Comment by new299 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by new299 | Hacker News Reader

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It's kind of clear that entertainment would still get made without copyright. But the videos thesis around drug discovery is much less well thought through.

I'd be interested in seeing someone think these issues through more deeply. For example I know a reasonable amount about the development of next-gen DNA sequencers. How would developments like this have played out in a world without patents?

It doesn't seem feasible to say that academics would be willing to prepay to fund the development of a life science tool that might help their research and appear in 10 years time or might just fail and not get developed at all. Research markets were the initial markets for these instruments.

Same goes for drug discovery, perhaps they need some new analytical tool. So do they directly fund multiple high risk approaches to develop this tool? In our current scenario VCs/startups take on this risk, in exchange for a time limited monopoly.

It doesn't seem reasonable to expect individual drug development companies to take on this risk. Do they ask prospective users of the drug to pay these downstream development costs? Do they take out a loan to cover the development costs?

I agree. Compromise: abolish all patents except for drugs for which expensive trials are required by law.

How about we reduce the patent validity to few years? The exceptions should benefit the public too. IF they can't meet the demand they should be forced to sell their patent for that time.

Someone here posted a while back the idea that maybe force a patent renewal every few years. Say original patents are good for 5 years and you can renew at an increasing fee each year after up to 15 years.

There are solutions, it just takes the political will. The patent office is funded through patent fees and appears to suffer no consequence for issuing bad patents. So the patent office seems to be encouraged to keep issuing patents good or bad…

In the US patent maintenance fees are due at 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years after issuance.

They are increasingly expensive, with the 11.5 year fee being $7700.

You could raise these fees, but how are you going to set them? Based on industry? Ultimately just feels like you’d end up making things harder for individual inventors and easier for big businesses and patent trolls.

Personally I think there are a few reforms that might work. Firstly, software patents do not seem to be useful. They don’t seem to have been required for the development of the software industry, and in general they’ve not been allowed in the past.

Secondly, patents should never prevent the sale or incorporation of a technology into a product. Courts should always demand royalties be paid to the patent holder, based on the profit the infringing party receives.

That’s much more problematic. But it feels like there should be a way to incentivize the continued sale of products so that a company can’t just sit on a patent.

You could maybe tax them at an appraised value, such that the patent right has to be licensed at at most x% of that value. If they under value then it's cheaper to license it, if they overvalue they pay more tax?

Or maybe a first-sale doctrine that allows a single sale but doesn't allow further sales. You better be sure you want it because once you bought it the resale value is zero? Then troll companies wouldn't be able to sweep up lots of older patents to use in trolling.

Or, it could be like trade marks, of you're not using the patent in a product then you lose it, unless you're the original inventor. If I sell you the patent, then you keep it to troll with you have to make a product that uses it, and sell that product, otherwise the patent expires. It doesn't return to the inventor - they got paid - it enters the public domain.

These ideas are entirely my own and presented for entertainment only.

> Or maybe a first-sale doctrine that allows a single sale but doesn't allow further sales.

Nitpick: that’s the exact opposite of the “first sale doctrine”. The first sale doctrine says that, once I buy something, I can do whatever I want with the product. If I want to shoot bullets at a $1000 smartphone for YouTube views, Apple, Samsung, etc. can’t prevent me from doing so.

There are exceptions to this (EULAs and all that), but the general idea is that.

Yes, that was confusing: 'The' first-sale doctrine is about exhaustion of the rights of an IPR holder though (as you correctly state); a consumer can resell because the creator of the IPR no longer has power over the goods.

My off-the-cuff proposal would be 'a' first-sale doctrine that would exhaust the rights of an IPR creator by preventing them from being transferred. To a [further] third party. This mirrors 'the' first-sale doctrine.

Of course 'a' first-sale doctrine is just a protocol related to a first transference - in the case you reference that's transference of goods to a consumer, in my proposal the transference was of IPR rights to a manufacturer/troll/company.

Then why not cars, airplanes, radio transmitters?

All those things require costly government mandated testing.

But it feels like the same arguments could apply to many things. Many deep tech projects require 100M+ to develop, and it’s difficult for me to see how these projects might get funded.

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