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Comment by hermannj314 | Hacker News Reader

We seem to always focus on the cost of the patent system, never the benefit.

One day we will all be dead (or much older) and all of these features and patents will be freely available, described in significant detail to be reproducible, and the world will be a slightly more amazing place than it is now.

If you look at all the expiring patents, many filed 20 years ago, you will find there are some neat things documented. It is awesome those are all available for use. The quid pro quo of the patent system is the other end of the pipe.

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Practically, this is not how it actually seems to work. Instead, companies create an pipeline of patents, whereupon inventions are locked up indefinitely.

Sure, the original invention may be available, but in the meantime, new patents were filed for improvements and refinements. Without those, the original patent cannot be made efficiently or cost effective. Plus, the new patents can be weaponized in the courts to drain the resources of anyone experimenting in the area.

In other words, patents as implemented effectively enable indefinite monopolies. This may not be true for all patents, but this seems to be a standard playbook these days.

Isn't this the system working as designed? If you want your thing to be protected, you've got to keep improving and refining it. When your 20-year old product is competitive with today's product, you lose your patent protection.

As a competitor, you can also try taking the 20-year old product and refining it differently, too. Or if you're aggressive, you can build and refine current competitive products and patent the refinements, but you can't sell the product without a license, so might not be great (otoh, you might trade licensing the refinement for licensing the base product)

> Isn't this the system working as designed? If you want your thing to be protected, you've got to keep improving and refining it. When your 20-year old product is competitive with today's product, you lose your patent protection.

Not really—the point of patents is to publish information so that others can use it after a period of exclusivity. But if you can keep filing patents, preventing others from using that information indefinitely, then it defeats the purpose of the patent system.

If you can keep filing new patents, and the new patents are so important that the old patents are worthless, then you're improving the product space tremendously.

If you look at video compression, by the time a patented algorithm expires, there's tended to be a new codec that's better, but you can use mpeg-2 as you like now. So we get the incentive to make better codecs, and we get the old codecs.

If it makes your old patent worthless, because your new stuff is so much better, that’s fine. If it makes your old patent worthless, because it’s hard to use your old patent without running afoul of your new patent, because they’re overlap too much—that’s not working as intended.

You only need to generate a single patentable refinement once every twenty years. In a lot of places, this is a horrible pace relative to the organic rate of progress. Compare the progress made since the main patents for FDM 3D printing expired compared to the progress made while it was still under patent.

You might not like the 20-year term; but in the case of FDM; I'm sure there are plenty of patentable refinements, and I'd be surprised if Stratasys only got the initial patent and never any refinements. But when the initial patent expired, there was an explosion of other options as the initial patent was sufficient to enable the ecosystem, even if there was a need to avoid some refinement patents.

I salute your intention to find the silver lining but my experience reading patents is that they are hard to read. I believe this is because their job is not to convey information but rather to fulfill a legal requirement. I also believe that less restriction of these "inventions" would lead to a greater proliferation of truly useful explanations. No doubt there are exceptions but this has been my experience.

That would probably not be the case as companies would be obligated to wrap anything up in trade secret and never disclose anything.

With trade secrets, you can still independently discover them later. With patents, you have to check your own inventions on whenther they infringe patents, which is kind of ridiculous.

> companies would be obligated to wrap anything up in trade secret and never disclose anything

What in these patents would be locked away in a trade secret? They seem to be things you can figure out just by playing the game, or thinking about how it might be implemented. There's no secrets here.

they're incentivized to be vague because specificity decreases the utility of the patent.

Sounds like a great opportunity for someone to make an AI that is designed to "decrypt" patents into their actual useful parts (minus the legal stuff basically)

I mean, these seem pretty obvious, or even visible from the game itself in a way that publishing it as a patent results in no additional publication since it was apparent in the game already. For instance the loading screen bit simply seems to talk about how they show where you're going on the map during fast travel.

Seems like mainly a net loss.

If the claims are non-novel or obvious, then the examiners, who are familiar with the state of the art in the field, will reject them. Maybe the applicant will amend the claims to claim something narrower, or maybe not.

If the examiner and patent office screw up and allow a claim that shouldn’t have been allowed, then the claim can be challenged later and revoked. Yes, that costs money and is inefficient sometimes.

If only that's how the patent system actually worked.

Your original comment that monocasa responded to read only:

> If the claims are non-novel or obvious, then the examiners, who are familiar with the state of the art in the field, will reject them.

Which displays a stunning level of naivety and lack of familiarity with our patent system. Patents are regularly granted for extremely trivial (edit: and obvious) mechanisms.

That's because triviality isn't an issue in patents, non-obviousness and inventiveness is what's key, so it doesn't matter that the thing accomplished is trivial.

Because it seems I need to really spell it out, there are a lot of obvious and non-inventive patents being granted.

That's something that is certainly frequently asserted here but I've never seen any proof besides someone linking to one or two patents they don't like.

No thank you. That's not a unique benefit of the patent system, that's a minor ancillary benefit that has already been replicated elsewhere. The patent office doesn't have a patent on historical records of so-called inventions.

And the patent process is not optimized to produce documents that actually help other inventors or future historians. In fact, to the contrary, as it exists within a particular narrow legal IP regime that optimizes around legal risk. This is especially the case with software patents, where the patent office incentivizes patents that use convoluted language to make an obvious process seem like a novel invention.

In other words, let's assume a future where there are no more copies of Zelda to play. If you had to choose between getting to preserve the patent on the Zelda loading screen and an actual recording of it, I'll take the recording every time. Or in a future where much of the knowledge of computer science and programming was lost, I'd rather have an archive of a set of textbooks, Stack Overflow, and Github than the entirety of the patent office's software patent documents.

I think your post reflects several misunderstands or false assumptions about the patent system.

First, you misstate the purpose of disclosure. It isn't to become a record of historical inventions, it's to encourage inventors to disclose their innovations, as inventors otherwise would not disclose their inventions. Inventors and their businesses would instead be incentivized to wrap their inventions up in trade secret and never disclose anything at all.

Second, patents don't use convoluted language to hide an obvious process. That's (a) merely facial and a waste of time, (b) contrary to the actual legal goal of patents which is to encompass as much in your patent as possible, while still maintaining its ability to grant. Patentees must actually disclose their invention, in a way that's cognizable to someone skilled in the art, or they simply do not have any benefit from the patent at all.

Inventors and their businesses would instead be incentivized to wrap their inventions up in trade secret and never disclose anything at all.

In the past there was perhaps more benefit from this exchange: manufacturers disclosed special knowledge of their products in patents and the world at large gained knowledge that would otherwise remain secret. But this theoretical exchange breaks down if the secret is easily reverse engineered or otherwise unlikely to remain secret. Reverse engineering all manner of products is much easier now than it was 100 years ago but the duration of patents has remained fixed at 20 years. I doubt that it would take more than a year to reverse engineer these patented Zelda features (or how to make a new small molecule drug, for that matter) in the absence of disclosure through patents.

There's still an argument for patents to incentivize investment in R&D. We still want people to invest the time and effort in developing and proving new small molecule drugs even though modern instrumentation and synthesis planning makes it easy to copy a drug. But the "disclosure is better than secrets" argument in favor of patents has been weakening every year as secret-keeping becomes harder.

What benefit? Most "inventions" hit the world @ large as soon as products incorporating them are released. Same world @ large gets the details after someone pokes around in those products & figures out how they work.

That is practically always before patents expire.

Truly smart innovations will survive over time. Obvious "inventions" are often trivial enough to be "invented" independently again & again.

Patents mostly add a load of red tape, and a big stick that large companies (& patent trolls!) can hit smaller companies or individuals with.

Overall benefit to society, even if patents work as intended? Debateable (and forever being debated, eg. between economists).

In a small society, an inventor taking solution-to-big-problem into their grave, is a problem. In a world with 8 billion+ souls, not so much. Someone else will repeat what 1st inventor didn't release into the world.

Companies innovate because they want to grab market share by getting there first. Losing 'protection' doesn't stop this process. It just removes that big stick that would-be competitors are beaten down with.

Can you share any literature on economists debating whether the patent system is worth it? I'm not familiar with materials like that, and it's been my experience that the patent system isn't really a debate outside of the hackernews and software development communities.

Boldrin & Levine: Against Intellectual Monopoly.

The book opens up with a case of James Watt (after whom the Watt SI units are named), and that even though he came up with the steam engine, only after the patent for steam engine expired, was the world able to benefit from his invention. Most of the time while patent was active, he was busy fighting off others, trying to extract financial gain (AFAIK). Not only that, his initial design was subpar, and the improvement that was important was actually patented by somebody else.

I would like to finish the book someday though...

But if there was no patent, he'd have kept it under trade secret in perpetuity, and no one would have been able to make that improvement

constantly putting a pause button on progress for 20 years because someone owns a key patent (e.g. e-ink, 3d printing) does much more harm for progress than documenting these things in patents does good

> someone owns a key patent (e.g. e-ink,

Could you identify what patent that is? I hope I will get a genuine response from someone who genuinely knows that industry because the last time I asked I just got a patents.google.com/search?q=eink response. It is fun to blame patents. But that's like saying we're not making progress in operating systems because Microsoft owns a key patent in operating systems.

I just wish patents were a little more accessible. I read and write these for a living and I have my doubts about how useful these are, in general, to members of the public.

One great use case for LLMs is the translation of patents into short, easily-readable summaries.

Is that a component of the patent system? It would be nice if there was (maybe there is) a "reasonable reproduction test" that required a patent's acceptance to be conditioned on someone being able to achieve the claim reasonably by reading it.

Since the system exists for the benefit of humanity, I assume that is baked into the process?

There is a test like that. It's called the "enablement" test and you must enable someone to build the thing in order to get a patent.

I'm talking more about the practical act of sitting down and reading a patent. They are long, boring, and filled with legalese. A patent may be 50 pages long, but the interesting part may fill no more than a few paragraphs and be described using nouns and verbs you've never heard before. It's completely possible to read a patent, look at the pictures, and still have no idea what the thing actually is.

It's essentially legal abstraction -- inventors and patent attorneys don't want to be pinned down to a particular interpretation, implementation, or embodiment.

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