"Hey everyone, I thought of this and wrote it down, none of you wrote it down before so now it's my idea for the next 30 years"
Is just ridiculous.
Monopolies are bad, and competition is good. Everyone is already incentivized to come up with and implement ideas faster than their competitors. Giving one person a monopoly just restricts others from creating competing products and only gives the user a worse and more expensive product.
That's how technology worked before the patent systems, and the outcome was manufacturer secrecy - which generally sucked more than the patent system.
The point of the patent system is that you share your invention in the world, in exchange for monopolizing it for a few years. The problem is that most software patents share absolutely nothing of value with the world.
I think another misconception is the entire purpose of the USPTO. The USPTO wants EVERYTHING in the entire universe to be in the public domain. To achieve this, you give them your idea and in exchange they give you a monopoly for 20 years minus prosecution time. Even worse, anything you publish anywhere on earth after one year automatically gets in the public domain.
Anyways, enough ranting, but the system is very expensive and is actually not incentivizing the "inventor" anymore.
Though I do agree lawyers and govts have basically colluded to create a system to suck money out of business in return for being allowed to function.
Have a look at the original Gore membrane patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4194041A/en
It's very clear, detailed and reproducible.
And since we are on HN, here a bit on the software side: IBM original arithmetic coding patent.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US4905297A/en
Perhaps it something that should not have been patented, but it's fully disclosed and reproducible.
They said it's the purpose of the patent system, not the real-world effect. It's very important to remind people of this purpose. Because people (especially lawyers) keep pushing this concept that ownership on a patented idea is some kind of natural right being protected by law. Which is completely opposite to reality, and part of what leads to the system being warped in the way you complain about.
So, not much different then?
A perfect counter-example to patents is FDM printers, which were incredibly expensive and inaccessible to the average hobbyist until the Stratasys patents started to expire. Now while it’s true there’s a lot of Chinese printers on the market, that hasn’t killed western companies - Pruša might be 2x-3x pricier than a Creality, but the 3D printing farms I know still went with the former, due to higher reliability and the fact that they need less fiddling to produce high quality outputs.
Meanwhile Stratasys is still selling $100k machines, and I highly doubt any of their customers would rather buy a cheap Chinese 3D printer instead.
Branding is completely irrelevant to the issue, you could well come up with say explosion-safe proportional valve design that is sold OEM worldwide and that an average consumer might not even know exists as a category.
This is proven false by the amount of top-selling products that Amazon has ripped off, produced for less (sometimes by striking a deal with the original factory), and then labeled “Amazon Basics”
Look at how Raspberry Pi still manages to maintain a huge market presence despite the prevalence of cheap Chinese clones - even if the latter occasionally have superior specs on-paper, in practice I have yet to find one that isn't vastly inferior in terms of ecosystem and software.
You’re also ignoring what the patent is actually awarded for. The temporary monopoly is awarded in return for publicly disclosing your invention. Without patents you’d expect almost all commercial innovation to center around ideas that can be kept a trade secret, and to have a lot more budget devoted to protecting trade secrets. It would essentially be the exact opposite of what I expect you’d want to happen.
> The temporary monopoly is awarded in return for publicly disclosing your invention.
We could do just fine WITHOUT the patent system. Maybe if instead of fretting about diligent Chinese copycats, the USA and its corporations actually built stuff instead of outsourcing everything, we would not need to worry so much about patent infringement.
Your suggestion that the global economy could shift towards an isolationist model is frankly enough to dismiss your idea without much further scrutiny.
Not at all. There's "global isolationism" and then there's outsourcing everything to the point where all that's left is the C-suite and a few supply-chain jockeys.
It doesn't have to be one extreme or the other.
I suppose they could read expired patents, though.
The calculus also doesn't seem all that clear to me. A alternative calculus: Build something new on top of someone else's idea (stand on the shoulders of giants) or spend all your time and money reinventing a perfectly good wheel so that you can do it in a slightly different manner purely for legal reasons.
If we assume free licensing then you might as well cut out the middle man and abolish patents.
A case in point is China. It used to just produce low-value-added manufactured products, and it had little IP protection to speak of. But as China has moved up the value chain, it has passed IP laws and built out a court system to enforce them. It has rapidly become one of the most active venues for IP litigation in the world. But if there were no Chinese R&D to protect, there would be little reason for China to build out this system.
"A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc., as has been said, and not upon the idea or suggestion of the new machine. A complete description of the actual machine or other subject matter for which a patent is sought is required."
Patents/IP/etc only have 'scarcity' because the government agrees to grant a monopoly to a person or corporation. It doesn't have any basis in natural law.
Without it, you would resort to greater degrees of secrecy.
First-movers already have an advantage in the market, this seems to be a natural incentive for R&D. And then also consider that many innovators and inventors do what they do for reasons outside of gaining monetary compensation.
Any consequences of greater secrecy would be largely overshadowed by the advantage of having an actually competitive market in film, tech, healthcare, and etc. Imagine if any manufacturer could produce insulin, or if any film student could shoot their own Star Wars movie.
In this case you are right, it stiffles progress instead of helping it.
But what about the case where "Hey, it took us 20 manyears of research to discover this, and when we release it, it's up for grabs for anyone"
In that case, you want to have a patent system so the research can have a ROI.
But the latter case never happens in software, and so I'm very happy Europe doesn't have any software patents.
... I guess it’s not really necessary to have patents in order to sell licenses, and I guess in most cases for software, patents are used as a moat for a business rather than getting a direct ROI on research.
If you are not from an industry where IP is unfortunately the foundation for doing business e.g. Pharma, Bio Tech; You are better off not pursuing IP at all, at least if you cannot afford the best IP attorney in your jurisdiction and assuming you have a competent patent authority.
Patents were designed as a way of allowing people to share their ideas, while retaining the ability to profit from their ideas for a limited period.
Without them, billionaires could just monitor the market and essentially just steal the business because they have the capital to leverage economies of scale. How do you prevent this without patents? What is your better idea?
You can always monopolize an unknown idea. Don't share it.
The alternative is "only I can produce this thing commercially, and you have no idea how I made it anyway".