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Comment by Sesse__ | Hacker News Reader

> If the idea behind the system was to give people a financial incentive to innovate

No, it wasn't. The idea behind the system was to give people a financial incentive to be _open_. Patents are a trade with the commons; you would give up your secrets for a limited time period of exclusivity. People would innovate with or without patents, but they would keep that innovation to themselves.

With software, both sides of that bargain have changed. Secrets are harder to keep, and since everything moves so much faster, any given time period is much more damaging to the commons (e.g., 20 years is forever in software).

(I also don't think Ticketmaster affairs have anything to do with patents, FWIW)

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That is an ahistorical view of the history of patents. Openness had never even occurred to anybody when patents were originally invented. Back then, it didn’t matter. Humanity hadn’t come up with much that you couldn’t figure out how it worked if you had one in your hands. It may have taken millennia to invent movable type, for example, but somebody who saw it could have copied it immediately. Its relatively recent that that has not been the case for almost anything.

It was developed to spur innovation, and that is still its main function.

That's an absurdly reductionist take on ancient innovation.

What about chemistry that mad everything from baking recipes, optics for physics, paint for art, forging techniques... The list goes on and on.

There are so many subtle ways of doing things that were silo'd in small communities or regions.

U.S. Constitution at least seems to side with innovation, not openness. Constitution article 1 section 8 says Congress shall have power

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

This says nothing about publication, only about progress and exclusivity.

It doesn’t say anything about selling patents to third parties to abuse either. It specifies authors and inventors, and rights to their writings and discoveries. At what point does it extend those rights to a random unaffiliated attorney or corporation that engages in zero productive innovation or authorship? I agree that the argument your replying to is flawed, none of this applies to Ticketmaster here specifically, but the contemporary system absolutely is broken in several ways that were seemingly never intended by its original codification.

I would support patents that could only ever belong to the actual inventor.

That’s short-sighted because it misses the fact that inventors are often not product people. There’s a big difference between creating something new and bringing it to market.

The big benefit of a functioning patent system is it allows people to make money just inventing things.

This group seems to have a “throw the baby out with the bath water” mentality when it comes to patents simply because of patent trolls, when the obvious solution is to just fix patent approval/litigation.

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