We should just end patents, period.
If we need to reform patents, maybe it should be based on revenue generated. Once a company has been successfully "incentivized" for their "innovation" the patent expires sooner.
In practice, the big companies usually have a ton of vague questionable defensive patents that cover a huge space of "inventions", so even if the smaller companies try to sue, they will get avalanched by an array of patent suits that could potentially bankrupt the company.
1. With inadequate penalties for filing frivolous lawsuits, filing frivolous lawsuits becomes a strategy. I've unfortunately had a close friend be a victim of this strategy. I won't name my friend, but I will name that Jared Kushner's companies were the (repeated) plaintiff. If we close the loopholes around patents (and we should) it will only make the filing of frivolous lawsuits slightly less efficient, because the lawsuits will get thrown out quicker. Note that even if the lawsuits get thrown out, they still cost the defendants money to get them thrown out, so patent reform wouldn't even necessarily mean they can't file patent lawsuits, it just means the lawsuits might get thrown out slightly faster.
2. Justice isn't possible in civil suits where the plaintiff and defendant have disparate resources to pay for counsel.
The pitfall there is that there is no guarantee of revenue. You also invite the possibility of predatorily delaying revenue generation. Potential revenue generated would be more on the nose.
In another sense, sustaining a patent until it generates sufficient revenue can be seen as oxymoronic to the idea that patents incent products that serve the public interest - since, if the patent is not creating value, how can it be in the public interest?
Patent lifespans are already sort of considered based on potential revenue generated, and use number of years as a proxy for that
Rewarding innovation has been archived, just skip ahead to the part where the public at large benefits.
Nestle has around 276,000 employees today, while Dualit seems to have around 100-200 (hard to tell since Dualit is private).
We really want examples of large companies licensing patents or buying smaller companies for their patents. Both are examples of patents helping smaller companies against those much larger. If patents no longer existed those smaller companies would get nothing.
why? why does it have to be only larger companies? if its a free for all, i copy your product, you copy mine. how is that not free market? people will choose so let them.
you could decide to not publicly release a product but you risk your competitor "inventing" the same thing in their own way so you can only either release it first or make the biggest noise.
Truly small operations don't have the bandwidth or resources to even file for a patent. So it's pretty much only medium sized companies or those with the backing of powerful groups who take advantage of the patent system.
[0]https://cdn.advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/1309...
Patents at work.
Oh, wait - he wouldn't have needed to patent his broccolli, because Monsanto wouldn't have been able to patent it against him.
> The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity. There is strong evidence, instead, that patents have many negative consequences.
That said, our current patent system is problematic for sure. The bar for getting a patent has become far too low as systems have become too complex for independent patent examiners to really understand them, which has allowed many companies to amass a huge portfolio of techniques that are obvious to people in the field even if they appear novel to an external observer.
At least patents expire in a reasonable amount of time. Copyright is in a far worse place.
That works when the patents is some simple thing anyone can understand. Nothing is like that anymore. Every interesting line of research requires a specialist to understand it, and every specialist represents a high opportunity cost. In practice only a few people could hope to benefit from the publication.
Throw into that the fact that it's actually lawyers who write patents, and thus they are written in legalese.
The government & large corporations use force via the justice system & jealously guard top secrets, to the point of violence as well. Property can be seized. I'd rather have a distribution of power than consolidation, which seems to attract people who are motivated by controlling other people, thereby undermining the supposed benefits.
> The bar for getting a patent has become far too low
The process is also expensive & serves as a barrier to innovation via market monopolies. The problem with monopolies is that they don't serve the marketplace or consumers. Monopoly is pure rent for the entities that control the monopoly. It is common for a dominant company to buy the rights to a patent only to quash the technology, all to serve the dominant company's stranglehold over a market.
That's a benefit that depends on the difficulty of reverse engineering the knowledge from working samples. As analytical instruments and procedures have improved, the relative disclosure benefit of patents has diminished. Worse, patents are increasingly written to hide the key insight in a hay stack of obfuscatory language and irrelevant examples. I can learn a lot from reading a typical 1970s-vintage chemistry patent. I can't say the same about present chemistry patents.
Lots of companies tried to copy the process (without licensing the patent). They couldn't, because the patent didn't describe all the know-how needed to make the process work. Companies that licensed the patent got the benefit of an on-site engineer that would help them get their process working. So most "plate" glass was thereafter float glass, made by paying licensees.
That is: the invention was really protected not by patents, but by trade secrets. And unlike with the mediaeval guilds, nobody had to be assassinated.
So it seems to me that in addition to being harmful, patents really are unnecessary; as long as there is also know-how. If there is no know-how, then I don't think the patent should be issued. Therefore, there is no need for patents.
The patent system needs to be fixed, not done away with.
It’s also a slightly depressing reason why I refuse to publish source for a commercial game I built, despite wanting to. The likelihood of being sued is very tiny, but why risk it when you’ve had enough success to be noticeable.
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GMOs were first made available in 1994 [1]. You can find data on famine deaths over time here [2]. Global famine deaths were near zero per 100k before GMOs had been developed. As an aside on this, the reason for historic famines was often not a lack of food or crops, or even weather - but war, which disrupts supply lines and may damage production.
GMO products are also primarily only grown in the USA and Brazil. [3] Of the two largest countries in the world, India has a complete ban on GM products except cotton, and China previously had a complete ban but lately has been in a state of flux, in no small part because of trade concessions - the US really wants to sell GM soybeans to them.
The vast majority of GMOs are used to feed Americans, Brazilians, livestock, and cars. If you don't understand that last one - US/Brazilian corn is often turned into heavily subsidized ethanol fuel. Which absolutely sucks as a fuel in every possible way [4], but has found a place in the market thanks to governmental regulation.
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[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavr_Savr
[2] - https://ourworldindata.org/famine-mortality-over-the-long-ru...
[3] - https://sci-hub.ru/https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007...
[4] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2016/04/25/why-a...
As for your affirmation that it sucks for fuel, the growth of corn as a competitor for sugar cane in the production of ethanol here in Brazil is not "thanks to government regulation". In our country, sugar cane farmers have a lot more pull with the government than corn farmers. If government meddling was an issue, it would make the use of corn as a source of ethanol more difficult, not easier.
If ethanol producers here are turning to corn, is because it has economical benefits.
--- [1] https://digital.agrishow.com.br/graos/etanol-de-milho-como-e...
GMO crops have nothing to do with famine reduction.
I’m not sure your reasoning makes sense to me.
Sources? References? Sounds like PR bullshit from Syngenta, frankly. For a start, half the world population is living off subsistence agriculture, i.e. not patented nor GMO seeds.
Doubt GMOs have yet saved hundreds of millions like the green revolution did, but this claim is false.
In general though, I agree - intellectual property gives too much power to the financial sector and the lifetime of patents and copyrights should be cut in half.
Absolutist solutions can backfire in unexpected ways. We should take an iterative approach unless a single jump is the only option. My 2c.
https://www.discovergermany.com/the-history-of-made-in-germa...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-industrial-esp...
There is some good to intellectual property -- it's more of a tuning problem that is currently tuned for the slow moving 1800's.
I often think that the bigger a company or wealthier a person is they should get less things like tax deductions, patent protection, subsidies and a lot of others.
The main issue with patents is not that they exist but that the system for filing and enforcing them has been eroded to the point where it has become a highly effective tool for big corporations to enforce patents they arguably should not have received against smaller competitors. That's technically illegal but since it is super hard to argue that in a court, companies get away with anti competitive behavior. And of course they are actively supported in this by bought and payed for politicians. In the US that's called lobbying, in much of the rest of the world we'd label that corruption, nepotism, and graft. Not a good thing. But as old as power and politics is.
The issue is not patents but the corruption around it.
The system in the US is flooded with bull shit patents that would not be acceptable else where. A lot of those have issues with their claims being overly broad, prior art, or a complete and utter lack of novelty. This does not matter. Getting patents rubber stamped is a numbers game. You just send more patents in and eventually a few will get approved. Of course, it costs a money to register and keep patents but once you have them the system is rigged in your favor. Challenging a patent is super expensive relative to filing one. And since patent offices are under staffed, they bias in favor of approving. And also they don't like admitting they were wrong to approve.
None of this happened by accident. The system was lobbied into the shape it is in today by the largest patent holders in the US (i.e. every big mega corporation you can name). They use patents as a tool to keep competitors out of the market. And they do so very successfully. To the extent that this is becoming a problem.
The solution is fixing the system, not getting rid of it. A big motivation for this could simply be that patents are not globally enforceable. So, you might convince companies in the US to not compete but e.g. Chinese companies will happily take your patented thing and run with it. Good luck complaining about that in a Chinese court of law. And they seem to have bootstrapped a pretty nice high tech industry in recent decades there. Bad patents actually erode the competitive position of US based corporations. While they are tied up in courts being sued by patent trolls, their foreign competitors are free to compete without concern for such things. Great argument for getting politicians off their ass. The problem exists to a lesser extent in other jurisdictions of course. But the US is the most paralyzed by this.
In the case of seeds, they could still hide behind plant breeders' rights[1], though.
someone invents a thing, someone else uses thing for evil. what to do? we ban the thing!!! yes, of course, that's the solution. don't punish the one that did the evil. <hangsheadinshameatthenotion>
https://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/more/2012-035
this isn't "generally good thing that some people abuse", this is the entire patent system is fundamentally not producing any explicable benefits and significant measurable harm, there is no reason to keep it around.
the scenario about the inventor who comes up with the better lightbulb in his garage doesn't happen. if it does, somebody else copies his idea (it's gotta be fairly trivial for someone to make it in a garage) or opens up their own patent portfolios and finds an overbroad patent that describes some trivial component or practice that is widely used, and drags him into litigation that bankrupts him for the rest of his life.
in software the example would be that you get dragged by someone who has patented "e-commerce on a website" or "software updates over the internet" and the money to have lawyers fight it while you empty your warchest.
no "I would simply..." or "but a law firm would do that pro-bono" is necessary here, either, those are both real-world examples, someone tried to shake down Newegg in 2015 with the e-commerce patent for example. And it worked for a lot of previous victims, none of whom felt like Newegg that it was worth fighting on principle or for direct economic benefit alone.
Patents literally kill companies, and they don't actually produce the intended innovations. And that's the federal reserve saying it. There were debates on ending it in the 50s, and they made the wrong decision.
> If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one. But since we have had a patent system for a long time, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to recommend abolishing it.
The harms have now clearly exceeded the benefits of keeping it. It may not have been worth the trouble of abolishing it in 1958, it is now.