader

How do you protect and encourage innovation without patents?

How are software patents protecting or encouraging innovation? I have seen patents cover algorithms that had not been proved feasible at the time the patent was granted. I have seen patents granted on academic research that do not recognizably cover the same invention. Most programmers have no idea whether or not they are infringing on patents.

Patents are supposed to come with limitations. For example, nobody is supposed to receive a patent on math. In my own field (crypto) math patents are the norm -- I have seen countless patents on results in algebraic number theory (elliptic curves, pairings, lattices, etc.).

The software industry has demonstrated an ability to innovate without patents, both in open source and proprietary software. Open source is obvious. Proprietary software is monetized with copyrights and trade secrets; patents play a minor role at most, and legitimate software companies just amass defensive portfolios to protect themselves from patent trolls. The only people making big bucks on software patents are lawyers who represent a drain on our industry.

In software, by doing nothing. Merely not punishing for innovation (via submarine patents) is enough. Other incentives and protections seem to be enough for the vast majority of software, which is not patented. To give a specific example, we'd be 20 years ahead in video codecs if they weren't a research minefield and innovations of open-source community weren't tainted by patents (in this area there are lots of people keen to innovate, but they have to bend backwards to make something good strictly out of 20+-year-old algorithms, because anything not obviously outdated is undeployable due to litigation risk).

For other areas, like drug research, I think publicly-funded research is a great solution. When new drugs are invented, they should be produced as cheaply as possible, repaying investment by saving as many people as possible.

> For other areas, like drug research, I think publicly-funded research is a great solution.

Tallying up most of the federal funding in the U.S. for R&D of any kind gives you a number ~ $130 billion per year for the last few years[1]. The top fifteen pharma companies have R&D budgets that look to add up to around $80 billion per year[2]. What countries do you expect to be willing to match that spend?

[1]: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsf16311/ [2]: https://endpts.com/top-pharma-biotech-research-development-b...

And note a huge chunk of government R&D is defense. HHS/NIH is like $30B a year, which makes the $80B comparison even more compelling.

The weird thing being that some of the biggest leaps of technological development have been during wartime, because then budget is no issue.

The early cultivation of penicillin involved walls of cotton balls acting as growth environment. Laborious, ineffective and expensive, but maintained so that the army hospitals were provided a reliable supply.

The question is do patents encourage innovation? It seem that they do not -- they in fact encourage rent seeking and slow down innovation.

So Halliburton could have funded the very long expensive development of Xerox machines... how?

Patents only encourage innovation in areas where R&D is expensive and/or time consuming. The pharmaceutical industry is a good example. Software on the other hand has far less R&D risk, and the cost of carrying out that R&D is far smaller. What ends up happening is that there's a race to patent basic processes that require very little R&D, but have wide-ranging legal implications. This stifles innovation.

In short, patents aren't beneficial for all industries.

False logic. It's not like the absence of patents has prevented innovation in the course of History. Imagine how poor the world would have been if a patent on "fire" was ever granted to some kind of proto-human organization.

Twenty years and it’s done. No big deal. But the patent on teepee fires, log cabin fires, elm fires, oak fires, pine fires that start faster, maple fires, fire for cooking chicken, fire for cooking turkey, fire for smoking meats, fire for signaling, fire for signaling with morse code, fire for warmth, Uber but for fire, charcoal, fire for witches, and firing employees—those would drown us.

Be wayyy more strict about what can be submitted. Limit patent claims to one page, authored by the main inventor (not her lawyer), reject wayy more submissions, allow the public to identify prior art on pending patents, etc.

>Limit patent claims to one page

Wouldn't that force people to be vague? More pages would mean more specificity, wouldn't it? A patent can currently only cover one thing anyway, and even if this wasn't the case then people would just submit many one-page patents instead of a 100-page collection of 100 smaller patents.

>not her lawyer

Can I ask why you specified her? I am all for gender equality and am currently trying to get into the habit of using "them" and "theirs" instead of "him" and "his" but switching to the opposite gender doesn't seem to solve anything. Plus it reads oddly because the male is gender-neutral in English, swapping it with a word that is not gender-neutral is confusing.

“Them” and “theirs” are plural. Talk about confusing.

I don’t get why using “one” isn’t more common. It’s gramatically correct and is as gender neutral as it gets.

It's pretty common in Britain, and yes it's valid grammatically correct English but it's used to refer to "oneself" so wouldn't work when referring to others very well.

As for the former portion, I think the goal here is to force the applicant to be as succinct as possible to make the review process faster. I think you're right in that it would result in a larger number of patents, and there are certainly patents that couldn't fit on a single page without omitting a valuable prelude. For example, an algorithm patent may require some initial exposition to delineate the novelty of the idea.

The latter portion of your comment is not necessary and does not contribute to the discussion at hand. There are many possible reasons for using "her" instead of "him" and the majority of them are valid.

Actually, "its" would be gender-neutral in English, but using "its" to describe a person is considered very rude (because people actually have genders, so "its" implies that you are talking about something rather than someone).

Something to consider: Would you have had the same reaction to this sentence: "...a nurse (not her lawyer)...?" Many people would find that to be less "forced" because they are already comfortable assuming that nurses are women. In other words, the fact that using one pronoun stands out more than using another is evidence of a bias people carry (not necessarily you -- maybe you would have been equally curious if it was, "not his lawyer"; that would make you a very unique person ;) ).

I generally go for 'they' to be neutral, but it doesn't always feel right.

I believe that is because English grammar is in a transitional stage right now as we lose declensions for our pronouns. In a century or two, "they" might be the proper genderless pronoun, and we may not even have gendered pronouns at that point -- but that is not the English of today. So while using "they" as a genderless singular pronoun might sometimes work it still feels a bit awkward.

Personally, I try to alternate between "he" and "she" when I am talking about hypothetical people, so I am never pushing the bounds of English grammar (at least with pronouns).

'He' and 'she' switching confuses me, and while in some cases I do feel that it's a result of actual ambiguity, a big part of it might just be unfamiliarity.

Either way, even in Dutch I find myself to be a bit more sensitive to these things and it's not something I'd argue against. Although in Dutch there's not even a 'they' we can use, practically.

The key is to keep the price of filing the same. So when you have a $20k budget for patenting, you will still only file the same number of patents. Then the one-pager will have to be succinct and to the point. If it doesn't convince the examiner that it's novel, the patent gets rejected and the application fees are wasted. Most patents today are just legalese with a zillion combinations of embodiments of the main claims. Just keep it to the claims and be specific.

Secrecy until it gets leaked/reverse engineered serves the same function to a more moderate degree.

which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for society as a whole: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible

Profits. For being better, not first.

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