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Comment by newaccount74 | Hacker News Reader

I think the story of "small inventor makes big contribution" is very misleading. If an invention is small enough that someone can make it without spending significant resources, it is probably obvious enough that you shouldn't be allowed to patent it, because it is more likely other people incidentally have the same idea than they are "stealing" it.

The only scenario where patents make sense is when a research group spends significant resources to invent something, and then publishes the invention with all the necessary documentation to make use of the invention, then they should be rewarded with licensing fees for their contribution, so they can continue and hopefully make more inventions.

Edit: When I say research group I'm not just thinking of non-profit universities. A research group could also be a group within a for-profit company that develops something, a for-profit institute, a joint industry working group, etc.

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While many contributions do require significant tools & investment, there are still plenty of sectors where individuals can make massive contributions. For example Ben Choi leveraged mostly public knowledge and a few thousand $ to develop a low-cost neural prosthetic in high school. Having been to enough hackathons, this caliber of project, though uncommon is also not rare. The surface area for innovation is so huge, and the flexibility afforded by individuals/small groups is so significant that major breakthroughs continue to be made without backing.

Many of these inventions could be readily transformed into significant business ventures but, without patent protection, would be easily beat out by companies with the resources to build out manufacturing nearly instantly.

In your proposed world, shouldn't we simply get rid of patents entirely?

The person who made the flash freezer, for example, was just one person. If he couldn't protect his patent, despite definitively changing the face of global food preparation, why should IBM have any intellectual property?

I don't know if abolishing patents altogether would improve innovation. But I'm pretty sure that patents on obvious things hinder innovation, rather than help it.

I'm not familiar with the invention of flash freezing. Did the inventor just patent the idea of freezing food fast? That sounds like a pretty obvious idea that should not be patentable. Why give someone a monopoly on quick freezing?

Or did the inventor patent a non-obvious mechanical device that is capable of quickly freezing food? Giving the inventor a short term monopoly on that device in exchange for publishing the blueprints sounds like a reasonable deal.

Yeah, there's a lot of bad patents, especially in the tech sphere, where the patent office & judges lack expertise to evaluate both what's in use and what's obvious. E.g. when someone almost successfully patented the concept of a e-"shopping cart" after it was in widespread use (also it's painfully obvious).

Sources: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/how-newegg-crush...

What is obvious?

In the case of flash freezing, hasn't the market shown that the idea of quickly freezing food (to preserve the food without producing large ice crystals) was novel when he invented it? We have been able to freeze food for hundreds of years, and nobody was doing it that way until 1924. That sounds like a non-obvious novel idea to me.

The latter. Under your proposed ideal, he wouldn't be able to defend such a thing, as he was an individual.

I wanted to know too. It seems he was inspired by fish being naturally preserved in the arctic by wind and cold and how it was still tasted good later.

"After years of work on his own process, Birdseye invented a system that packed dressed fish, meat, or vegetables into waxed-cardboard cartons, which were flash-frozen under high pressure"

The point of patents isn't just to protect you from theft. It's to grant you a monopoly on the invention in exchange for publishing details about it (thereby allowing others to build on your invention). Trade secrets law protects you against theft. Multiple people having the same idea doesn't actually mean anything - the person who makes the public disclosures of its existence is the one who gets the patent.

No, you don't necessarily need to spend a lot of resources or even have a "research group" to invent something completely novel, and the price of research is actually a lot lower than you think if you aren't hiring people. For example, you can make a new silicon chip to prove that your new circuit works for under $10,000. A new electronic device of some other kind is only a few thousand. Software (for the few remaining fields where you can get a software patent) is pretty much free to develop.

> If an invention is small enough that someone can make it without spending significant resources, it is probably obvious enough that you shouldn't be allowed to patent it, because it is more likely other people incidentally have the same idea than they are "stealing" it.

The resources spent on an invention is typically a terrible measure of novelty or inventive step.

But I agree, patent law should to a greater extent protect the investment that goes into realizing an invention, and less the invention itself. For example I think it’s absurd that you can patent stuff that you have no intention of building or offering for sale.

I think that's one way to view invention but the classic way it's been viewed in America is that if you found a novel way to put a sponge on the end of a dowel and manage to market it you should have protections to exclusively make your good for a while - there has always been, for me at least, a very strong romanticization of folks inventing things in their garage and making a few hundred thousand dollars off of them.

Imagine how history would have changed if we had to wait for the patent on the wheel to expire to use it

That’s probably true in the aggregate (as I’d posit most advances are incremental and become more expensive as you run up against diminishing returns to investment with legacy technologies). However, I think it discounts breakthrough tech/new technology fields and new applications. Not to mention many things that are consumer focused ( beanie babies, spanks, super soakers etc)

Sure I somewhat agree with you. However my argument applies just as much if you exchange sole inventor with research group. The funny thing is "protecting the small inventor" is often stated as the purpose of the patent system, while in reality it is largely the big incumbents that are protected

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