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Comment by SamReidHughes | Hacker News Reader

It's really easy to come up with patentable ideas at the current standard of patentability. If you paid people for patents as you suggest, you'd just get flooded with patents for novel but useless contraptions. So then you'd need to get the government deciding whether something is useful and paying people create allegedly useful inventions, rather than the marketplace.

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No one would be getting paid (by way of tax discount) for a patent unless they're already doing something the market values and therefore generating an income to tax in the first place. It doesn't matter if the income is from use of the idea in the patents or not. Any income generation is a sign the market is rewarding them for something. The government doesn't need to decide anything differently than they do now.

The patent system is already flooded with useless and novel things. The reason is that people are hoping that over the next 20 years (or whatever) that the idea might suddenly become valuable and they can profit off it. With my idea, at least, you cannot profit from a patent unless you're already profiting in the market.

You're proposing that Joe the candy store owner be given money by the government for filing a patent on kite-powered lawn mowers.

You claim that since Joe is evidently providing something the market values, we should cut his taxes.

But that's what everybody with income does. So why not cut everybody's taxes? We could do that without a sideshow of filing useless patents.

This idea

1. Does not tie rewards in any way to actual innovation.

2. Explicitly suggests that people keep things as trade secrets for a while, which negates the actual purpose of the patent system!

If you know the perfect solution, I'm sure we'd all love to hear it. All you're doing it tearing me down. You're not offering any suggestions to fix these apparently obvious glaring problems in my idea or the current system.

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