The short lifetime of patents and the requirement that you publish detailed information about the invention significantly mitigates this. If they were measuring innovation by the number of copyrights filed, then I might agree with you.
For a lot of industries 20 years is an awfully long time to the point of complete irrelevance - and that "detailed information" is often vague enough to be unusable. Combine that with an overly-broad range of patent-able things and an overworked USPTO granting clearly invalid patents, and in practice (at least in the tech/software world) it's doing more harm than good.
Patents are no longer about protecting R&D investments. They have become more about patenting the vaguest concepts possible, in the hope of making a profit when someone else does an actual invention which somehow stumbles into your patents' wording.
Patents are always the tool of the moneyed and the lawyered, which is not the same thing as protecting R&D investment. There are exception, such as the guy who spent 12 years suing car companies over the windshield wiper, but that actually proves the rule because of time spent. It even apparently cause his marriage to break down. [1]
> Kearns sought $395 million in damages. He turned down a $30 million settlement offer in 1990 and took it to the jury, which awarded him $5.2 million; Ford agreed to pay $10.2 million rather than face another round of litigation.
Not that I don't agree with you, what makes Kearns' pursuit 'greedy'?
Jury awarded 1/6 after litigation.
Ford payed double to get rid of this nuisance.
$30 million in 1990 was fuck you money. It’s still enough to comfortably retire on for a high school aged person.
Edit: sorry about the non sequitur. Bitterly learning about inflation and fiat recently.
Not only that, but in the odd scenario where it was "kept liquid", or kept purely in cash, it'd be worth $30m in today's money, not $100k. It's not clear where the $100k figure is even coming from. Even $100k/year doesn't make sense in any context I can derive.
I guess if he lit the money all on fire, it would be worth nothing, too.
I don't think that currency exists though. The closest current example I can think of is if you're Argentinian and you bought $30m worth of Argentinian pesos in 1992 which would be worth ~$35k today. But that is due to relatively recent hyperinflation, not yearly 10% inflation, 10 years ago it would still be worth $4.3m, 15 years ago $8.8m.
You'd have to be seriously asleep at the wheel (or being strong-armed by local law enforcement, unfortunately) to keep your liquid currency parked in a hyperinflationary currency.
I’d argue the same applies to all patents; the world would be better off without them in general.
https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/RT2%206-...
There is no such thing as a software patent.
There is no such thing as a rubber patent.
There is no such thing as a steel patent.
There is no such thing as an electricity patent
There is only ... a patent.
So either you think "well it's not a software patent, it's a patent that covers the application of some software" is a useful point to make, or you're being pedantic for pedantry's sake. To the former, I don't think that makes a difference to someone being sued by a patent troll.
Well no system can work that way - if judges in court were overworked and making invalid judgements, then the legal system would fail no matter what kind of laws you have and no matter what police does
An overworked Supreme Court does not lead to more Supreme Court decisions.
Suppose an institution is overworked, it has two options - long queue or rush the job.
Courts understand their role is important, so you have a long wait, but they d0 the job properly.
Patent office, perhaps, rushes the job. Now whether they issue too many or too few patents is maybe equally bad, in my view, it’s screwed up either way.
And the wealthy and powerful use that wealth and power to influence how government functions.
Thus, the current situation.
Former USPTO patent examiner here. I'll answer why an overworked USPTO will lead to more patents at present, but I make no claims that it should be this way.
The effective default is to grant patents. Why? Because the examiner has a finite amount of time for each application and has to have some sort of justification for a rejection. Unless there are some formal problems with the patent application, "I couldn't find prior art" means that a patent will be granted. Examiners could try "official notice" to basically say that they don't think it's novel or non-obvious without providing a reference, but that's easily defeated by attorneys. Examiners must provide a clear justification for a rejection.
If the amount of time an examiner has is too low (and it's far too low), that increases the chance that no prior art will be found, and consequently increases the chance that invalid patents will be granted.
Contrast that with the Supreme Court: The Supreme Court can decline to see a case. You can't do that as an examiner. You can try to have an application transferred, but that will just give it to another overworked examiner!
The path of least resistance makes appearance once again. If we don't understand that this guides the default final state, we would argue about nothing constructive.
Interesting. Did you enjoy it? Why did you stop?
I stopped for the simple reason that the job was far too difficult, and poorly paid on top of that.
And the maximum payout on violating a patent should be the remaining profit to end the patent.
Differences between industries then look after themselves.
There are some industries where due to slow-moving markets the 20 year patent period is still sensible, but for most sectors we would be better off with a 5 or 10 year patent period to account for the increased speed of innovation.
Also, the point counts even if Apple just patented enough to block comparable phones.
The point: For the smartphone market, 20 years would be a very long effective time for any foundational or gatekeeping patents.
that’s literally every patentable invention ever, though.
Remington didn’t invent the hunting rifle… they didn’t even invent the first self-loading or lever action rifle, probably.
“removing the annoyances and downsides that make a previous approach infeasible or impractical” is more charitably described as “a useful innovation that advances the field”.
Now, the problem is that a lot of patents are issued for things that someone else already has done, so the recipient of the patent isn't actually advancing the state of the art. But on the face of it, "removing the annoyances and downsides that make a previous approach infeasible or impractical" is literally what patents are supposed to be granted for.
Further, most patents may contain key details, but they also intentionally contain as much broad information as to create a massive exclusionary zone, not to mention burying any legitimately useful information.
20 years is not short! 20 years might be appropriate for capital-intensive innovations (e.g., in pharma), but definitely not for industries where innovations are not typically capital-intensive. E.g., 20 years for cryptography and software patents is a disaster.
not if patents become a weapon against actual innovation - which it has devolved into being today.
Far from being made to progress science and the arts, patents have become a method for which large corporations can add moats to competition. Things like codecs for video/audio, which are purely mathematical expressions, have been patented. Genes and molecules, even tho they might occur naturally, can be patented (a very tenuous form of invention - it's discovered, even if not naturally occurring!).
And not to mention design patents.
I say the entire patent system needs to be abolished, or at least, made such that only applicable to physical mechanisms, and not software, nor biological systems.
If the invention takes 3 weeks and $0, yeah, 20 years is a long time.
…then the patent can be invalidated on the basis that it is obvious.
If the invention is commercially valuable, then invalidating it (or just pretending it doesn’t exist until you get sued, then invalidating it) can make more sense than licensing it.
A related issue is that there are many, many patents that most people (e.g., competitors) mostly ignore, because everyone, including the patent owner, knows that they would be invalidated if challenged.
Most of the purported benefits of patents seem based on theories that most people don’t understand. We all take some received knowledge about their supposed operation, and usually proponents of patents know nothing about how powerful innovation in open source and other patent-free spaces can be.