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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

I get that in this context "patents" should be seen as the announcement of a new innovation, a surrogate of the innovation itself if you will, but setting that aside for a moment I'm struggling to imagine how patents could ever do anything but slow down disruption.

Take any revolutionary discovery. Compare making it freely available to anyone, or limiting the availability to those holding the patents. EDIT: And perhaps more importantly give people the freedom to innovate on top versus stopping anyone who does. Shouldn't the former always be more disruptive of the status quo? I can imagine this is an oversimplification though so I'm open to hearing counterintuitive examples where the opposite is true.

And to be clear, either way I'm not saying this is good or bad in and of itself - in some cases it might slow down essential improvements, in others it might be good to have speed limits for change so that things don't break.

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> Compare making it freely available to anyone

The original idea of a patent is that it must reveal the "secrets" behind an invention, in return for a "temporary monopoly". It's supposed to help diffusion of technology by publishing trade secrets, not to "incentivise" research.

I think what is actually happening is that patents are made obtuse/opaque containing little meaningful information. They are then used as playing cards in patent licensing deals between big corporations.

There is no longer any hope for patent clerks to do meaningful inspection of patents to determine if they are legitimate. Instead, it's left to lawyers/attorneys to play something out in court.

Patents have always been written in precise but vague terms. If you take that as the language and understand the structure of them, they can be quite readable, although you will often need to use outside knowledge and critical thinking to determine how to actually replicate the invention.

I lost a lot of faith in scientific research when I had to spend time reviewing patents in an early job.

The fact that I was looking into battery materials (a notoriously over-hyped sector) certainly didn't help, but some of the approved parents were laughable. They included core materials which had been historically known to be useful in batteries (and hence shouldn't qualify for protection), but then also every possible element-wise substitution of the same structure - many of the resulting materials would not even have been stable, never mind viable as a battery component. There were also instances of multiple patents covering the same material, suggesting that any prior-art searches were not being done rigorously.

You make two assumptions:

- There are as many revolutionary discoveries with and without patents

- Without patents, discoveries would be freely avalaible

As far as I know, two (related) arguments are generally made for patents:

- Patents create an indirect (by preventing the competition from using your invention) or direct (by licensing it) monetary return to innovation, potentially leading to more innovation

- If a company wants competitors not to copy their innovation, they can 1. keep it secret or 2. disclose it and patent it; without patent the choice is between 1. keep it secret or 2. disclose it and have everybody copy them. In this case, patents lead to more innovation being made freely avalaible (with a delay!).

Whether patents lead to more or less innovation is, as far as I know, contentious.

> There are as many revolutionary discoveries with and without patents

I explicitly don't: I mentioned the patent stops others from innovating on top of the patent. The necessity of patents to be public is one I had not considered though, being a force against trade secrets is a good counterpoint.

> Whether patents lead to more or less innovation is, as far as I know, contentious.

Honestly, I really have trouble accepting this. Not that I have an answer, but with the idea that researchers haven't been able to find some sensible way of measuring this by now. I already mentioned the example of light bulbs. Surely there are enough similar historical scenarios available to analyze where one can make use of global differences in IP laws and other variables to simulate control groups?

You do here:

"Take any revolutionary discovery. Compare making it freely available to anyone, or limiting the availability to those holding the patents. [...]"

You take the situation where there _is_ a revolutionary discovery, with or without patents, and then wonder about the effect of patents on the next innovations. In doing that you do not consider that may be a revolutionary discovery with patents, and none without.

3D printing seems a good example:

Extruded plastic took off before resin printers because the patents expired a few years earlier.

As far as I can tell, we could have had the 3D printing revolution in the 90s or early 2000s, but instead we locked the technology away to only be used in a few esoteric commercial applications until the patents expired.

Similar story with e-ink; the license costs for the technology are the main blocker to wider adoption.

> Similar story with e-ink; the license costs for the technology are the main blocker to wider adoption.

How much is the license cost?

Given the abundance of cheap eink book readers, price tags etc on the market, cost doesn't seem to be a problem. OTOH the limitations of the technology - in particular, the contrast and the refresh rate - and how expensive large screens get, prevents it from expanding into more niches.

Perhaps if there were no patent, there'd be more third-party research to improve all these things faster. But as far as adoption of the existing stuff goes, I don't see how license costs are a direct blocker.

You could argue that there is more economic incentive to invent new things as discoveries are worth more if you alone have the right to use them. This in turn could lead to more investments in research that lead to more inventions that increase disruption.

I know that that has been one argument in favor of patents since forever. But that ignores the part where competing parties are not freely allowed to build on another person's patent, which is essential for making good improvements.

And you can see this play out in the history of invention. For example, Edison stopped other people from doing research on the light bulb. Meanwhile the Netherlands was a country without IP laws at the time so Phillips quickly ended up producing the superior and cheaper product. No patent laws, bigger disruption. Similarly the Wright brothers were notorious for holding back aviation with their patents.

James Watt and his patents on steam engine are also an interesting case. Efficiency gains basically stopped for duration of the main patent patent and exploded later.

On the other hand it is also case for more innovation due to necessity, e.g. his patent on beam connection to a shaft (linear-to-rotary movement) required others to come up with a different solutions (e.g. sun and planet gear).

> EDIT: And perhaps more importantly give people the freedom to innovate on top versus stopping anyone who does.

Everyone is free to innovate on top of any pre-existing, current patent. They simply can't profit on their new innovation without licensing the patent. However what they can do with their new innovation is patent the innovation itself. This newly patented innovation prevents the original patent holder from profiting off of the new innovation, and thus incentivizes the original patent holder to license their patent to the new patent holder (or vice versa).

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