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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Just to play devil's advocate, that's the whole purpose of patents, to prevent progress by others.

On the other hand, the gain is that E Ink Corporation decided it was worth investing in developing and commercializing the technology knowing they'd have exclusive rights for 20 years, and quite possible only because of that. If they didn't have that guarantee, it might not have been worth any company developing it in the first place.

Now I'm not familiar with the history of investment in e-ink specifically. But I'm curious if there's anyone here who is: if patent protection wasn't available, would it have been worth it for any company to develop it, knowing it might be copied a year later by a competitor who would then undercut the original inventors (not having to pay for the expensive R&D)?

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> Just to play devil's advocate, that's the whole purpose of patents, to prevent progress by others.

Not really. The "societal" purpose of patents is to promote innovation. That's really the yardstick by which most of the conversation around patents needs to be measured - does this help or hinder overall innovation.

There are also moral/philosophical arguments for or against patents, but I think the majority consider the societal impact to be the most important.

The mechanism by which patents achieve this is by giving a temporary monopoly to the inventor. It also requires the inventor to disclose, in detail, how their innovation works ; that's part of the tradeoff - the innovator gets a temporary monopoly, but society benefits by the innovator not hoarding it as a secret. This should actually encourage progress by others, in the long run.

It’s important to remember every laws has trade offs, including patent laws. Perhaps patents stiffened e-ink but OP seems to have issue with patents in general which it would be hard to argue universally prevent innovation.

The purpose of patents is to give innovators a temporary competitive advantage, by forcing competitors to pay royalties for the patent.

The main problem is "temporary", as patents have a flat duration but fields innovate and turn over at different speeds - compare web software to aeronautics/NASA software. The former could potentially he outdated within months, the latter likely won't be used until it's been tested for decades.

So obviously a 30-year patent is potentially paralyzing in webdev, yet might even be too short in space tech!

The problem is there simply isn't any duration that can satisfy both fields.

Meanwhile, often patents don't benefit anyone because they're 1) more trouble than they're worth to actually enforce, and only serve to reinforce the incumbents who don't need them, and 2) are in some cases deliberately written to be meaningless and uncommunicative, which defeats the purpose of open publishing in the first place.

Every law might have upsides, but that doesn't change the fact that patents are fundamentally flawed.

Your response makes me think of the phrase “More Perfect”.

Agreed, patents are flawed. But so is basically every law in the United States. However, laws can change and we have influence on that so rather than chalking the idea of patent law as “fundamentally flawed” let’s look at ways we can tweak the existing system to work better for everyone.

For example, one commenter had an interesting suggestion of increasing the patent fees exponentially over time incentivizing only orgs that are using the technology and disincentivizing trolls long term.

It that tweak perfect? of course not, but rather than viewing it as an all of or nothing game of us vs them let’s keep working together to make it “more perfect”.

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