Many of these arguments also apply to all patents, not just software ones. Is there a compelling argument to keep any patents at all? They seem like a weird throwback to some past society where reclusive inventors spend all their time tinkering and inventing things.
Stopping software patents as a first step would set a precedent and provide a beachhead.
Because the key argument is that math is not patentable. Software patents are relatively uniquely expressible amoung patents as mathematical conjectures.
If someone constructively proves p=np then they deserve some term-limited profit taking.
Getting a monopoly for being the first pos to mail some legalese to the right government office about clicking a button once to order something for delivery is both not math and not beneficial to society.
The problem is software patents is not that software is math. The problem is software patents is that most patentable software is obvious to anyone without severe brain damage, and no one in the legal establishment has historically had any clue how to assess whether some idea in software is non-obvious.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.I think everyone here is in agreement that software patents are harmful and not what was intended by the patent system. Software is already protected by copyright.
It's very hard to otherwise compete with an established company who can copy your brilliant idea, scale, and distribute it way faster and more cheaply than you can.
But assume s/he did afford one.
Now comes the theft. Amazon steals it, and now our tinkerer needs to cough up millions of dollars to go after a one-trillion dollar company. It lingers in courts for decades. Even pro-bono legal advice would eventually give up. Futile.
Patents exist only for companies to wage war for monopolies.
Let's also not forget the broader context here, which is software patents.
It’s not true that you will always need to put up the money yourself. If the patent is sufficiently valuable you can enter into joint ventures, or contingency agreements to have someone else bankroll the fight.
Having a large company infringe on a patent also makes it a desirable purchase for any other company with a bone to pick with the infringer.
"It’s not true that you will always need to put up the money yourself."
I don't believe this was my argument. I simply said "capital".
In software, we’ve already returned to the state that patents were designed to avoid. Everything of value is treated as a trade secret. In several domains of computer science, virtually everything that is state-of-the-art is never published and is instead slathered in NDAs. And for good reason, patents on computer science have been effectively unenforceable for decades. So instead, no one publishes.
This isn’t speculation, it is official policy in organizations I work with. The end state is that public computer science is mediocre compute science. I’m agnostic about it since it doesn’t affect me either way, but I recognize the suboptimality.
They're not. Software is already protected by copyright.
It works this way in chemical engineering, for example, where I have some experience. You license the process and the implementation of the process independently, because they are not the same work; the patent in the former and the copyright in the latter.
If you can't have that right, you won't invest those millions of dollars.
But software is not like that, because innovation is mainly driven by building on top of small things, not doing a crazy expensive research project.
So industries are different, and I do see the benefit for some.
The reason to ditch software patents is copyright already protects software. Copyright allows you to decide how your code is distributed. Software patents restrict innovation in a manner that was never intended to be possible.
Do you truly believe this? If we got rid of the patent system 5 years ago. Do you believe no vaccines for COVID would be made?
edit: my comment went against the worldview of some ideological drones and they decided to downvote me instead of actually responding.
There is a reason that MRNA was developed in countries with strong IP rights and countries without those rights are relying on century old technology to develop their vaccines.
America has produced by far the most medical advancements in the modern era.
What people don't recognize about the lower cost of drugs in countries like Canada is that they effectively have government price controls. If we were to do the same here, it would greatly limit R&D into new treatments.
However, there are of course other ways to reduce cost to the consumer without harming the rich ecosystem of biotech.
Important to understand this dynamic when adjusting laws, because it would be very easy to totally kill medical innovation
Without them, there is little incentive to create, and much more incentive to rip off someone else's work. The result would be a reduction of technology that would put luddites to shame.
If we got rid of the patent system today, there would probably still be vaccines 5 years from today because of the prior investment. But, in 100 years, the only people who could get vaccines would be the ultra wealthy, and 100 years after that we would lose the knowledge to create a lot of new technology because the old tech never sufficiently made it into the public sphere.
Anything you come up with could be copied and produced for pennies on the dollars by any number of companies. Of course, the cost to produce most medicines is quite low.
So you have to invest a high fixed cost in R&D, at great risk of failure, and in the end you don't recoup any of that cost.
When patents expire, you'll see many generics come onto the market at reduced costs, and cost to consumer goes down.
Some other system could probably work, but free market R&D would fail without protections to profit from creations. I suspect trying to replace the free market system with some quasi-public one would not produce as many innovations.
This assertion is simply not true. A prime example - Insulin is 100 years old. Those who need it are paying sky high prices due to corporate greed, and many simply can't afford it. No competition, no affordable option. People are dying due to this greed.
"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Semglee, a biosimilar form of insulin."
"As a generic, it can be automatically swapped for the price brand-name versions to help patients save money."
https://www.verywellhealth.com/fda-allows-generic-swap-for-b...
I don't agree, it seems to me that almost nobody who innovates does it for money, people do it for fame, curiosity, desire to fix a problem. (All progress depends on unreasonable men.) Rather, it's people who organize innovators who do it for money, and the question if they need to be renumerated in patents is legitimate.
Of course there is. The government would have paid a company a whole bunch of money to do it, for COVID.
There needs to be a mechanism to profit from the R&D. Point blank. It doesn't have to be through patents... We can create a new system if a better one is devised. But fundamentally, nobody will invest billions of dollars into a venture that is guaranteed not to be profitable.
The alternative is fully public funded research.
So then you agree with me completely that these companies would have existed and would have researched the covid vaccine, because literally as I just said before, the government offered a bunch of money for it, which is "public funded research".
Glad you agree with me entirely, but I guess also just wanted to restate my argument slightly, for no reason.
The government would be willing to fund a vaccine, but there would be no capability to create it.
What is difficult to understand about that?
Do you think we could create a new vaccine within a year if there were no companies with multi billion dollar R&D teams?
Could we build iOS or Android if there were no software developers?
I very clearly laid out why, even if there were a will to publicly finance a covid vaccine, the capabilities to do so wouldn't exist in a world where pharmaceutical companies couldn't profit from R&D. You can't finance towards an outcome if you have no structural capability to reach it.
You know, the last few hundred years biotech companies have spent developing the capacity, know how, ability to invent new drugs and vaccines? All of which was supported by a patent system allowing them to profit from their creations.
What part of that is difficult to understand? Do I need to make it clearer somehow? Is it too challenging to understand the nuance of structural capability vs financing something in the moment?
Pay them with public funds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_pa...
Patents solve this by using the market. If you patent some garbage, nobody buys it and you make no money. If you invent something ingenious that everybody wants once it exists but nobody else would have thought to offer a prize for before it existed, you make a lot of money.
Also, now there is only one buyer. Say six different companies all develop working vaccines. Is the government going to buy all of them? What about the tenth or hundredth? If not, what happens to the company that spent a billion dollars developing a working vaccine, only to have someone else beat them to the prize by a few days?
And vaccines are something we know ahead of time that we want. How do you do a prize for inventing something you don't know you want because it doesn't exist yet?
There would be no patents.
>Also, now there is only one buyer.
You could also sell them to other governments, hospitals, people, etc.
>what happens to the company that spent a billion dollars developing a working vaccine, only to have someone else beat them to the prize by a few days?
It's possible for competing products to exist. Is yours cheaper or more effective than your competitors? If you wanted your money building a bad product then tough luck.
>How do you do a prize for inventing something you don't know you want because it doesn't exist yet?
How do you make a vaccine for a disease that you don't know about? You don't.
I'm not sure why you are talking about prizes. Along with just selling them normally, you could also have an unlock system like kickstarter. If you raise $x then they will release the drug, or they could kickstart the entire process. Or instead of a kickstarter they could find investors.
> You could also sell them to other governments, hospitals, people, etc.
Sell what, exactly?
> It's possible for competing products to exist. Is yours cheaper or more effective than your competitors? If you wanted your money building a bad product then tough luck.
These are existing risks. You're adding a new one: Pfizer and Moderna each create a working vaccine. The government buys one of them to give away for free, so the other one makes zero dollars. Normally they would each take an equal share of the market.
> How do you make a vaccine for a disease that you don't know about? You don't.
Some forms of cancer are caused by a virus. It's possible to vaccinate against them. We did not know that a century ago. Two centuries ago we didn't even know that vaccines were possible. What don't we know now?
Whether patents help or hinder innovation seems to depend on how general the patented idea is. If it's really broadly applicable, they hinder it IMHO.
I also don't see the patents benefiting researchers anymore, rather than some corporate middlemen.
> I also don't see the patents benefiting researchers anymore, rather than some corporate middlemen.
The researcher can't make money without some form of protection. You could spend 20 years building something and have it stolen by a huge company with no means to recoup your costs. Removing patents would immediately benefit the biggest players, entrenching existing monopolies.
But why is the big company stealing it? Currently, it makes sense to steal it because the patent protections make it seem as if the idea itself is valuable (and can be a private property not commons). But in the world without the patents, what is valuable is the physical implementation, or rather, the coupling of both.
It has been pointed out that you have many cases in free market economy with a similar problem. iPhone, for example, has very little innovation in it, it's just an idea executed well, based on past things like Palm Pilot for example.
It seems to me, to have fair patents, you need to assume that value of everything can be broken to additive pieces - value of this idea, that idea, and then the value of the materials and energy from which it is built. But this is really hard, because things have value that also comes from combining these things. (In general, this is a problem with free market with respect to labor too, because you cannot really meaningfully determine what contribution of different types of labor is more valuable for the product to arise, but at the same time, the people need to be remunerated for the labor somehow.)
On the other hand, in the world without patents, we assume that value of everything can be broken to little pieces (not so valuable by themselves) that are added by individuals in small amounts. So if all innovation is in the commons, no need to toil for 20 years to invent something. You build a little piece, add it to the pile, and everybody benefits because at the end of the day, you take lot more from the pile than you put in.
It makes no sense to steal when the owner is likely to sue you for doing so, thus invalidating all of your work. It is also not a good business practice to steal.
> in the world without the patents, what is valuable is the physical implementation, or rather, the coupling of both.
You've discounted the value of research.
Preposterously, we have a system that does the opposite and encourages universities to file patents on publicly-funded research.
Patents expire after 20 years. There is no need to buy them. You just invite more corruption if you tell the government to pick and choose which ones are "good".
The corruption problem is the same one a with NIH grants and everything else, it's just doing it after the fact in exchange for the patent. You try to minimize the inefficiency as best you can, but even when it's not zero it can still be smaller than the inefficiency from waiting for the patent to expire.
The entire point is that the patent goes into the public domain. The government pays money to cause it to not be patented anymore.
> Good thing the public will never go for this so I don't need to worry.
What does the public have anything to do with it? It's Congress that makes the laws. There are surely some companies with lobbyists who would like to make some tax dollars. Let a bit of corruption do something good for once.
Congress most certainly is not going to undo all patent law. The ability to be rewarded for your work is foundational to capitalism.
> Let a bit of corruption do something good for once.
This is nonsensical.
Abolishing the root cause would be better. And if this was done, then yes, government buyouts and release of existing patents would be fantastic, where the release would spur growth.
And now there’s enough money at stake to trigger a land rush to fence off entire problems using solutions that just don’t merit protection.