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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

That's how patents work though. That's the whole deal.

Private entities invest in research and development. If they find something incredible, they release the full details to the world of what they found, and in return we give them monopoly on the invention for a period of time. That's a patent.

Take away the incentive and private entities won't invest in research.

The public appetite for investing in basic research with government funding is pretty low. So instead of waiting 20 years for the patent to expire, during which we're all paying a premium on the invention, we instead spend 20 or more years without the invention at all because no research was funded to find it. Maybe longer.

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I know that's how patents work. That's the problem.

I don't believe private entities wouldn't invest in research if it wasn't for patents. But I also don't care. If the private sector won't invest, let the public sector invest. Just don't keep innovations out of the hands of humanity.

Patents aren't just an incentive to invest in research: it's (moreso, even) an incentive to also disclose that research.

So yes, in a world with patents, private entities would still engage in research, but what would they gain from disclosing the details of their process?

It is extremely rare that actionable, reproducible information comes out of the patent process. In general, they provide as little information as possible in order to satisfy the office, which is extremely overworked and (by design) rubber stamps everything that has basically the correct headings and formatting and isn't too similar to an existing patent.

In the case of drugs, it works. The day a patent expires, you have generics that instantly lower the market price. Replicating a drug from a patent is not free but you know that the compound works and can be synthesized. It's much cheaper than doing original research where a drug candidate can fail after you invested a lot into it.

That's generally because other companies figure out the synthesis themselves in that 20 years timespan, not because they got accurate synthesis instructions.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. But the generics researchers know exactly what they're trying to make. And they don't have to prove that their drug is better than the standard of care. Just that they synthesized the right thing.

For drugs, patents:

1. Successfully provide a profit

2. Are necessary to provide said profit

3. Are long enough to provide enough profit to pay back the investment

But it's not clear that they're short enough to encourage further rapid improvements. Like, suppose a patent lasts 20 years but would still be worth pursuing even if it lasted only 5 years; that's 15 years of public development opportunity lost, for each patent.

Currently, the system is that the government declares "X years" by fiat. If it's too short, then corporations can lobby for longer patent durations. If it's not too short, then corporations can lobby anyway. This is a functional but mediocre system, and there's clearly room for improvement.

I agree. This might be worth optimizing. In case of drugs, you can easily spend the first ten years in research and testing, while paying the patent fees. Software or manufacturing patents, on the other hand, might get different time frame.

>So yes, in a world with patents, private entities would still engage in research, but what would they gain from disclosing the details of their process?

They might not gain, but the people working for them would certainly gain from moving to other employers who needed their "expertise".

Do you have an example or two of a country with no patent protections that still invests in research? If no incentives, there are no outcomes.

Public sector investment is too tied up in finding new ways to kill and monitor people.

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