Most good inventions are "obvious" in hindsight.
It wasn't really designed for people patenting vague concepts, math or ideas.
If you build a better mousetrap, a patent is pretty good. If you have a vague idea you might show ads in elevators, you should A: just be shot, and B: not get a patent
(Well after I posted this comment you can't anymore)
That’s not true. I have several issued US patents and while you don’t publish the code, you certainly have to disclose enough high level details that another person versed in the art would be able to implement it.
Today, they are simply a giant anchor on the speed of innovation.
The software world has flourished with effectively very little patent protection and very lax IP enforcement.
And in the hardware world China quickly commoditizes and copies everything, regardless of US patents anyways.
The only real moats in modern capitalism come from talent, marketing, distribution, and regulation.
Patents are now just a weaponized form of regulation useful for kneecapping domestic competitors. They hurt the local economy more than helping it.
If copyright worked like patents, Disney wouldn't have a monopoly on the Star Wars franchise
Patents tend to be super-broad, so instead they'd have a monopoly on all space-related fictional media.
Even within patents, you're not supposed to be able to patent a "fact", which is why most math is non-patentable, and it gets into kind of weird territory when you get into stuff like algorithms: is an algorithm part of mathematics and therefore a fact and therefore non-patentable? or is it closer to an invention and engineering, and therefore should be patented? Or is coding "creative" enough to where we should actually be copyrighting algorithms?
I have no idea the answer to that question, or where the line should be drawn (though I gravitate towards the "math" side).
I don't know where I'm going with this; intellectual property law is weird.
I kind of think that patents should not exist. I'm not a scholar in the area, but I am not aware of good evidence that, without patents, we would be bereft of the many inventions of human history and especially the last 200 years. And actually, the open source movement demonstrates that there is a very strong human impulse that will create and invent things without material recompense. My reading of patent history is that people who were inventing things anyway wanted a way to profit from it, not that there was a lack of invention and patents were arrived at as a solution to that problem.
Perhaps someone could object that companies are responsible for a lot of invention and they need to be incentivized in a way that individual inventors do not. But I'm not convinced that making a better mousetrap isn't enough of an incentive. After all, companies spend an incredible amount of money on sales and marketing (usually a larger line item than R&D on a company's income statement) and neither of those gives you a legally enforced competitive advantage.
I think the best argument for patents is to encourage drug discovery, since the costs are enormous due to the testing requirements. But if the main cost is in testing, then perhaps the solution is to require that copycat medications also go through the testing process, at least for some period of time. Or just have patents for drugs but not for other things. Or just have the government engage in drug discovery and validation directly (normally I'm against the government doing stuff, but I'm not convinced that the lack of a profit motive would be worse than the presence of a profit motive when it comes to drug discover).
The main point being, if you’re still making money hand over fist from your book you wrote, or film you made, you can keep the copyright. But at some point, you have to prove it has value by paying for it, with a fast growing price each year after, and still a finite time where the copyright goes away entirely. This prevents dead copyrights where you can’t even find the copyright holder, because they died 50 years ago, and the work is obscure, but you want to license it. But if you create some original song or story or whatever, it’s totally fair that only you get to make money from that for a very long while.
> But if you create some original song or story or whatever, it’s totally fair that only you get to make money from that for a very long while.
Why is this “very long while” based on how much money you are making, and why would it be different from creating anything else?
The point of taxpayer funded legal and police protection for owners of patents and copyright terms is to incentivize creating something, not to maximize rent seeking abilities for the creator.
> if your work stops producing value, squatting on it IS rent seeking
“Producing value” is far too nebulous of a parameter to legally enforce. Again, the point of a copyright and patent is to incentivize creation. At a certain point, it moves from incentivizing to rewarding those that sit on previous accomplishments.
That is why old movies, music, and games are locked away or only accessible via pirating, why TV shows from the 1990s and 2000s have different soundtracks if streamed legally today, and why patent trolls exist.
That's enough time to realistically make money off your creation, but not so much time that your great grandkids are also making money off of it.
The fact that a lot of things are invented and patented in the US shows that the comparatively shorter timespan doesn't appear to be discouraging innovation and creativity, and I think that would hold with copyright as well.
It is a mechanism of slavers and connected lineages, and completely puts of a boot on the neck of unconnected innovators, which are abundant in today's age.
They must be abolished.
But filing fees, etc (ie those things set by the USPTO) are really quite reasonable imo. Strictly speaking you don’t have to use a lawyer to file (I know that can be a minor concession in the landscape of practical success). Maybe you can clarify what you mean by “connected” vs “unconnected”in this case? I’m missing how patent law directly related to connections/lineage beyond what sister comments have said re: ability to litigate or be patent trolls. But I think that’s the point of the sister comment on it (at least ideally) cutting both ways.
Explicit are things like racism, lineage requirements (like Ivy leagues asking if you have family that attended), etc.
Implicit are things like growing up in poverty and not having the knowledge, access to mentors, or access to the money to secure ideas.
The rich and connected have access to everything to buy and secure ideas. They can even buy people and take their ideas for themselves without proper compensation, because generally, creators are not negotiators.
It is a rigged system that empowers slavers.
People in poverty, for example, expend significantly more energy to develop a creative mindset, and have little to no energy for negotiation and navigating legal frameworks. So because of this, they relinquish that power to abusers who benefit for their relative disability.
I could write a book about this but if you think it through, it is clear. You could also paste my comment into AI and have a discussion about it.
The fairy tale of the solo patent holder fighting off giant mega corporations is worthy of a Hallmark movie and just as realistic.
I think that is a major problem with patents - all inventions are treated the same. However there is a big difference between something reasonably new that took a decade of r&d work to get right and a tiny change to an existing invention which took a day and is an obvious logical progession from what came before which everyone would have came up with.
The plaintiff had some pretty good evidence that it was in fact not obvious:
• The defendant was one of the largest companies in the field with a very accomplished and impressive R&D department. The plaintiff introduced documents they got from the defendant during discovery where the CEO had called solving the specific problem that the patent solved to be vital to the future existence of their company and made solving it a top priority. Yet they failed to make any progress on it.
• Two of the other largest companies in the field, also with impressive R&D departments, had also been working on this and failed to come up with anything.
The jury found that the patent was obvious.
What I think happened is that both plaintiff and defendant had presentations that explained to the jury what the patent did. Both presentations did a great job of finding a problem from everyday life that was kind of analogous to the problem the patent involved, and translating the patent's solution to that everyday life problem. The presentations made it easy to understand the gist of what the patent did.
There's a natural tendency to mistake easy to understand for obviousness, and I think that by explaining the invention in a way that made it easy to understand it also made the jury think it was obvious.
But if you don't explain the invention in a way that the jury can understand how are they supposed to be able to make decisions?
This reminds me of college. Many a time I'd read some theorem named after a mathematician and think "how the heck does this obvious theorem get named after someone?". The answer is that it wasn't at all obvious when that mathematician proved it 400 years ago. I'm seeing it after 400 years of people figuring out how to present the subject in a way that makes that theorem obvious.
That reminds me of a classic math joke: A professor says "It is obvious that" and writes an equation. Then he pauses, and says "...wait, is that obvious?". He goes to another board and starts deriving the equation, not saying anything while doing this. After 20 minutes he had gotten it, says "I was right! It is obvious!" and goes back and resumes his lecture.
Specifically, it only counts if it was obvious before the patent filing to a person of ordinary skill. It's actually really hard for a patent claim to be rejected for obviousness. A poking stick for pressing buttons on a TV without getting up counts as a non-obvious invention.
In many cases there are patent pools you can license that cover large areas of the standards, without needing to negotiate each one individually.
Many very fundamental parts of 4G/ 5G are patented and you'll not be able to get your device to work on the network without those patents, so Apple will have licensed those patents under FRAND for their new C1 modem.