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Comment by m12k | Hacker News Reader

I mean, IP is by its very nature designed to be monopolistic, and with the decline of manufacturing and the rise of tech, IP is making up a bigger and bigger part of the US economy. So of course it's becoming more monopolistic.

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IP is designed to allow a certain subset of solutions to be monopolize by inventors for ~ half the life of the inventor (although most patents are abandoned after a few years). It shouldn’t, ideally, block all possible solutions.

In my experience (have applied for over 50 patents), the act of understanding and inventing around other peoples patents has very often lead to brainstorming resulting in superior solutions (this was an unforeseen advantage of good US IP law that other countries are trying to replicate).

I would note that my ventures are in the area of atoms and not bits :)

Looking at the US Constitution, IP law should be designed to heavily encourage innovation. I would think that the actual details of law would reflect that rather than maximizing the value of an idea to it's owner.

To be fair, the current results should have been predictable. A small, finely focused and self-interested group can usually defeat an unruly mass.

>I would note that my ventures are in the area of atoms and not bits :)

Good for you. My own bias and personal experience highly tends towards that, including US manufacture. Thinking about the article at the top, I wonder sometimes what the 'economy' even is anymore. I tend to distrust articles on it as all the news tends to involve internet-based FIRE 'industries' and surveillance marketing startups. I'm not feeling the love for those segments.

Of course, a downside is a person can set out to invent something entirely on their own, succeed in doing so, and then find out what they've done is illegal. That's a big downside.

Paul Graham said if you're successful you will be sued by patent owners. How many are discouraged from even trying?

This is where experience comes in, and the need for good mentors. In many cases, you can explicitly define your solution with certain key differences relative to prior work.

That is why it is wise to have good patent lawyers on your team. You may still get sued, but your likelihood to prevail can be increased.

Companies know this, that is why it is often cheaper for, say, Apple to purchase entire start ups than to sue them. The inventor still benefits in this case (actually, they can benefit more than typical inventors when this happens).

> this was an unforeseen advantage of good US IP law that other countries are trying to replicate

More common, from what I've seen, is smaller countries reluctant to adopt liberal US-style IP law and being pressured to do so by the US State Department as a condition in trade negotiations and foreign aid. The US delegation was the principal pusher of IP reform in the TPP, and this evaporated when the US left.

The benefits of strong IP law are not apparent at first. It happened in the US through trial and error during both world wars and then up through the decades, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh–Dole_Act

I only know this due to some policy courses I took during IAP when I was at MIT.

The decline of industry/manufacture is largely a fake thing American politicians pushed over the decades to enrich their overseas partners. It will definitely come back, especially with the rise of ESG where environment concerns means short supply chains, not shipping everything across the pacific and polluting the crap out of planet unnecessarily.

The gov has subsidized it at every level, including making it cheaper to send to shenghai than new York.

And on top of that, the wages in Chinese factories are approaching and sometimes surpassing a 1000$.

Even that infamous wage gap is significantly decreasing.

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