Comment by joebadmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joebadmo | Hacker News Reader

I recently asked a patent lawyer acquaintance of mine the question: "Do you think patents encourage innovation?"

His answer was: "There's absolutely no question at all whatsoever."

Which I was certainly a bit suprised by.

Maybe the truest conclusion I can come to is that, well, because he's a patent lawyer and his livelihood is based on that being true, he has every incentive to believe it.

I think it's worth pointing out that Nilay Patel is a laywer. [EDIT: non-practicing lawyer, never a patent lawyer] It's clear to me when I read his writing on the subject as well as when I hear him talk about it on the podcast that he's so far from my own thinking on this as to be almost incomprehensible.

I've slowly been reading this: http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm

But it seems to be light on data. Seems to me that theoretical arguments are well established and fairly strong on both sides at this point. Does anyone know of any empirical studies that have been done on the subject? Is that even possible? Any strong natural experiments?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

    --Upton Sinclair

My own observation is that "The Law" (that class of people in charge of creating, extending and defending laws and legal systems) in the USA has crawled inside itself. The legalists like your patent lawyer and others will give very persuasive and logical arguments for laws and the current implementaton of laws. Unfortunately, the non-logical axioms and symbols they start with are all legal. The Law has come unstuck from reality. This un-reality is a bit more subtle than trying to legislate the numerical value of Pi, probably because they've dropped the axiom that The Law exists to serve society.

Yeah, I've been thinking about how perverse legal systems are by fundamental nature.

Laws are made (to some large degree), argued, and adjudicated by lawyers. The more laws there are, and the more complex legal system as a whole gets, the more we need lawyers and the more lawyers we need.

Seems to me like the definition of a vicious cycle. There are no controls. Are controls even possible?

Hmmm, "There's absolutely no question at all whatsoever." is a statement about the certainty of his answer, but it doesn't seem to be an answer to your question. Was the answer yes?

I think the occupation of lawyers and programmers are oddly similar. Both are paid for precise analysis and generation detailed interpretations. They just happen to speak different languages and their implementations run on vastly different platforms.

Just to clarify, Nilay was a lawyer prior to Engadget, but he's no longer practicing.

Also, I believe his specialty was copyright, not patent, law.

Based on what I've heard him say on the podcast and read in this essay, it seems to me that his main objective is to show that this is a complex issue that can't be simplified down to "good" or "bad".

Right, I didn't mean to imply that he's a practicing lawyer (since he's clearly a writer and editor for This Is My Next/Verge, but it was foolish of me to expect everyone else to know that) or that he was a patent lawyer.

What I meant by that part of the comment is that from what I've heard and read by him, he seems so thoroughly entrenched in his perspective as a lawyer that the system in place is just how it is, that he has trouble even understanding systemic criticism of the system itself.

And my reading of the main objective you attribute to him isn't so much to introduce the complexity of the situations so much as to tell people to quit arguing about things that they're not experts on. Leave it to the lawyers in other words.

I think that's a fair sentiment to a degree. People definitely do seem to join one camp or another based on very simplistic versions of arguments, with very shallow understanding of the subjects at hand. But it doesn't seem useful to me to tell people to stop doing that. What seems more useful to me is try to educate people on the complexities of the issue so that you can elevate the people who are amenable to education. Ignore the others.

It's perfectly valid to tell stupid people that they're being stupid. But does it add anything meaningful to the conversation?

I just don't see Nilay ever addressing the actual, valid, fundamental criticisms of the patent system.

Seems like the time to bring out the old Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Look at countries with strong patent protection - the US.

Look at the EU (which is less patent friendly).

Which has more innovation in software? OK, the US. But that's mostly the result Silicon Valley. And there are a lot of non-US tech companies - Nokia (Finland), RIM (Canada - not sure where they stand), SAP (Germany).

Then there's the open source stuff. Linux (Finland), MySQL (Sweden), PHP (Greenland / Canada), Python (Holland), HTML (from CERN), Pascal, ... lots of innovative stuff gets made in the EU, but the profits tend to be less concentrated.

Well, in fairness: Fortran, C, UNIX, Apache, Perl, and PostGres are basically from US. Also, the GNU movement, but why would the EU need a free software revolution when they didn't have the stifling and secretive culture of the US?

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