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Comment by mik4el | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree with the common belief that patents are the wrong way for protecting most startups... But, an interesting thought about patent trolling, I believe, is that if patents are useless then why can the trolls make $29B/year on trolling? I'm confused!

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Patents are intended to incentivize people to reveal their secrets in exchange for a temporary monopoly on the secrets. They are not meant as vehicles purely for making profit, but that is how they are being abused - by people who buy up patents and then sue anyone who infringes, or by people who patent as broadly as possible and then sue anyone who infringes. Useful for making money, not useful for the intended purpose of contributing work for the greater good of all people.

The patent system is too broken. Anyone who writes software should hate patents. Anything you write will infringe on some patent out there. If all you want is money then writing software isn't the best way to go about getting it.

A better system would be one where patents do not give protection to ideas, but do give minor tax incentives to the people who own and use a related patent in their business. Then their ideas are shared, but not using the patents gives them nothing, and they cannot block others from using the all too often obvious ideas.

It should be noted that patents are particularly broken for software, since in that field it appears to be quite easy to convince someone at the patent office that a trivial discovery is non-trivial. Also most of it is math and shouldn't be patented anyway.

> The patent system is too broken. Anyone who writes software should hate patents. Anything you write will infringe on some patent out there. If all you want is money then writing software isn't the best way to go about getting it.

I write software (open source on GitHub) and don't hate patents. I hate bad patents, the kind you can infringe upon just by writing software, but lots of patents aren't bad patents. E.g. IBM has a number of patents on compiler optimizations. Am I going to stumble upon Steensgard's pointer analysis by accident? No, the only reason I know about it is that IBM let him publish a paper based on the research they paid him to do at Watson.

>Am I going to stumble upon Steensgard's pointer analysis by accident?

Yes! Yes, you could stumble on Steensgard's algorithm. Like convergent evolution in nature, it's easy for requirements to shape implementation, and for multiple implementations to naturally overlap. There are so many software patents out there- it is a minefield.

Additionally, engineers at large companies are discouraged from doing their own patent research, because of the risk of losing a "sorry, we created this organically in good faith" defense in litigation.

Publication of patents does not offset the chilling effect and legal overhead on our industry.

Part of the rationale for the patent system is that it is supposed to encourage people to disclose trade secrets that they would not otherwise disclose. However, if you can tell how a thing works just by looking at it, then according to that rationale there is no point in allowing such an invention to be patented (at least not on that basis). Unfortunately, that does not seem to prevent many completely obvious things from being patented (e.g. one click shopping).

Before capitalism, "trade rights" were a property right. You could own the right to be a sell bread in a particular town, for example (and the right to exclude others from doing so). Those owning such rights made lots of money, but that doesn't mean they were a good idea.

Your question is based on a flawed assumption. Making money is not the same thing as obtaining money - it's creation of wealth vs. transfer of wealth.

Good point, but the common belief is that patents are worthless and therefore it's interesting that at least some (the trolls) make a hefty profit on using patents in their business model. I.e. patents can't be worthless? That was my point and some thought I should be downvoted for that but it's still my point...

You're using two different meanings of "worthless." Patents are "worthless for the benefit of society" (I would go further and say that they are actively harmful) in that they provide disincentives to innovate and create new and interesting products. However, they are not "worthless for obtaining money" because our government allows them to be an excuse to forcibly transfer money.

A neo-liberalist wouldn't necesseraly make the two a difference. Right now I personally see patent trolling as a tax (collected by some really murky individuals) on innovation, a neo-liberalist would perhaps see it as the market promoting patented innovations over non-patented innovations or innovations without "good" protection - thereby making the individual with a "good" protection an advantage. I think even a neo-liberalist could see that as positive. I'm however not a neo-liberalist (fuck, I'm a Swede we're pretty much communists anyway?) so I can only see this as a tax on innovation, but the point I was trying to make and still stick by is that if patents are so "worthless"/"weak" then why can someone make a buck out of them, aren't patents then more misunderstood than "worthless"/"weak"?

>A neo-liberalist wouldn't necesseraly make the two a difference

A (neo-)liberalist would not approve the difference, as long as money is made, but the patent system is government regulation of trade, so he would not approve of the patent system itself if he took his conviction to the logical end.

If I have a patent on X, that means I can charge you money to make X.

Suppose X is sandwiches. If I'm allowed to charge anyone who makes sandwiches, yes, my patent is worth lots of money. It's not "worthless" in that sense. It's worthless in the societal sense: allowing my monopoly provides no value to society.

Nobody thinks you can't make money from software patents. Some people think software patents do not provide value to society by encouraging innovation, which is the stated legal intention of intellectual property law.

Patents have value to the holders of the patents, but that does not mean their existence creates value to society as a whole. If they do not, then there is an open question as to whether society should continue offering to enforce them.

When people call patents valueless, they're probably talking with respect to society as a whole.

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