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Comment by hgsgm | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't really solve the problem of patent trolls taking money from other companies.

A covered song is actually a specific lyric, not "a song about love in which the party of the first part expresses admiration for the part in the second part"

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Currently, in trade for publicly disclosing how their invention works, we give patent holders an exclusive right to make, sell, or use their invention for 20 years. A patent holder can say no one other than me can use my invention for 20 years. I think inventions are more important than songs, yet Congress decided there must be some way to force the author of a song to allow anyone to play that song - and we will decide how much you get in compensation. I am saying we do the same thing for inventions. Don't like the deal? You are free to keep your invention secret. The formula for Coke is a classic example of how they chose to protect their invention.

Some types of inventions are easier to keep secret than others. And some, like drugs, probably legally have to disclose ingredient in order to sell them. But, in general, I'm not sure we really want a system where companies are incentivized to either just not pursue certain avenues of research given the results will just be copied or to take steps to make it harder to reverse engineer devices.

I agree patent trolls are a problem. And I agree we want to incentivize people to innovate. I am citing an example with copyright how Congress chose to strike a balance and I think it could be applied to patents.

I have several patents that were issued to both large companies and start-ups. The patent system right now only works for large companies and is actively stopping innovation by small companies. What changes do you think would help?

Breadth of patents is the most obvious issue--though it's somewhat understandable scope creep given that mechanical inventions are probably not as central as they once were. But any system of IP protection is always going to favor the entities who can afford good lawyers and pursue enforcement claims. A system where those same large entities can swoop in and copy anything they want is not obviously better.

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