The very first patent was to duplicate an existing process (the loom) and have a monopoly to produce it.
I keep hearing this argument from patent proponents, but patents have never in their history been ostensibly for good.
No it doesn't, it grants them the power but it doesn't specify they have to do it.
“The Congress shall have Power To…promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries….”
There is a big difference between having a power and being forced to use it.
My reading is that Congress has an OBLIGATION to promote the arts and sciences, and has the power to use copyright and patent law to achieve those goals as congress sees fit.
You are literally looking for something that isn't there, because it is not written down.
I would love for a lawyer to chime in, because admittedly this is not my wheelhouse.
Additionally, even if Congress had an obligation to grant intellectual property rights, couldn't they simply grant patents for a term of 24 hours? or 15 seconds?
From what I've read (c.f. Clinton v. City of New York 1998), Congress can decline to use a power, but it cannot grant that power to another branch of government.
If the framers wanted to require that Congress do this stuff, why insert "have the power to" unnecessarily? There's no need for that phrase.
As another point against this being an obligation, if you look at the list of enumerated powers[0], you'll see some that are clearly not obligations. Congress doesn't have to borrow money. They don't have to maintain a navy. They didn't have to establish post offices. They didn't have to create a federal court system. (Granted, it makes a lot of sense for them to do many of these things, but it feels wrong to think that they're required to.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_Stat...
The basic idea here is that an authority (e.g., Congress) that has been given a specific power (e.g., declaring war) is obligated to exercise that power where appropriate.
Do note the specific phrasing above: if there is a situation in which exercising that power is the appropriate course of action, then that power must be exercised. The authority cannot choose not to exercise the power in such a situation.
So, Congress doesn't have to declare war for the sake of declaring war. However, if there is an existential military threat to the USA (e.g., aggression by the Japanese Empire in WW2) you could argue that Congress is obligated to declare war, as this would be an appropriate situation to exercise that power.
Of course, the above explanation is very simplistic. There can be specific wordings that clarify how much discretion that authority has; there may be case law pertinent to that area; and whether a given situation mandates "appropriate" exercise of a given power is never a black-and-white decision.
Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
It is notable that patent and copyright are not natural rights. At no time was it assumed that people have such rights, nor that government, without explicit authorization could grant such limited term monopolies. Calling these monopolies "good" is definitely not uncontested, nor was it ever.
As I pointed out, the constitution grants congress the EXPLICIT AUTHORIZATION you refer to, for the very purpose of promoting the PROGRESS of the arts and sciences.
I guess you think that the promotion of the progress of arts and sciences is not inherently a GOOD thing, but I'd disagree and I think the implied reasoning behind it's inclusion is entirely self-evident.
Does the current set of systems promote the progress of "science" and "useful arts" as they would have been known by those signing those laws many lifetimes ago?
From what I remember of other parts of the constitution and amendments offhand they generally don't include an explicit directive about why something is there. It's extremely implicit as an often obvious effect of what the law expressly allows or forbids.
Thus it is very reasonable to ask: Is the behavior we see from IBM in this news story promoting the progress of "science" and/or "useful arts"? Is the behavior of industry overall with respect to these tools doing more good or more harm?
The intent of the patent systems != what the patent system achieves
What I described to you, that you disagreed with was the intent of the patent system. If you want to debate what the patent system achieves, it's a much more complicated question.
It is substantiated by the text of the Constitution itself.
From what I remember of other parts of the constitution and amendments offhand they generally don't include an explicit directive about why something is there. It's extremely implicit as an often obvious effect of what the law expressly allows or forbids.
They generally don't. And therefore the statement of intent for this particular clause should be given more weight, not less.
Though you do understand the further elaboration of why I too feel it is __extremely__ important that there is a clause about why this power is reserved to Congress and a described intent / limit within which that power is to be used.
More specifically, can Congress achieve unlimited terms with regular copyright extensions to existing copyright? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft ruled that they can. However their next attempt to extend has so far failed.
We will find out in 2024 whether they get it together, or whether Mickey Mouse enters the public domain after all...like it should have done in 1984. (That was the maximum that could have been expected when Steamboat Willie was released.)
Secondly, an explicit reason implies a condition: Is current patent law actually fit for the stated purpose?
Lastly, another comment here refers to the language of "amendments," presumably the Bill of Rights. The Copyright Clause is a clause, not an amendment, and not part of the BoR.
Companies file deliberately vague all-encompassing patents that are very hard to understand and pretty much useless for the purpose of educating the public and advancing the state of the art. Patents are merely weapons to be used against competitors. Companies file patents despite the existence of prior art and not only are they granted by the patent office but they're also allowed to stand uncontested due to the prohibitively expensive nature of patent litigation.
Disney and its copyright industry friends lobbied the government and successfully cheated the public out of its public domain rights by extending the duration of copyright to ludicrous lengths. If that's not criminal conspiracy, I don't know what is. YouTube and the copyright industry cheat people out of their fair use rights every single day.
A company may invent a mechanism or process which is better for its intended use than what came before. Sometimes it takes a lot of money and time and it doesn't always work. In the case of a mechanism, once it is sold, competitors could take it apart and reap the benefits without having expended the money and effort to create something new. If patents were killed off, it would discourage people and companies from making those investments. It has varied over the centuries, but currently a patent gives a 20 year time limited "monopoly" on the thing invented.
In the case of a process (vs a mechanism), without patents, a company is highly motivated to keep the process a trade secret. Even with patents a company may prefer to take that route. What do patents offer here? In exchange for disclosing the process, the company is granted that monopoly. In theory disclosing the process will spur the next round of improvements and help the system.
The problem isn't necessarily patents, but the process. Patent examiners are not paid all that well and literally have minutes to research and approve or deny a patent. They need to crank through multiple patent applications a day. And companies abuse the system. Secondly, the practice in patent law is to write the patents in such a way as to disclose as little as possible and claim as much as possible using obtuse language. If you read really old patents an ordinary person could understand most of them. Today I can read a patent in a domain I'm expert in and it is very hard to follow.
There should be some penalty for filing obvious patents, and part of the penalty would be to pay for for more patent examiners, and to pay the legal costs of the challenging party.
The early US loom patents are particularly ironic as they were “stolen” from the British design rather than actually invented, in violation of British law. The same thing applied to a whole bunch of other early technologies - the patents existed to encourage stealing other peoples ideas and hard work then claiming it as your own.
https://www.uspto.gov/about-us/news-updates/first-us-patent-...
Good. If law is stupid company must defend it's interest and at the same time - hard earning hosts too. I don't see which law is being broken if those are fought in court.
This is BS. Those "regular" people just want rental market to collapse so they can live in center of the city for pennies.
It's nobody's business if someone rents apartment. If you can't afford it - you can't afford it.
Unless you explain why, you're doing nothing to persuade anyone of anything other than employees at AirBnB disagree with the prevailing sentiment of HN. Having met the founders of AirBnB, I am incredibly skeptical of your claim, but I am willing to listen to what you have to say.
There is a large supply of housing that is available to customers that want to purchase it. The idea that two people can't make a consensual exchange of value is antithetical to a free society.
This is a good thing, and this is not antithetical to a free society.
Both Uber and AirBnB knowingly break the law as part of their business model.
Zoning doesn't allow the kind of business that AirBnB has, they just don't care.
One could very well argue that maybe the laws need reform (as I do) but that's another story; the inherent ethos of YC et. al. is to err on the side of breaking the rules.
Surely that's true, but nobody can agree on which exact rules need to be broken. :)
So you'll forgive me when I call the police because you're building favelas in your back yard and have 20 micro-rentals.
If you rely on the power of the state to be the ultimate enforcer of contracts and property rights, the state has the right and duty to delineate which contracts it will enforce.
My town prohibits leases under a week but that hasn’t stopped AirBnb from accepting listings there.
The problem I believe, is that software innovators are taught not to worry about patents. Perhaps this attitude helps the VC shops who are experts at it, and it gives them an information advantage. I don’t know who feeds the myth.
In a right-thinking world, we would look at this situation and say Airbnb just started farming on land that was unclearly owned. This is the natural consequence.
You don't need patents to build software but you need land for crops.
The patent is the land, not the crop. The products that can be produced with the patent are the crops, with which it is impossible to have without the patent. Think of it this way, you spend years cracking a new invention. You bring it to market. You immediately go out of business because a larger company takes your invention and sells it at half the price you can because they don't need to recoup your R&D costs. Without patents you cannot protect against this circumstance.
Trade secrets don't protect against this because trade secrets don't protect against reverse-engineering whereas patents do. Patents are a temporary monopoly. Trade secrets can last indefinitely. Patents have a relatively short lifetime, though people do argue one still too-long for software.
That's exactly what is happening in a country that does have the corresponding IP law and the IP law is enabling the practice rather than fighting it. In other news: war is peace, ignorance is strength, and freedom is slavery. Carry on!
That hardly follows. "IP" has very different properties than land, and "no ownership framework" is hardly the only alternative under consideration.
Even to the extent that land ownership and idea ownership can be analogized, using the former to justify the later is a poor argument on account of the enormous known systematic problems with the former. In particular, there's a reason why economists borrowed the term "rent" to mean "benefit received for non-produced input."
> The thing to do now is understand it.
That doesn't justify anything either. Did organized crime just take over your neighborhood? Understanding their priorities will help you deal with the problem, but it doesn't make them good and it doesn't make them worth protecting.
The point of patent laws is to encourage the spread of knowledge. To put it another way, it's NOT yours, but we'll let you act like it for a bit in order to make sure the knowledge gets out. If we've created a situation where the "land of ideas" is remaining fallow, then the process isn't working as intended.
> The problem I believe, is that software innovators are taught not to worry about patents
Who's the innovator? What side of the worry?
The software companies I've been in have been all about MAKING patents. Teaching special classes, polling workers to see if they've done anything patentable.
Worrying about violating patents is a different story.
Meanwhile, as an individual coder doing anything outside a corporate market, the message is that it's too expensive and difficult to "worry" about violating them.
I think you mean, ‘has fallow spots’. It seems to me that writing law is similar to building software systems; you always want a perfectly effective and economical system but you never have that ideal. So good engineers don’t stand up and say this system isn’t perfect, it’s obvious. What’s the proposed improvement? That is interesting.
It is important.
That's why software engineers want to be allowed to do their work without a silly patent system blocking their work.
Software is a medium in which patentable "inventions" come naturally to software engineers at a very high rate, often the same ideas as each other in response to the same problems.
(This suggests they aren't really rare insights at all and shouldn't be patentable, but the standard is too low for that.)
Sometimes tens or hundreds of patent-grade "inventions" a week for a great software engineer.
It isn't even possible for a great software engineer to know if what they are writing infringes on patents, existing or pending. It's just too difficult because of the high rate of duplicate "inventions" that come naturally.
Mechanical and electrical engineers also have great ideas and are blocked by patents. But the rate at which new, patentable ideas come to individuals in those fields seems to be lower, perhaps because it takes longer to actually make things, perhaps other reasons. Maybe even just because there are so many software engineers that duplication is unavoidable.
Is this really true?
1. Microsoft – mostly software
2. Apple – software and hardware
3. Amazon – mostly software
4. Alphabet – mostly software
5. Berkshire Hathaway – not tech
6. Facebook – mostly software
7. Alibaba – mostly software
8. Tencent – mostly software
9. Johnson & Johnson – not tech
10. Visa – not tech, but mostly software
Does a company like Facebook really develop new tech, or just apply it? They don't produce that many papers, compared to even a small university department.
How are you even measuring the volume of new tech? What is one new composite material compared to one new JavaScript framework? How do you compare those?
Is a small university department really producing more than a paper per working day?
Microsoft produces a lot of value from software, but how much new technology are they producing? Some for sure, but how much?
I don't think your metrics prove the claim...
Facebook has developed a software product, and earned a lot of value from advertising. They've also developed several new technologies along the way, but I'm not sure their advertising revenue or market cap are good trackers of their R&D output.
Software products obviously scale very well, which makes them very valuable. But are you counting new technologies in terms of dollars earned? That's very different than just the number of innovations, because it depends on the size of the market for them, your capacity to exploit it, etc.
Wallmart, Exxon, Amazon retail revenues completely dwarf the 'tech sector' - it's just that their margins are more narrow, in most cases, surpluses to consumers are vast.
Honestly 'profit to investors' should be one of the last metrics most of us care about. Most individuals should be far more concerned about surpluses they receive through lower prices or higher wages, as they'll nary get any real material lift via investment income.
In this way, it's kind of odd how 'market cap' is so widely used and perceived as some kind of great measure. It's good for investors, and unless you're an investor, it's bad for you. Every dollar that goes into the pocket of Amazon's investors should be a dollar in your pocket in the form of lower prices or better products/services.
Have a look at the biggest companies by revenue [1]
The only 'tech' companies on there are Apple and Amazon.
Amazon makes the hardware, and most of Amazon's revenue is retail goods.
There are not mostly software companies on that list.
Actually, a lot of HNer discussions tend to veer into this magical surplus world as well, I'd encourage anyone to have a look at 'big revenue companies' because it gives a much clearer picture of how the world works outside our bubble.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...
Take two hypothetical companies, say ebay` and amazon`. They both provide a marketplace, but slightly differently. ebay` allows manufacturers to list directly on their market for a fee. Amazon` buys from manufacturers and sells on their market for a markup equivalent to ebay's fee. Are these two companies substantially different? I don't think so but the revenue frame of reference says they are,
From an economic standpoint, what matters more will be revenue, it's a better indication of how meaningful what is done impacts the world.
As for Ebay vs. Amazon - for 3rd party listings, it doesn't matter that much, it's all accounting, but when Amazon actually does buy and sell stuff, it's very material because of a) cash flows: they send off cash (or get huge credit) to buy stuff b) they have inventory, warehouses, workers c) they are the merchant of record and take on chargeback risk, returns etc.. At the scale that is meaningful.
But I don't think that this comparison really highlights the difference between 'high margin' and 'high revenue' so much as for example AirBnB vs. Toyota. Even though Toyota is not worth that much more than AirBnB, it's considerably important to the economy whereas AirBnB is almost irrelevant.
And Samsung, Foxconn, and Alphabet. So 10% of the list.
For starters, Amazon derives most of its profits from AWS.
I mean, this conversation can keep going - I'm not really interested in digging in deeply to find the answer, because I don't think there's anything meaningful to be found. But I do object to scratch-the-surface level analysis like "Amazon is a valuable company these days, I guess the innovation happening in software outpaces all other fields of research combined" or "AWS makes most of Amazon's profit these days, which makes Amazon a software company".
Amazon might be a software company, but it might not be; it might be a logistics company, a consumer electronics company, a retail company, a data analytics company, a media company, a server farm company... it's not enough to say that AWS makes the most money, thus it's a software company.
Amazon has over $200B of revenue from e-commerce, $1 Profits. AWS Generate ~$25B revenue, $1M Profits.
Here is the headline. AWS ( Its Cloud Division ) Generating 1 Million times more profits than Amazon Retail!.
Or AWS Generate more profits than all of other Amazon Department combined!
What this mean is that Amazon is a vertically integrated Retail company ( Where Retail here includes Online ), with logistics, and transportation. Amazon is mostly software / AWS is a Silicon Valley / I.T / Tech view bubble.
Forgot to mention AWS is actually lots of hardware, land cost for DC, etc. i.e Not Software.
Cool, yeah, so you're saying if I go buy a bunch of servers and land I too can compete with AWS? It doesn't matter what software it runs?
The hardware and datacenter stuff is commodity. Table-stakes. Everyone has to have it. That's why they don't even manufacture the servers themselves. Software is where the value add is. This goes for any cloud provider, BTW.
People who use AWS don't care about the metal that it runs on, as long as it does the job.
> Amazon revenue does not derive from Software. And should not be valued as such.
Ok. But it is (I think - I don't know that much about valuations). If you're certain that's wrong, you shouldn't be arguing with strangers over the Internet, you should be off making money from that insight.
In a world where electric coffee grinders exist, and batteries exist, is a battery powered electric coffee grinder a new technology? Or just a new product. I'd say the latter.
There's certainly new software technology being produced every day, but much less than there are new software products being launched every day.
Yes this is true for other forms of technology too, but no, I don't think software alone outbalances technology being developed in all other fields combined, including materials science, semiconductor, medical, photonics, robotics, drones, power electronics, microscopy, machining, metrology, renewable energy, telecommunications, etc... I think it's just an indicator of a bubble perspective from someone who probably mostly interacts with software developers or follows software technology.
Assuming that patents were actually useful as method of sharing useful designs with the world wouldn't you want to know how to overcome the engineering challenges?
> most new technology is just software
On the software side, AFAIK the infamous "One Click" patent was never held up in court, but companies had to spend significant money defending against lawsuits based on it (and therefore the only possible victory was pyrrhic).
The world hasn't ended so far.
https://fsfe.org/campaigns/swpat/swpat.en.html for a decent overview