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Comment by daveungerer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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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