Patents are a form of feudalism. The very word "patent" is rooted in feudalism, where it used to be "land patents" that were granted to the landholders in the middle ages.
Patents do not disallow you to think of certain things and they do not disallow you to share those thoughts. They only disallow you to implement a specific solution to a specific problem, for a specific period of time. Patents get struck down for being too broad.
If having to be struck down is the problem, then look at the justice system, not the patent system.
That was true only up until software patents were approved. In software, there is no hard and fast line between concept and execution. Without a physical product, the concept is the execution.
And you misunderstand patents as well, but that's not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is that you cannot make an ethical case for patents, on the contrary, they are a gross usurpation of a human being's right to create and trade. This is obvious to anyone who ignores the propaganda they were taught in high school.
There is and can be no ethical principle [..]
* Corporations are legal entities that are allowed because they were expected to, and have been shown to, advance our average wellbeing
* Corporations more effectively increase our average wellbeing if they are encouraged to heavily invest in innovation. They receive this encouragement by allowing them temporary monopolies on their inventions, thus enabling them to profit from their investment
* On average, the population profits: they have more free time, more money, a better health and can engage in 'creating and trading' all they want, except for a few specific instances that have been sacrificed in order to enable them to have these resources and this wellbeing in the first place
It's a trade-off our government made for us, in the belief it would be a net benefit. Things seems to have taken a wrong turn somewhere, but the original intent of the patent system was for the public good. That is a valid moral argument. Which doesn't mean you have to agree with it.
Corporations also exist for the good of society. They allow individuals to limit their liability and share a risk with others. Patents are granted to individuals, but those individuals are free to bequeath them to the corporations they are part of. Or they have freely signed an agreement that they will bequeath them to the corporation.
Now I agree the original reason for patents wasn't to encourage corporations to do R&D. I only gave a nutshell outline of the argument: I wasn't trying to be historically, philosophically or legalistically thorough, so I don't think this kind of criticism is very appropriate. I'll happily admit being wrong, but it is certainly not 'completely wrong': corporations were never restricted from being granted patents, even though that has been suggested. The common argument is the same argument given for individuals: protect the inventor or his corporation.
Neither corporations nor patents came into being with immoral intentions. Both ideas have actually proven quite successful. Unfortunately, we are now seeing some excesses of (the combination of) them that suggest the rules need to be changed.
If the rest of this comment appears to be a personal attack, I apologize; I would ask that it be read as an analysis of the above thread, with an eye to improving future discourse.
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The fact is, people DO make arguments of a moral nature in favour of patents. And last I checked, there's no gold standard in validity of moral arguments. Your opening salvo ("no moral justification for patents, period") is interpretable as either a claim about the behaviour of humans, or a claim about universal ethics; that would make it obviously false or obviously laughable, respectively.
You ALSO, in your opening salvo, misrepresented patents ("you are not allowed to think of... and then trade..."), and Confusion fairly-politely tried to help you out. You replied with "No, you misunderstand ethics", which aside from being a rude escalation of conflict is also a non sequitur (since the use of "No" implies you're replying to his/her content, which you weren't).
THEN, Confusion was again polite and outlined a moral argument which has been taken by many participants in the broader societal discussion about patents, including the ones who make the laws in several countries over a few hundred years. She/he was even clear that the consequences alleged by this argument, with respect to the public good, appear to be at least partially divergent from the consequences observed in reality, AND explicitly pointed out that the argument isn't unassailable ("That is a valid moral argument. Which doesn't mean you have to agree with it.").
I think any reasonable observer would agree that there IS a moral argument in favour of patents. It has some premises that not everyone agrees with (e.g. a sort of utilitarian framework). It also contains some contentious claims about the interaction between incentive structures and behaviour (e.g. inventors wouldn't invent, AND/OR drug companies wouldn't do FDA testing, without patent "protection"), which are clearly hard to test the truth of, and many reasonable people disagree about to what extent they are true. (I myself find the "drug company" argument very persuasive (I agree with kevinalexbrown above), and the "inventor" argument highly suspect (I mostly agree with you, below, in your comment about Tesla and Torvalds), but the point is that intelligent thoughtful people (or even HN commenters) can disagree about these things.
Hopefully I don't have to go into detail about how opening a post with "This is horribly embarrassing argument." is nothing more than verbal abuse.
And your shot about post hoc ergo propter hoc is a little missing the point: while some crazy person COULD say "look we got an internet because of the patent system, therefore we were right about patents", and I take your point about that hypothetical argument being an instance of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, I don't think anybody actually does make that argument. We all know we haven't sampled the universe in two states, and we all know that we're arguing about untested hypotheticals (about what WOULD happen with less patents or more patents, and about what WOULD HAVE happened in the past say 50 years).
And one last complaint about your rhetoric: while I acknowledge that ultimately any law (at least in all extent societies) is ultimately backed up by threat of violence, and thus in some sense law is violence, it's ludicrous to conflate the enforcement of near-consensus with violence. Unless you literally meant violence, and literally meant "gets the tar beaten out of him", in which case of course we all know that's not what happens to those who lose in patent fights. What happens is that profits that they have taken, which are judged by the courts to have been earned in violation of the framework of law, are taken away, and/or they are required to make good profits that they have been judged to have unfairly denied to others. Much as other proscribed commercial activity (e.g. fraudulent product misrepresentation, e.g. cartels) would be penalized. So, either way, your phrasing about violence is at best a distraction, at worst a falsehood.
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The thing is, it's weird having to write this little attack on your little attacks, because I agree that the first-world patent system has raged dysfunctionally out of control, and is stifling innovation rather than promoting it. (That's ALL it's doing wrong, mind you, because if you stick to 30-year-old products and technologies, you'll never notice this stuff. But I want to live in the FUTURE, never mind the present!) But I think the argument is narrower than you make it seem (again, consider drug companies), and I think we could afford to keep it more civil than I read you to have done, at least among basically-reasonable people.
Hopefully I have myself managed to avoid destructive incivility.
As to your silly play by play, it's all just your own self-serving spin. You have some bogus theory of civility that you mindlessly cling to as if it were a religion, it's a wrong theory, and that's really all the substance there is to your "criticism." I see your remarks in the same way as I'd see a religious zealot reading me the riot act over violating one of his beloved precepts.
If inside of that babbling rant of yours there is something you actually consider to be a reasonable disagreement, not with my style, but with the logic of my point, then go ahead and point it out without ranting and I'll try to elaborate for you.
The trolls don't mince words: they readily call it "theft" if you happen to be using something they patented. If we mince words then we loose from the very start, for the moral argument is the most powerful.
Which is precisely why you try to turn it on me given all your hypocritically impolite scolding about me not being polite enough for your tastes. If you're opposed to moralizing, don't moralize, not even about people who moralize.
Further no company would bother with R&D because as soon as they make a breakthrough everyone else will simply steal the idea and sell for pennies more than cost of production. R&D costs could never be recouped so no one would ever do it again.
That's always the rhetoric but in practice patents usually protect big companies at the expense of the little guy. This is especially true in software, where getting the patent is generally a lot more expensive than creating the invention. Only the big companies can afford to file patents for every little trick of coding they come up with.
And for all types of inventions, it's generally very expensive to litigate.
All sorts of inventive software was created before there were software patents, so empirically, it's clear that in this business at least we don't need patents.
The kind of men who refuse to engage themselves in creation without being prodded are the kind who patent most of the trivial ideas we see patented today.
As for your examples, Linus didn't invent. He made a version of an existing OS and started with an existing version of a copy of that OS. He did it for fun, but one must also recognize that he's gained a tremendous amount by this seemingly "benevolent" action. Fresh out of college he could take much more interesting jobs than most people with his background could. His "gift" ended up being a loss leader for his career.
So if we were reliant on only having people like Tesla to push us forward we'd be nowhere near where we are today. Tesla was brilliant but there are just far too few people who think and work as he did.
You've got to be kidding. Do you know nothing about the history of software?
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."--Bill Gates
so, please cite.
Who do you think you are that you can tell people on what terms they can cite a quote from the New York Times? No, I am not going to do a scientific research paper tracing the historical roots of this oft-cited (in reputable media) quote.
Please take your head and pull it out of your ass.
I don't agree with people filing this lawsuit. I don't think their idea is all that novel. I also think patents shouldn't last longer then it takes to recoup the investment.
TL;DR = People don't work that way, but yeah the patent system is currently ridiculous.
The point is that they ought to work that way. People can and should change. Answering "well they don't work that way" as an argument against this is fallacious. I mean, take your argument and apply it to (say) cannibals. A cannibalistic tribe would say "well, we eat people, we've always eaten people, therefore things will never change."
There can't be a logical, rational argument for patents. Which is unsurprising, since patents are clearly barbaric. So barbarians defend patents using (surprise) barbaric illogic.
I would restrict patent law to force a patent holder to license their patents to whomever for a reasonable price. We already have that for standards relevant patents, but i think it should apply to all patents.
Objectivists do that:
Rand argued that limited intellectual property monopolies being granted to certain inventors and artists on a first-to-file basis as moral because she viewed all property as fundamentally intellectual.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_%28Ayn_Rand%29#Poli...
Without this, there would be a strong incentive to keep innovations secret as much as possible, which may have them end up being lost.