Can someone explain to me why patents are more helpful than harmful to society?
With stuff like this, it seems the reverse is true, but I might just be ignorant of how things work.
With stuff like this, it seems the reverse is true, but I might just be ignorant of how things work.
Particular industries, eg drug patenting, could be far better addressed with targeted legislation but at this point it's mostly just momentum and vested interests. It provides huge benefits for a small group and diffused costs. It's hard to imagine it being possible to get enough momentum to change things.
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2005/spring/p....
I've read a fair number of patents, both in and outside of software, and my biggest problem with software patents is that most of them are absolute crap: they are generally neither innovative nor insightful.
In both cases, I feel that the patent system fails its goal to make trade secrets public.
If it's not possible to verify that the system is fulfilling its purpose, and if the general consensus is that it doesn't fulfill its purpose, then what do we get out of saying that "encouraging inventors to publish their work" is it's purpose? It feels like it's mass self-delusion at that point, and for who?
I can say anecdotally that I've used non-software patents to figure out how to level a door via its hinges, find out how Pop Rocks are made, and understand how they keep air sickness bags from leaking. Nothing earth shattering, but interesting. It is worth noting that I could easily follow all of these even though I'm a complete non-expert on any of the subjects.
I've never gotten anything out of a software patent. I have a hard time even reading mine. This leads me to the hypothesis (which seems testable) that software patents are particularly broken.
In practice, my understanding is that you can't really afford to enforce your patent without a big legal team, and even then, the cost can sink your fledgling company
I think the real problem is the cost of accessing and navigating the legal system (including: the cost of invalidating bogus patents)
Getting reasonable licensing terms doesn’t require you to be able to win a case just cost them significantly more money if they don’t.
There are some avid supporters of this strain of thought. Here is an example: albeit old, this may give some background:
https://mises.org/library/book/against-intellectual-property
Although I agree with your position re IP not legitimately being property, I want to nitpick a bit here, and point out that empirical evidence can only substantiate empirical claims. Construing outcomes as "harm" or "good" is a normative evaluation, so this argument is an attempt to leap across the is-ought gap.
Every patent is taxed at some arbitrary rate - say 3% a year. The catch is the patent holder decides how much it’s worth. Low value means low tax. However, whatever value you pick is an open price for licensing by anyone else.
Ultimately, use it or lose it. If you don’t think it’s valuable and someone else does, the world still benefits.
Tune the tax percentage based on how much you want to hurt patent trolls vs impact on actual long term R&D
How patents are supposed to work:
You come up with an idea for a novel device. You spend time, money, and effort figuring out how to create your novel device. Once you actually have it working—or at least a detailed schematic, if building a prototype might be cost-prohibitive—you file a patent. That patent does two things: First, it ensures that, for the duration of patent protection, you have sole rights to produce the novel device. Second, it ensures that once that duration expires, anyone with the resources to obtain the raw materials and manpower can create as many of your novel devices as they want.
Then in comes the information revolution. There's much less demand for novel devices that do specific things; now people just want software that can run on general-purpose computers. Software is already protected under copyright law, so there's no logical reason for it to be patentable—but some people still want it to be patentable too...with a twist. They don't want to just be able to patent a specific implementation of an idea in software. They want to be able to patent the idea itself, so all they need to do is come up with a thought of a kind of software you could write, translate that thought into patent language, and submit it to the patent office.
This is how you end up with idiocy like saying you own the sole rights to "selling people stuff by adding it to a digital shopping cart—over the internet!"
TL;DR: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Get rid of software patents, and the whole concept of "patents on ideas", but keep patents on novel devices.
The alternative would be a gold rush every time a good idea is had. It would be chaos.
Patents could be shorter though. Ten years?
If you can accidentally stumble into multiple patent violations without even trying, they aren't really novel ideas by definition.
For example "slide to unlock" is a digital patent, but I would argue that any number of physical implementations predate it, and the motion itself isn't novel or unique enough to merit a patent.
For me, the Polio vaccine is an easy one. Of course, Salk chose not to patent it, but I would have been happy to make him and his lab very rich.
... but ...
Seems like that isn't their main use anymore.