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Comment by jean_tta | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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