Hacker News Reader

Comment by learc83 | Hacker News Reader

I wish the president had used this opportunity to support real patent reform. That could've been a huge step toward supporting startups and job creation.

View on HN

How many people do you know who didn't create a startup because of patents ?

I'm not saying patent reform isn't important, but it's probably not even in the top-100 problems the average startup faces.

I think that's not how OP was thinking about it. People may not be able to create a startup--or even think to do so--because someone else's patented product could be unavailable to them (due to monopoly pricing), not because they feared that their final product wouldn't be strongly patentable. The number of people who are prohibited from even being be able to obtain the knowledge to innovate is uncountable.

Of course it's a trade-off between incentivizing innovation on one hand and enabling the spread of knowledge on the other, but needless to say the number of people who didn't create a startup because of patents is inestimable (not inestimably high, just inestimable).

Unfortunately, any such proposal would for sure bring about heavy flak fire from the Republican party (and probably from the more big-corporations-interest-sensitive Democratic representatives too) as a socialistic, un-American attitude, with the risk of stopping the whole show.

Protect IP Act passed today, I believe, which is a real bummer for actual patent reform that will promote innovation, since the system was just shifted from a 'first to invent' to a 'first to file,' supporting patent farming/fencing and litigation. Bummer :(

It passed? I haven't been able to find anything about it passing, and GovTrack[0] still shows that neither the house nor senate has voted on it.

[0]: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s112-968

Protect IP didn't pass; it was the America Invents Act (patent reform).

Thanks for the correction. I keep mixing the two up :-\

Reply on news.ycombinator.com